Making the Price Too High

When Geraldine Ferraro was picked as Walter Mondale's running mate, Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. representative to the United Nations, praised the choice as "just marvelous." A decade earlier, as a political science professor at Georgetown University, Kirkpatrick wrote a pathbreaking study of gender and power in America (Political Woman, Basic Books). At a meeting with TIME editors last week in Dallas, Kirkpatrick offered an intriguing assessment of the Ferraro controversy and the future of women in American politics:

I think there are interesting issues involved in this case that touch deeply on sex-role problems in our society. On the one hand, there are traditional expectations that men will manage the business affairs of the family and wives will sign on as secretary-treasurer or vice president or whatever their husbands ask them to. It is just as conventionally understood that the husband will then run the business, get the accounts done and pay the taxes. That is standard practice.

But we have some new practices, too, that assume women are going to be treated as equals and their spouses' business affairs are just as relevant to public life as a man's spouse's business affairs are. I think we see these roles and expectations coinciding here and creating an interesting problem that is probably damaging for Geraldine Ferraro.

I have had three calls asking me did I report my husband's income on disclosure forms. Nobody ever asked me that before. The answer is yes. I might add a footnote too: academics' finances are not all that interesting.

I don't know how Geraldine Ferraro is going to feel about national politics after this experience. I think the price for participation in high-level politics in our society is very, very high--for both men and women. One lives under continual scrutiny and criticism, much of it unfair. It is a very harsh game, and I do not think women want whatever it is at the end of that particular rainbow badly enough to pursue it. There are already more opportunities for women in politics than there are women ready to pay the price. I do not doubt a woman could be nominated and elected Vice President today, or even President.

We are making the price of power much too high in this society. I worry that we are making the conditions of public life so tough that nobody except people really obsessed with power will be willing finally to pay that price. That would be tragic from the point of view of public wellbeing. I think that is what is happening to Geraldine Ferraro now.