Eleanor Smeal - interview with the president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority - Interview

Progressive, The, Nov, 1995 by Barbara Koeppel

Interviewing Eleanor Smeal is a delight. Unpretentious and passionate, she gesticulates, springs out of her chair, and paces back and forth when she builds up steam on the issues that have propelled her for the past three decades. She crosses the continent the way others commute to the suburbs. Her energy seems boundless.

Her public life started in the early 1960s in the civil-rights movement - pressing to integrate Duke University (where she was an undergraduate), picketing, and working for candidates who supported integration. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh, where, "because of the times and the presence of two feminist faculty," she shifted her focus to women's issues, writing her dissertation on women's attitudes towards feminist candidates. The National Organization for Women (NOW), which had begun in 1967, was growing fast in the Pittsburgh area - already having amassed 2,000 to 3,000 members by 1970.

"Discrimination was everywhere in your life," she recalls. "Professors told me not to go to law school, because women didn't practice law" (so she went to graduate school in political science). "It followed you when you went to buy a car - since salesmen asked your husband what he thought. It followed you as you read the newspaper want ads, since they were separated for men and women - with the obvious differences in the jobs being offered and pay," she notes.

She joined NOW at a time when it was intensely involved in discrimination suits. It sued the Pittsburgh Press for publishing separate want ads and won in the Supreme Court in 1974. It sued the University of Pittsburgh for discrimination in granting tenure (a suit NOW lost) - "and women are still only 12 percent of tenured professors, nationwide," Smeal notes. It sued G.C. Murphy for discrimination among its warehouse workers, and won a settlement of about $600,000.

She soon moved into leadership roles - NOW's Pennsylvania president in 1972, national chair in 1975, and national president from 1977 to 1982 and 1985 to 1987. She also headed the Equal Rights Campaign nationwide, from 1977 to 1982.

In 1987, she co-founded the Fund for the Feminist Majority with Peg Yorkin, and has been its president since then. Headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., the group works to empower women in politics.

I tried out my homespun theory - that often the women most active in the movement came from families where daughters took a sorry second to the sons. Was this what propelled her? Not so, she says. "My mother always said that if my three brothers could do something, so could I," she recalls.

However, the theory may have applied after all - just a generation off. Smeal recalls that her mother wanted her daughter to do all the things that had been off limits for her (as a first-generation Italian American) - like riding a bike or going swimming. "My mother always felt she'd been cheated and encouraged me to do everything." Smeal's mother died a few years ago, but lived into her eighties - long enough to know that her daughter has indeed helped change the lives of all of us.

Q: The attacks from the Christian right, the Congress, and the candidates - all rushing to prove each is tougher on single mothers, welfare, abortions, criminals, and immigrants - keep escalating. They make page one on newspapers across the country, and the rhetoric seems to just get more strident by the day. So many of the gains of the last three decades are being wiped out - like Medicaid coverage for abortions, even for rape and incest. What's going on in this country?

Smeal: First, I think it's important to understand that as a single-issue movement, the anti-abortion effort is collapsing. All the polls show the bottom is dropping out and demonstrations are smaller. Nearly half of all women still have an abortion and the percent is even higher among Catholics and low-income minorities, because neither use birth control as much as other women, overall. For the poor, it's because the pill, plus the doctors' visit for refills, are expensive.

That said, we have to understand that public opinion doesn't mean power. What has happened is that the virulent far-right movement has taken over the Republican Party at the grassroots and has gained tremendous power. Its concerns are much broader than just abortion. And it is very dangerous.

Q: Why is it so successful at framing the debate?

Smeal: Mainly, it's because it has tremendous money behind it, from much of big business - which sees liberals, who are pro-choice and concerned about issues like the environment, as people who also support regulations. So Ralph Reed's Christian Right takes the anti-women, anti-abortion issues and marries them to the deregulation issue. As a result, we have a rightwing Congress defunding school breakfasts and nutrition programs, refusing to cover abortions for rape and incest, and deregulating the environment. And the corporations, which want to deregulate everything, throw money to the reactionaries.

What makes it particularly upsetting is that it's so hypocritical. Jesse Helms takes money from and supports the tobacco interests, rants against gays, and wants to deregulate the environment, and the next minute talks about the evil of killing babies. And in the end, the public thinks he's the guy who's against killing babies. Not that he's the one who keeps the B-2 bomber flying - whose budget is $20 billion, while that of the NIH is $10 billion. Because the debate is structured in this way.