“Of All the Feminist Nerve On one side, Walter Mondale has been hearing some infuriating demands. If he wants to win in November, feminists are saying, he has to nominate a woman to run with him. Otherwise, as Judy Goldsmith, president of the National Organization for Women, said the other day, ‘’I don’t know how we can go out to women and say ‘Here’s something to work for.’ ‘’
On the other side, traditionalists sputter at what sounds like imperious presumption. The test of a candidate, they pronounce, should not be gender but qualification to be President. It’s a dismaying dialogue on both sides.
The feminists suffer from a crippling coarseness of style. They may sometimes feel embattled, driven to shrillness. But if, as a matter of pure political arithmetic, they are right about putting a woman on the ticket, that should be obvious to any serious Presidential candidate. If not, issuing threats sounds even more shrill.
Yet to be shrill is no worse than to be righteous, like the people who insist that the women Vice Presidential candidates so far proposed lack the requisite standing and experience. Why, it is said, none of them is even a senator. “