Geraldine Ferraro

American representative (1979-1985)

• Born: August 26, 1935
• Birthplace: Newburgh, New York
• Died: March 26, 2011
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

In 1984, Ferraro, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, became the first woman to be nominated to the vice presidency by a major political party.

Early Life

Geraldine Ferraro (fer-RAH-roh) was born to an Italian American family in Newburgh, New York, on August 26, 1935. Her father, Dominick Ferraro, operated a nightclub in Newburgh. In 1944, he was arrested and charged with operating a numbers racket. He died of a heart attack the day he was to appear for trial.

Antonetta Corrieri Ferraro, the major influence on Geraldine’s early life, was left to rear her two children alone. She and the children left Newburgh to make ends meet; they relocated in a modest home in the somewhat less desirable South Bronx. Education was traditionally a way up and out for the children and grandchildren of immigrant families, and Antonetta Ferraro worked hard as a seamstress to provide an education for her children. Geraldine Ferraro attended Marymount Manhattan College and was graduated in 1956. She worked as a schoolteacher to support herself while attending law school at night and received her law degree from Fordham University in 1960, the same year she married John Zaccaro, a real estate developer. In honor of her mother, Ferraro kept her maiden name.

In the years that followed, three children were born to Ferraro and her husband. Although she passed the New York bar examination in 1961, she chose to practice law part-time while rearing her children. It was not until 1974 that she entered public service and accepted a post as an assistant district attorney in Queens County, New York, specializing in cases involving women, children, and the elderly.

Life’s Work

Running as a Democrat, Geraldine Ferraro was elected to the United States Congress in 1978, then reelected in 1980 and 1982. During those years she devoted her considerable energies to serving her working-class district in Queens, New York, by obtaining federal assistance for roads and subways, pure water and pollution control, control of illicit drugs, and other urban issues.

As one of the few women in Congress there were only eleven Democrats and six Republicans in 1979 and a total of twenty-four women in 1983 she also became an obvious symbol for the feminist movement that had begun to transform American society. Ferraro denied that she wanted to be solely a women’s representative, but she did speak out on the feminization of poverty, the discrimination affecting salaries and pensions awarded to men versus women, and the problems of single-parent households headed by women.

Ferraro was not the first woman to have made her mark in Congress. In 1916, Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress, and she voted against American involvement in both world wars. Pat Schroeder of Colorado and Barbara Milkulski of Maryland were two Democratic representatives rising to prominence at the same time as Ferraro. Outside Congress, women were also achieving positions of political power. By the 1980’s, Sandra Day O’Connor sat on the United States Supreme Court, Elizabeth Dole and Margaret Heckler were in the cabinet, Dianne Feinstein was the mayor of San Francisco, and many male politicians were asking their female colleagues to speak for them in election campaigns.

The year 1984 was a presidential election year, and the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan was running for reelection. Most observers believed it would be a difficult challenge to defeat the former actor, who enjoyed notable popularity as president and was recognized for his skills of communication. After enduring a bruising series of primaries, Walter Mondale , former vice president under Jimmy Carter and onetime senator from Minnesota, emerged as the leading Democratic challenger and came to the San Francisco convention in July with the Democratic presidential nomination assured. The only remaining question was who would be his vice presidential running mate.

Traditionally, vice presidential candidates have been selected to bring balance to the ticket. With Mondale’s roots in the upper Midwest, it could be expected that he might well choose someone from one of the big coastal states such as New York or California. Age, experience, and ideology could also play a part. In the past, however, balancing gender had never been seriously considered, and the Democratic and Republican parties had never chosen a female candidate for either the presidency or the vice presidency. When he appeared before the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1983, Mondale himself had indicated that he would consider a woman as his vice presidential candidate if he received the Democratic nomination.

In November of 1983, several influential women met with Ferraro in hopes that she would consent to accept the vice presidential nomination if it were offered. Other Democratic women had been considered, but most were rejected as unsuitable because of geography, their stand against abortion, their brief tenure in elective office, or their lack of national and foreign policy experience. Ferraro nicely complemented Mondale: an Italian American Catholic from urban New York, she had completed three terms in Congress representing a conservative ethnic and blue-collar constituency. Ferraro had struck a balance between her role as a wife and a mother of three children and her career as a politician. She had also made an impact within Democratic Party circles. In her position as secretary of the Democratic Caucus in 1982, Ferraro had served as House liaison to the National Party Conference; in 1984, she was the chair of the Platform Committee at the Democratic National Convention and oversaw the selection of presidential and vice presidential nominees.

The prospect of a woman as the Democratic vice presidential nominee was widely discussed. In June of 1984, Time magazine featured Ferraro and Feinstein on the cover as possible candidates. By the end of the month, there was considerable pressure on Mondale to choose a woman as his running mate: The National Organization for Women (NOW) was seemingly threatening a convention fight if a woman was not selected. Mondale, however, did not have to be threatened. Always supportive of women’s issues, Mondale knew that as a long-shot candidate against a popular incumbent he had little to lose and possibly much to gain by choosing a woman running mate. Many, including some Republicans, believed that a woman nominee would attract significant numbers of votes to the Democratic ticket.

On July 19, 1984, Ferraro made history when she was nominated as the Democratic vice presidential candidate. She and Mondale knew that the campaign would not be easy, but they believed that Reagan was vulnerable both on his foreign policy, which they deemed too belligerent toward the Soviet Union and therefore a danger to world peace, and on the domestic issues of unfairness and lack of opportunity for the less privileged members of American society. Unfortunately for Ferraro, much of the ensuing campaign revolved not around the issues of public policy but rather around herself and her personal history.

Sadly, it might have been predicted that a woman candidate would be treated differently, and not only by representatives from the opposite political party. Ferraro had difficulties with Mondale’s own campaign staff, and other problems arose which, she argued, would not have occurred if she had been a man. More troubling were claims that she had acted unethically and perhaps illegally in the financing of her first congressional campaign, with her congressional disclosure statements, and with her family’s past taxes and tax returns. These negative issues quickly dominated her campaign. She questioned whether such charges would have received such credence and publicity if she were a male candidate. Her husband was initially willing to release his financial statement but not his personal tax returns, which he had been filing separately for several years. His reluctance to release this information led to charges that he had something sinister to hide. Over the next several weeks, accusations were made that Zaccaro’s father had rented office space to an underworld figure and that Zaccaro himself had borrowed money from an estate in which he was the legal conservator. In late August, after the various tax and financial statements were finally made available for public scrutiny, Ferraro held an open press conference in the attempt to put the issue to rest. This tactic was only partially successful.

Ferraro was also criticized by members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy for her stand in favor of personal choice in the controversial matter of abortion. This, too, she believed reflected a double standard: Male Roman Catholic politicians had not been personally criticized for similar stands on the abortion issue, and in the past, Catholic bishops had generally abstained from political comment. Given the Mafia stereotype closely connected to the image of the Italian American community in the popular mind, Ferraro also was exposed to charges that she and her husband and their families had ties to organized crime. What was most galling for Ferraro was that other Italian American politicians did not come to her defense. The final blow to Ferraro’s dignity was the report in October that her father had been arrested shortly before his death, charged with participation in a numbers racket.

Despite these personal attacks and the physical challenges of the 1984 campaign, Ferraro found her activities to be highly rewarding. In three months, Ferraro traveled more than fifty-five thousand miles and spoke in eighty-five cities. Her campaign raised $6 million for the national Democratic ticket. Crowds were invariably large and enthusiastic wherever she appeared. In November, however, the country voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. The polls and political commentators had early predicted the outcome, and Ferraro realized that she and Mondale were going to lose even before election day. In the aftermath of the election, polls indicated that most women voters, like their male counterparts, chose the Reagan-Bush ticket over Mondale and Ferraro. In reality, most voters vote for the presidential candidate rather than the vice presidential candidate, and Mondale was not a match for the charismatic Reagan.

After the 1984 campaign, Ferraro chose to keep a low political profile and passed up the opportunity to challenge Senator Alphonse D’Amato, the incumbent Republican from New York, in 1986. The previous year she had published her autobiography, Ferraro: My Story. It sold moderately well. Still under public scrutiny, her husband pleaded guilty to overstating his net worth in getting a loan and was sentenced to community service. Later, Ferraro’s son, John, a college student, was arrested on cocaine charges. In 1990, Ferraro chose to campaign aggressively on behalf of female Democratic candidates in New York.

Ferraro launched her own political comeback in 1992, when she entered the New York Democratic primary as a candidate for the United States Senate. Competing against three other candidates in the primary, Ferraro faced a tough battle. Typically upbeat and optimistic to the end, Ferraro finished second, less than 1 percentage point and fewer than ten thousand votes behind the winner, New York State attorney general Robert Abrams, who was ultimately defeated in the general election, but ahead of New York City comptroller and former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and the Reverend Al Sharpton. She again sought the New York Democratic senatorial nomination in 1998, but she was the runner-up to Congressman Charles Schumer, who defeated the Republican incumbent, D’Amato.

President Bill Clinton chose Ferraro to represent the United States at the United Nations, a position she held with the rank of ambassador. From 1993 until 1996 she served as a member of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. In addition to her feminist commitments, Ferraro continued her involvement in foreign policy issues, becoming a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the National Democratic Institute of International Affairs; she also served on the board of the National Organization of Italian American Women. A witty and incisive speaker, Ferraro was a popular media figure and cohosted the Cable News Network (CNN) show Crossfire for several years during the mid-1990’s, where she was the liberal voice to balance the conservative John Sununu, former chief of staff to President George H. W. Bush.

In 1998, Ferraro was found to be suffering from multiple myeloma, a common form of blood cancer. Initially she kept her illness from public knowledge, but believing that as a public figure she could become a spokesperson for research and fund-raising for the disease, she became active in the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation and testified before the Senate. Ferraro was also active in several management and consulting businesses. Of the three Zaccaro children, John and Laura Anne Lee became a lawyer and a pediatrician, respectively, and Donna Zaccaro-Ullman worked as a television producer.

Significance

For many women and for some men Ferraro’s 1984 campaign for the vice presidency was a watershed, a defining moment in their lives. Never before had a woman been chosen for such a high office by a major political party. During and after the campaign, Ferraro received thousands of letters from women, young and old, who saw her campaign as a symbol of equality, recognition, and opportunity for American women. Gloria Steinem, one of America’s most respected feminists, noted during the campaign that “In the long run, the importance of the Ferraro factor may be the talent and dreams it unleashes in others.” As an attorney in private practice after the campaign, Ferraro found time to encourage numerous women candidates by raising funds through public appearances on their behalf. Within a decade of the 1984 election, California, the largest state in the union, had chosen two women to represent the state in the United States Senate. By 2007 there were sixteen women senators and about eighty women representatives in the House, in contrast to the seventeen women in Congress when Ferraro was first elected in 1979. Nancy Pelosi had become the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, senator from New York, was one of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for 2008. It would be too much to claim that these advances that women had made by the early twenty-first century were due primarily to Ferraro’s pathbreaking 1984 campaign, but in the 1980’s and after, she was, and remained, a symbol of the political empowerment of American women. Significantly but not surprising given her own history and accomplishments, in 2007 Ferraro endorsed Senator Clinton for president.

Bibliography

Adams, James Ring. “The Lost Honor of Geraldine Ferraro.” Commentary 81 (February, 1986): 34-38. This article explores the press and media coverage Ferraro received during the 1984 campaign and concludes that part of the press resorted to sensationalism but some of the media failed to adequately delve into Ferraro’s controversial family history.

Blumenthal, Sidney. “Once Upon a Time in America.” The New Republic, January 6, 1986. In this important article, Blumenthal explores Ferraro’s past and her family history and notes that, in spite of her claims, there are numerous criminal connections to both her and her husband’s history.

Drew, Elizabeth. Campaign Journal. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Drew covered the 1984 election campaign for The New Yorker magazine. Her comments on Ferraro’s campaign are insightful, including the observation that some exit polls indicated that Ferraro’s controversial candidacy lost votes for the Democratic Party.

Ferraro, Geraldine. Ferraro: My Story. New York: Bantam Books, 1985. Ferraro, with the assistance of Linda Bird Francke, writes primarily of the 1984 vice presidential campaign and the various vicissitudes that she experienced. It also covers more superficially her earlier life, particularly her political career.

Ferraro, Geraldine, and the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. “What We Learned the Hard Way.” Newsweek, December 26, 2006. Ferraro and Jackson discuss their own national candidacies and what changed between the 1980’s and 2006.

Ferraro, Geraldine, and Catherine Whitney. Framing a Life. New York: Scribner, 1998. Ferraro writes of her early life, including the sacrifices that her mother, Antonetta, made for her after her father died. She also discusses the Italian American stereotypes that were evident in the 1984 campaign and the heights that the daughters of immigrants could attain in the United States in the late twentieth century.

Ferraro, Susan. “What Makes Gerry Run?” The New York Times Magazine, March 22, 1992. The author, no relation to the subject, discusses the early stages of the 1992 New York Democratic senatorial campaign in which Ferraro was attempting a political comeback. She also summarizes Ferraro’s story since 1984.

“Geraldine Anne Ferraro.” In Women in Congress, 1917-2006. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2006. A brief summary of Ferraro’s congressional career.

Witt, Linda, Karen M. Paget, and Glenna Matthews. Running as a Woman: Gender and Power in American Politics. New York: Free Press, 1993. A journalist, a political scientist, and a historian collaborated on this sweeping narrative of the experiences of female candidates in American politics. Throughout this work, Ferraro’s political career serves as one of the key case studies. The book contains numerous references to Ferraro’s 1984 campaign, her career outside public office, and her heroic efforts to encourage the political aspirations of other female Democratic candidates during the 1990 election year.