Ferraro Urges Women to Seek Office In Speech on Political Opportunities

"If you don't run, you can't win," former Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro said at the Law School yesterday, encouraging women to run for elected office.

In a speech entitled "Women in Public Office: The Opportunities," Ferraro told an audience of 200 that she had decided to imitate President Reagan in borrowing her comments from the movies. The line was from "Chariots of Fire," a film about two Olympic runners. Using a second line from the movie, she said women who do not win at first should remember to "beat him next time."

While noting increases in women's political power over the past decade, Ferraro said, "Women are by any objective means grossly underrepresented in elected office."

The former candidate, now a fellow at the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, said that women are both winning elected office and heading presidential campaigns--thereby increasing the prominence of women's issues and guaranteeing themselves future political positions.

"We're not talking tokenism any more; we're talking about women sharing power," she added.

Women can make unique contributions to public office, Ferraro said. "Instead of engaging in conflict, women are more likely to negotiate. Instead of focussing on the short term, women are more likely to think of generations to come," she said.

Ferraro also argued that women more frequently view the positions they occupy as opportunities to do the best job possible, while men tend to view them as stepping stones to higher positions, she said.

Despite her commitment to increasing the number of women in national offices, Ferraro said that she tends to support men who are "right" on women's issues before women who are not.

"It is not enough to be biologically a women and expect to get support from women's groups. The women who are elected are congressmen-at-large for all women in this country," Ferraro said.

Women are still underrepresented in national elected office, she said. "In the top jobs--speaker of the House, minority leader, majority leader--there are still no women," she said.

Ferraro emphasized the national importance of women running for office. "Every time a woman runs for national office, it's like throwing a stone in a lake. The ripples are felt everywhere," Ferraro said, speaking of her own candidacy's affect on women across the country.