NOW Leader Presses Women to Seek Political Office

Molly Yard, the National Organization for Women’s spirited president, didn’t need a microphone Sunday to get her message across to the nearly 200 women and men assembled on the Sherman Oaks lawn.

In a powerful voice, Yard urged women to shed their social conditioning and run for political office. It’s a message that Yard, who declined to state her age, but who went to college in the 1930s, will be carrying all over the country as part of NOW’s election-year drive.

“We have been brainwashed for centuries that politics is not our role,” she said. “Guys who go to law school think of running for office automatically, while it never occurs to women. We’re just as able and have as much to give as men.”

Yard’s exhortation, part of a campaign called the “Feminization of Power” launched in July by former NOW president Eleanor Smeal, already has been heeded by at least one woman who was in the audience.

“It helped me decide to run,” said Sandy Hester, a candidate for the state Senate in the 25th District, which includes Pomona and Glendora.

Promoting Women’s Rights

Women candidates from all over the Los Angeles area showed up Sunday at the Sherman Oaks home of Justice Joan Dempsey Klein of the 2nd District State Court of Appeal. Klein did not attend because she was in Atlanta at a Women in the Constitution conference sponsored by former First Lady Rosalyn Carter.

Louise Gelber, an Arcadia attorney, who is running for state Senate in the 21st District, which includes Pasadena, Glendale and Lancaster, said promoting women’s rights is an important aspect of her candidacy.

Lisa Specht, a lawyer and television commentator on legal issues for KABC, “worked” the room for an hour before Yard’s speech, stopping to chat with groups of people gathered around the buffet. “It’s an excellent opportunity to network,” she said.

Specht, co-chairwoman of the Women’s Political Committee, a Democratic organization that endorses female candidates for state and federal office, deplored the fact that no women from the major parties are running for president.

NOW so far has not endorsed a candidate for president. Yard said the organization’s strategy is to make the Equal Rights Amendment a part of the presidential race.

“We will remember in November,” Yard said of politicians who do not support the amendment.

Nominees Held Accountable

Smeal, who served as NOW president from 1977 to 1982 and regained the office in 1985, said the Fund for a Feminist Majority, a group she founded last summer, intends to hold each party’s nominee accountable on women’s issues.

“We’ll let them fight it out,” she said of the primaries. “But I think we’ve got to demand to know who’s going to be their vice president, who they’re going to appoint to the Cabinet and to the Supreme Court.”

But one group at the reception prefers an entirely different approach to the electoral process. “The only way to release the presidency from patriarchy is to pool intelligence and elect a team of presidents in 1988,” said Glenn Hopkins, a member of the West Los Angeles-based New Age Network.