Above: Aravella Simotas with Gerry Ferraro and U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney.
New York, N.Y. Today she was put to rest. Last summer, at 11am on Thursday, August 26, I attended the Long Island City Post Office Dedication Ceremony – for only one reason. The building was being dedicating to one of the singular women leaders of our times, the Hon. Geraldine A. Ferraro. Her presence was electric.
Important women from America’s Democratic establishment were there in droves, including my own U.S. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, as well as U.S. Congresswoman Jane Harman of California; Congresswoman Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut; Terry O’Neill, President of NOW; and Ellie Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation. Democratic stalwart Loula Loi Alafoyiannis and others sat in the packed audience.
Gerry, of course, was best known for being the first woman to run for Vice President on a major party ticket and was honored for her many years of dedicated public service to New York and the nation. The bill, Public Law 111-50, was sponsored by Carolyn Maloney, and signed into law on August 19, 2009 by Barack Obama.
Like many political figures, Gerry was an attorney. She grew up in Queens, never losing her accent, becoming first a teacher and then a lawyer. She joined the Queens County District Attorney’s Office in 1974, where she headed the then-new Special Victims Bureau that dealt with sex crimes, child abuse, and domestic violence. Her experiences there impacted the dedication she showed to the downtrodden throughout her political career.
According to Wikipedia:
She was elected to the House in 1978, where she rose rapidly in the party hierarchy while focusing on legislation to bring equity for women in the areas of wages, pensions, and retirement plans. In 1984, former Vice President and presidential candidate Walter Mondale selected Ferraro to be his running mate in the upcoming election.
In doing so she became the only Italian-American to be a major-party national nominee in addition to being the first woman. The positive polling the Mondale-Ferraro ticket received when she joined faded as questions about her and her husband's finances arose. In the general election, Mondale and Ferraro were defeated in a landslide by incumbent President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush.
In 1992 I explored running in the Republican Primary against Alfonse D’Amato to force him to spend down his campaign chest (story). Our effort eventually rolled over onto an education campaign against him called Dump D’Amato in ’92! Gerry ran in the Democratic primary that year, as she did again in 1998, both times starting as the front-runner for her party’s nomination before losing in the primary election. Bobby Abrams went on in ’92 to represent the party until Italian-American D’Amato beat Bobby down for referring to D’Amato as a fascist.
Gerry’s primary opponents in ’92 included State Attorney General Bobby Abrams, Reverend Al Sharpton, and New York City Comptroller and former Congresswoman Liz Holtzman. Bob was considered the early front-runner. The D’Amato campaign feared facing Gerry the most, as her own Italian ancestry, effective debating and stump speech skills, and her staunch pro-choice views would have eaten into several of D’Amato’s usual bases of support.
Gerry became the front-runner, capitalizing on her star power from ‘84, and using the campaign attacks against her husband John Zaccaro as an explicitly feminist rallying point for women voters. But Liz ran an exceptionally negative ad accusing Ferraro and Zaccaro of taking more than $300,000 in rent in the 1980s from a pornographer with purported ties to the mob.
To paraphrase Wikipedia, the final debates were nasty, and Liz kept attacking Gerry’s integrity and finances. In an unusual election-eve television broadcast, Gerry talked about “the ethnic slur that I am somehow or other connected to organized crime. There’s lots of innuendo but no proof. However, it is made plausible because of the fact that I am an Italian-American. This tactic comes from the poisoned well of fear and stereotype…” Bobby went on to defeat Gerry by less than a percentage point in the primary. Gerry refused to concede she had lost for two weeks, leaving Bobby weakened and vulnerable to D’Amato’s powerful forces.
Wikipedia finishes her biography, stating:
She served as a United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1993 until 1996, in the presidential administration of Bill Clinton. She also continued her career as a journalist, author, and businesswoman, and served in the 2008 presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Ferraro died from multiple myeloma, 12 years after being diagnosed.
Born August 26, 1935, Geraldine Anne Ferraro passed on March 26, 2011. Her ascendancy as a woman candidate for the office of the Vice President was the harbinger of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency. With each barrier broken, more and more possibilities occur. Her long-term survival of multiple myeloma Gerry Ferraro was another broken barrier. Gerry was a fearless candidate, a devoted wife, and an exceptional survivor.
Photos by Jim Luce.
Profile in Courage: the History-Making Geraldine A. Ferraro. Originally published in Daily Kos, April 1, 2011.
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