I was married with children when Geraldine Ferraro was a VP candidate. She was a new breed, a New York Yankee with Italian immigrant parents--a WOMAN at a time when LADY was still the preferred. The attacks against her and her family during the campaign would not have been possible if she had not been a woman . “If she had been home where she belonged,”. . . well, that was heard a lot back then. Whether any of those attacks were true or not, her career never recovered. I watched the attacks against her with fascination. She didn’t have a chance. In fact, the barrage was so intense that it seemed like there was an organized plot to get her, part of a bigger scheme, even a calculated plan to keep all women out of power, especially out of politics. In my imagination, I could see some very powerful men sitting around a table in a secret place planning the future of women, watching carefully to keep the world the way they believed it should be, and Geraldine was out-of-line. I was inspired to write my novel Backstage at the White House which is about a plot to keep women out of power and about a group of women who set out to set things right. I tried to tell Geraldine Ferraro about my book but she wasn’t interested. I don’t know if she was bitter at the way she was treated–she certainly had every reason to be for she was a victim and no one came to help her out. We have a lot of those in our history, and we don’t have a good track record for helping each other. Geraldine Ferraro will be remembered for going where no WOMAN had dared to tread–and me, well, if she had read my book, she would have known that I, for one, cared.
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