Not a Time for Tears
`FEMINISM.' IS NO LONGER
A DIRTY WORD AS WOMEN
MAKE GAINS AND SUFFER LOSSES,
ive days before the Michigan primary election, volunteers
at the offices of Elect Women for Change in Southfield are frantically preparing for a victory on the first Tuesday in August.
It's time for more phone work. Getting people out to vote never has been easy. In the midst of a hectic campaign, it's come down
to the politics of the moment. Debbie Stabenow and Lana Pollack, candidates for governor and U.S. Senate, have dosed the gap.
Suddenly, their races are too dose to call. There's cause for optimism. Change is seemingly at hand.
But not the change they expect.
Early on this Friday morning the office receives a call and the campaign comes to a halting standstill. If the long history of fem-
inism has revealed anything it's that the ebb and flow of progress is intimately aligned with the polar impulses of tolerance and
intolerance, love and hate.
The tears that many were saving for a spectacular victory in the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races are being shed discreet-
ly for two people — a physician and a security guard — who were gunned down outside the Pensacola Ladies Center in Florida.
On this day, a few more tears are shed in the battle for free choice, and the ultimate price for attempting to fundamentally change
American politics.
The political battle for equality has become a life and death struggle. One local feminist activist and pro-choice advocate
likens progress to a spiral. For a moment, the journey seems to lead downward. It may also seem like for every step forward there's
a half-step backward.
T
here have been men who've told us, We're tired of all this gender stuff,' and I tell them, 'So are we,' " said Jacquie Stein-
gold, a board member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), lifelong Detroiter and a member of the Detroit
Women's Forum. The catalyst for many women involved with Elect Women began with the controversial Clarence
Thomas-Anita Hill sexual harassment confrontation during the Senate confirmation hearings in August 1991. Since
then, Elect Women for Change, a political arm of NOW, has mobilized feminists around the country.
In 1992, Elect Women was an organizing force behind the election of Carol Mosely-Braun in Illinois, and two female senators
in California, Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, said Ms. Steingold, who is also an aide to State Sen. Pollack.
In Michigan, which Ms. Steingold calls a "bellwether state," the organization focused on the high-profile gubernatorial and U.S.
Senate races, but also kept a close eye on the other 123 statewide races with women candidates.
Ms. Steingold, who is affiliated with Temple Emanu-El, said her passion for social equality is inherently part of Jewish tradi-
tion and culture. "Jewish women have been leaders in all human rights organizations," she said. "We take a very strong role in
activism in the community. It's very much a social community role, and it's part of the tenets of Judaism that the attitude is you
must give to the community. You must be involved."
Being involved in the feminist movement has historically meant being part of a larger social struggle for liberation, according
FRANK PROVENZANO SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS