Two blocks from the White House, Patricia Ireland stands shivering in the cold, waiting for a break in the traffic so she can dash across K Street and keep a lunch date. She pulls a wide scarf around her thin, coatless shoulders as snowflakes skitter through the air.
”I hate the cold,” says Ireland, 46. ”I hate it so much I once swore I`d never live north of Orlando. And I wasn`t kidding. That should give you some idea of how important I think this work is.”
Ireland, a Miami lawyer, took office Dec. 15 as the ninth president of the National Organization for Women, which is marking its 25th anniversary with a Silver Anniversary Celebration and Global Feminist Conference Jan. 8-12 in Washington, D.C. She says she intends to stay in office until 2001.
If gritty political struggle and phenomenal social change marked NOW`s first 25 years, the final decade of the 20th Century promises to be no less challenging.
Says Ireland: ”These are dangerous times.”
President Bush has vetoed the family leave bill. The Equal Rights Amendment is dead. Roe vs. Wade, which legalized abortion, teeters on the brink of reversal, though Ireland says she thinks the Supreme Court will wait until after the 1992 election. More recently, Ireland`s own sexuality has become an issue.
Since the feminist agenda is clearly stalled, maybe even shifting into reverse, isn`t it a bit daunting to be taking over NOW now?
”You mean,” asks Ireland, ”do I feel like I`m about to become captain of the Titanic? No, I don`t.
”The irony is that the women`s movement prospers in adversity. When things get bad we get more supporters, more activists, more money, more everything.”
And besides, ”When has there ever been a good time for women?”
It could be argued that this is both a good time and a bad time for Ireland, who served as acting NOW leader since May, when outgoing president Molly Yard suffered a stroke.
Ireland`s step up to the presidency took a messy turn when the Advocate, the nation`s largest circulation homosexual magazine, featured her on the cover of a recent issue with the headline: ”America`s most powerful woman comes out.”
Ireland, married for 25 years to James Humble, an artist-businessman who lives in Homestead, Fla., acknowledges she has a female ”companion.” But she refuses to label herself lesbian or bisexual.
”I`ve never hidden what I am,” she says, ”but I don`t discuss my sexuality.”
Asked about the Advocate story, Betty Friedan, who once called lesbians who were members of NOW ”a lavender menace,” said: ”I firmly believe in privacy and choice between consenting adults.” But she fears the focus on Ireland`s sexuality may detract from the feminist agenda, which has been in gridlock since Ronald Reagan moved into the White House.
”Sexual politics is a diversion,” says Friedan, a founder of NOW. ”The major question is where she will lead NOW? Will it be on the cutting edge of the issues facing a new generation of women with complex lives?”
Roxcy Bolton, founding president of Dade County, Fla., NOW, agrees that
”sexual preference has nothing to do with ability to lead.” But she worries the issue may erode mainstream support for the women`s movement at a critical time.
”I`m sad this is coming out on NOW`s 25th anniversary,” Bolton says.
”It`s going to take its toll. Right now, I have a heavy heart about NOW.”
At the last NOW convention in July, Ireland rallied the crowd with a raised fist and a trenchant quote: ”When we get screwed, we multiply!”`
She says she has learned the hard way to watch what she says around reporters, ”but that time I couldn`t resist.”
There are few tactics, short of outright violence, that Ireland is willing to resist in promoting NOW`s agenda, which calls for passage of the ERA, protecting abortion rights, expanding lesbian rights and improving women`s economic status.
Ireland is abrim with ideas. Among them:
– She wants NOW to look into feminist television broadcasts. ”If Jimmy Swaggart can have his own program,” she reasons, ”why can`t we? Why can`t NOW have a `700 Club`?”
– She has talked about leading a parade of bare-breasted women down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, drawing attention to women`s concerns about breast cancer-an idea that has been shelved. For now. Other feminists want to undress in front of the U.S. Supreme Court as a symbolic protest. In their eyes, the court has stripped them of their rights.
– Ireland is fomenting a coast-to-coast campaign of civil disobedience in tandem with a massive ”We won`t go back” march on Washington in April.
”We`re going to make it so non-violently in-your-face that it`s impossible to ignore.”
– Fed up with what they label as wimpy, anti-feminist ”Republicrats”
peopling Capitol Hill, NOW, through Ireland, has put out a call for a third political party. Working within the two-party system has failed, Ireland says. ”We`re not moving our issues forward and not getting enough women elected to Congress. Women always think they have to be qualified to lead; men think they`re entitled to lead, qualified or not.”
Ireland herself isn`t interested in running: ”I`d rather be down here taking potshots than up there dodging bullets. But I never say never.”
Ireland was born in Oak Park and grew up in Indiana. Her father, James, was vice president for research for what then was the world`s largest magnet manufacturer. They lived in a rural ranch house near Valparaiso, Ind., raised honey bees, attended Presbyterian church and studied at a two-room school.
”I was an average, typical teenager,” says Ireland, who wore her mother`s mink to proms and was a member of her school`s spring beauty court.
”I`ve even been known to wear false eyelashes.”
Her role models, however, were hardly typical. Her mother, Joan, was the first director of her Indiana town`s Planned Parenthood clinic.
As a preschooler, Ireland contracted rheumatic fever; she recalls the tedium of weeks in bed. Her mother moved her sewing machine to her room, and, in a pre-Barbie era, they passed the time designing doll clothes. Ireland`s sister Kathy helped.
”They were inseparable,” Ireland`s mother, now retired in Pt. Charlotte, Fla., says of her daughters. ”I`d never known siblings to be so close.”
She was 5 when her father took Kathy, then 7, horseback riding. Kathy`s horse threw her, but her foot caught in the stirrup. The horse galloped off with the little girl dangling from its side. She died in her father`s arms.
For Ireland, it was a life-transfiguring events.
Ireland figures she resolved to turn things around for her anguished parents, to somehow make things right after that tragedy. That may have evolved into a determination to make things right for women.
”I was well into my 40s before I started thinking what impact my sister`s death had on me,” she says. ”My strongest defense is always denial.”
Shortly after Kathy`s death, her parents adopted two daughters, which Ireland brings up in speeches when she talks about abortion. ”It`s not always the right decision,” she says. ”My sisters are both adopted. I know that`s a valid and viable option.”
She was 16 when she entered DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind. Not long afterward, she became pregnant. Abortion was illegal, so she had the procedure in Japan. Continuing the pregnancy, her mother says, ”would have spoiled the life of a girl who still had a lot to achieve. There`s no way you can tell me a blob of cells is a baby.”
A brief marriage and a transfer to the University of Tennessee followed. There she met her second and present husband. After graduation she taught German but hated it. She decided to use her eight years of Spanish and German as a flight attendant for Pan American World Airways.
Emboldened by articles in Ms. magazine, she began bucking airline rules about wearing girdles and makeup and deference to pilots. The seeds of her activism came when her husband needed dental work, but Pan Am`s insurance didn`t cover him. It did cover wives.
For advice she called the Dade County, Fla. chapter of NOW, which coached her in how to challenge the policy. She did, and won. The experience inspired her to enter law school at Florida State University, where she read in a law text that ”land, like a woman, is meant to be possessed.”
Ireland took a stand.
”Before the professor got there, I called the class to order,” Ireland said. ”There were several hundred students. I was so scared, my knees were knocking. I asked them to sign a letter of protest, and they did.” The offending phrase was dropped from the book`s next edition.
”These were the sorts of things that propelled me into becoming an activist,” says Ireland, who finished at the University of Miami, making the law review. At the high-profile Miami firm of Arky, Freed, Stearns, Watson and Greer (now defunct), she specialized in commercial law. She also began doing pro-bono work for Dade County NOW and using the law firm`s downtown office to run ERA phone-a-thons.
Ireland fought Dade County`s anti-homosexual referendum in 1977, chaired Florida NOW`s lesbian rights task force and, on a ticket with Molly Yard, ran for national executive vice president in 1987. They won, and Ireland moved to Washington. She and Yard were re-elected in 1990, with the understanding that Yard would step down mid-term.
Ireland will earn $80,000 a year and oversee an $8 million budget.
Last year, she returned to Miami to iron out problems in the Dade County chapter of NOW. The fight was portrayed as being ideological, political and Old Guard vs. New Guard. But insiders say complicated relationships, some of them sexual, also played a role.
Ireland helped broker an icy detente. But since then, more than 200 members have quit.
Almost from the beginning, sexual politics has been an issue at NOW. The group always has had a sizable lesbian component, the Advocate says, ”but Ireland is the first president to come out publicly.”
Asked directly, ”Are you bisexual?” Ireland won`t say. Consumed as she is with women`s work, she says, her sex life is theoretical; ”I wish I had time to be something.”
Ireland sees no image problem. ”There is a conscious effort to ridicule women`s progress. If you can portray feminists as ugly, hairy, man-hating, humorless dykes-did I leave anything out?-if you make them so unattractive, so unappealing, so out-of-the-ordinary that nobody will want to be part of the movement, you can keep the movement from growing.”
But the movement is growing. NOW`s national membership of 250,000 includes 9,000 who joined in October and 4,000 in November. That includes renewals, but the usual number is 2,000.
Yet the great fear of NOW`s leadership, feminist author Susan Brownmiller said last week, ”has always been that the haters would say, `They`re just a bunch of dykes.` ” With Ireland living in Washington and her husband in Homestead, Fla., the couple sees each other about twice a month. They have no children.
As for her companion, Ireland says her husband ”knows the details.”
”We`d had some discussion about the fact that this was going to break.” A person who values his privacy, ”he was distressed.”
Both Humble and her companion are ”very important in my life,” she says, and ”I have no interest in having people tell me how to choose my family and who to love.”
Miami feminist Nikki Beare doubts the tempest over the Advocate interview will have much effect on the women`s movement. When you go through the fires of the women`s movement, says Beare, ”you either become a blob of molten metal or you become steel. I think Patricia has become steel.”
