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By Howard Fineman
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For a feminist, Patricia Ireland has a startling political role model: George Wallace. When she was a flight attendant in Florida in the late '60s, Ireland saw the ex-governor of Alabama barnstorm the South, pulling voters to the right with his angry, third-party appeal. As the new leader of the National Organization for Women, the 45-year-old Miami lawyer hopes to stir a similar upheaval--on the left. With the Democrats seeming confused, and abortion rights under siege, Ireland wants to lead American women, Wallace-style, founding a new party if she has to. "He shook things up," she says, "and so can we."
Ireland rose into the limelight after NOW president Molly Yard suffered a stroke in May. (She is scheduled to succeed Yard formally later this year.) The hard-line Yard often sounds like an IWW organizer at a lumberjacks' rally. Ireland, with a flight attendant's cool efficiency, is made for the TV sound-bite age. "We'll Bork him," she snapped when President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Ireland wants to draw a new generation into NOW, which has been criticized for neglecting younger women's concerns about family and jobs. NOW's recent convention in New York, she says, drew a surprisingly large turnout of students and fewer of what she derisively calls "TOFs"--"tired old feminists." Donations are brisk, membership is steady at 250,000 and recent polls show that most women agree with NOW on many issues, even if they eschew the "feminist" label.
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But Ireland takes a Yard line on tactics and issues. She touts her arrest in 1987 at a pro-choice rally outside the Vatican Embassy. She calls for "shadow lobbying," where lawmakers' wives and daughters work over their husbands and fathers at dinner. She says policymakers aren't concerned enough about violence against women, and the medical establishment ignores research on female-health issues.
NOW's role as the Hell's Angels of the movement annoys its allies. Groups such as Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League think the Supreme Court's anti-abortion drift presents a chance to win "mainstream" support on issues that transcend gender, such as privacy and free speech. But NOW, its allies argue, is too militantly feminist to take advantage of the opening. "We need their energy but not their image," said an official of one abortion-rights group.
Ireland, reared in suburban Chicago and educated at the University of Tennessee, joined NOW in 1969, when the group helped her win a job complaint against Pan Am. She put herself through law school at the University of Miami, flying runs on weekends. She is married to businessman and painter James Humble; they have no children. Ireland is undaunted by criticism from other groups. "Our role is to be at the cutting edge of controversy," she says. With Ireland at the helm, that's where NOW will remain, however painful that may be to its sisters in arms.
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