Reflecting on the significant Geraldine Ferraro

My first thought when I received the news about Geraldine Ferraro's recent passing was, "wow, that woman had been fighting cancer for 12 years? She certainly had me fooled!"

In a way, her fight against cancer was in keeping with the rest of her life, often (not always) able to overcome adversity and making it look easy. Like our current president, she was the product of a single mother of modest means. Her stellar academic accomplishments got her into law school at a time when it was quite rare for women to do so; she was a very successful lawyer when few women practiced law. Her election to the House of Representative's seems quaint by today's standards--an era when a female running for Congress garnered attention simply because she was female, as opposed to a female candidate garnering attention for being batshit insane.

However, the real complication to Ferraro's legacy is not that women candidates can be just as terrible as their male counterparts. Buried deep within Ferraro's personal history is that by 1984, she had accrued more wealth through her own means than George H.W. Bush had accrued in his entire life at that point. This prompted a jealous Barbara Bush to complain: "I can't say it, but it rhymes with rich." And how Barbara's husband acquire his vast fortune? I can't say it, but rhymes with dorally metestable!

Perhaps the cosmos where trying to tell us something given that Ferraro died within hours of Bob Herbert's final New York Times column, "Losing our Way," his final swan song to 98 percent of Americans on the other side of wealth and power. While many of the pundits will opine--correctly--that Ferraro's candidacy for vice-president was a watershed moment for women in politics, it is unlikely someone from such modest means could achieve such success financially in today's economic climate.


Before feeling so hopelessly lost and dejected, perhaps we should remember most that we can overcome long odds. Ferraro's many gallant fight against an incurable disease should remind us both of the struggles we face, be it economic injustice, gender discrimination, or obnoxious people like Barbara Bush. Hey, we can overcome!