The 1984 fundraiser promised a live band and libations, but the crowd instead buzzed about the featured speaker, Vermont gubernatorial candidate Madeleine Kunin.
“Where’s Madeleine?” one guest was quoted as saying in a newspaper story about the event.
“I hear she has a whole new look,” said a second.
“She’s therefore got to be fashionably late,” suggested a third.
The trio, seemingly unfazed as a reporter scribbled down their conversation, kept talking after the candidate finally arrived.
“She has a more tailored, mature look,” one was quoted as saying.
“It’s a gray dress,” said a second.
“No, I’d say mauve, no, maybe taupe,” added a third.
Moving on from color commentary, the group eventually turned to matters of substance — specifically, the Democrat’s pearls, stockings, shoes and what the press would deem her “coiffured hair.”
This year, Vermont could join the rest of the United States in electing a woman to Congress. But it had yet to vote a female candidate into any top office when Kunin faced what today would be considered blatantly sexist scrutiny before her historic gubernatorial win almost four decades ago.
“Electing a woman, no matter how qualified, knowledgeable and experienced in government and politics, will create a precedent in Vermont and means overcoming long-ingrained habits of political thought,” the Rutland Herald noted in a 1984 editorial.
The year synonymous with “Big Brother” was the first to see a woman race in an Olympic marathon (with American Joan Benoit Samuelson winning gold) and run as a major-party vice presidential candidate (with Democrat Geraldine Ferraro losing alongside the top of the ticket’s Walter Mondale).
But at a time when a proposed federal Equal Rights Amendment withered for lack of enough support, women held only one U.S. governorship (Martha Layne Collins in Kentucky) and fewer than 20% of Vermont’s legislative seats.
“Thousands of years of history had made maleness synonymous with leadership,” Kunin would reflect in her autobiography “Living a Political Life.” “We had to stamp that image with an alternative in freshly inked black letters that spelled ‘woman.’”
This is how she did it.
‘I just can’t vote for a lady’
When Kunin moved to Vermont after emigrating from Switzerland during World War II, the Montpelier Statehouse featured only two portraits of women: One of Edna Beard, the first to be elected a legislator, in 1921, and the other of Consuelo Northrop Bailey, the first to be elected House speaker, in 1953, and then lieutenant governor, in 1954.
Kunin didn’t set out to be a politician. She was a writer-turned-mother when she circulated a petition in her Burlington neighborhood to mark a nearby railroad crossing with a flashing red light.
Successful in that campaign, Kunin went on to win a seat in the state Legislature in 1972 and considered running for Congress when the late U.S. Sen. George Aiken’s retirement spurred younger politicians to play musical chairs in 1974. Kunin, drafting a list of pros and cons, discovered such negatives as “I might lose” and “fear of flying” overshadowed by one larger perceived obstacle: “Woman?”
But that didn’t stop Kunin from seeking and securing the post of lieutenant governor in 1978. That, in turn, spurred the Burlington Free Press to publish a story headlined, “She’s Somebody’s Wife, She’s Somebody’s Mother, She’s Lieutenant Governor.”
“Wearing her late mother-in-law’s lined raincoat, she didn’t mind that her skirt hung inches below the hem,” the article reported. “Rebuffed or complimented, reassured or looked at askance (‘I just can’t vote for a lady,’ a lifelong Democrat told her), she smiled.”
Kunin initially ran for the state’s top spot in 1982, when Republican Gov. Richard Snelling announced he would step down, only to change his mind and win another term. When Snelling finally left office in 1984, she decided to try again.
Kunin had hired a man to manage her first gubernatorial campaign. For her second, she tapped Liz Bankowski, a public administration student at Harvard University and former aide to the Rev. Robert Drinan, the first priest to serve in Congress. Kunin and Bankowski started by meeting New York political consultant David Garth, the model for the media hustler in the Robert Redford film “The Candidate.”
“Let me give you one piece of important advice,” Kunin remembers Garth telling the two. “Whatever you do, don’t hire a woman campaign manager. It will look like a tea party.”
They thanked him — and tossed his guidance.
“Madeleine knew,” Bankowski recalls, “this has to be run by someone who gets all of the gender and cultural issues we’d have to navigate.”
‘The phone’s been ringing off the hook’
Bankowski’s first task was to keep fellow Democrat Peter Welch, then a Windsor County state senator, from joining the gubernatorial race and sparking a party primary. Successful with that, the campaign then polled Vermonters on how they viewed men and women running for office.
Voters rated Kunin higher than any Republican man in such areas as compassion, commitment to education and innovative ideas. But that gap closed when respondents weighed who was better at decision-making, with more favoring a male candidate even if they didn’t know him.
“It wasn’t a level playing field from the start in terms of how much of the vote we could really count on,” Bankowski recalls.
In response, the campaign produced a television ad featuring words flashing on the screen:
Experience.
One candidate for governor chaired the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee.
Managed state spending in good times and in bad.
Spent ten years in state government …
Experience.
The ad closed with a photo of Kunin.
“Surprise!” she wrote in her autobiography. “Both Liz and our pollster-consultant were certain that, had they flashed my picture first, the text would not have had equal effect.”
But the public had its mind on other matters. Before her 1984 run, Kunin was known for shoulder-length hair. Then she cut it.
“Talk about my hair followed me everywhere,” she wrote in her autobiography. “The press assumed I had made a calculated hair decision on the advice of a political consultant.”
Same for Kunin’s switch to white stockings.
“They noticed?” she asked her staff.
“The phone’s been ringing off the hook,” she remembers the reply.
Still others dismissed the candidate by addressing her with the less-than-honorific title “Mrs. Kunin.” Throughout it all, the campaign never complained.
“We went to a Rotary Club meeting where the men sang, ‘The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be,’” Bankowski recalls, “and neither of us said a word. Where would that lead? Then you would be an ‘angry’ or ‘nagging’ woman.”
Kunin’s Republican opponent, then-Vermont Attorney General John Easton, received different coverage. Described by the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus as a “boyish” bachelor with “clear, bright, untroubled eyes,” he decided to try his hand at 25 different jobs.
“I wanted to roll up my sleeves and work with the men and women who make up the labor force,” Easton told The New York Times.
But Kunin’s campaign perceived other intentions as Easton was pictured wearing a muscle-defining T-shirt as he hauled scrap metal in Burlington. And lifted heavy reels above his head in Rutland. And layered auto grease on his bare arms in Brattleboro.
‘What can I do to match this?’
“It’s a great idea, working with Vermonters,” Bankowski says in retrospect, “but picking jobs that amplify your maleness?”
Kunin remembers picking up the front page one particular day to see Easton bench-pressing a log in what the campaign would call “the Adonis picture.”
“What can I do to match this?” she asked her staff.
Seize her own strengths, they decided. In a Burlington Free Press story headlined “Kunin Fights Gender ‘Liability,’” the campaign played up its candidate’s 10 years at the Statehouse as the first woman to serve as Democratic whip, in 1974, and chair the House Appropriations Committee, in 1976.
“For the woman, the question always is asked, ‘Is she qualified?’” the paper quoted Billi Gosh, head of the Vermont Women’s Political Caucus, as saying. “For the man, if he’s running, you can assume he’s qualified. Women are expected to be better. Fortunately, we are.”
Kunin would hold arms high with Ferraro when the first major-party female vice presidential candidate visited Burlington. The Vermonter then moved on to meet with the editorial boards of the state’s newspapers in hopes of receiving their endorsements.
“We never talked about gender,” Bankowski recalls. “We talked about credentials and issues.”
But a resulting editorial in the Rutland Herald addressed the unspoken question head-on.
“It’s a factor,” the newspaper opined, “that undoubtedly accounts for some of the holdouts among the Democrats who can’t quite become adjusted to the idea of voting for a woman for governor.”
The Herald was one of six newspapers that endorsed Kunin, noting “she is probably as well equipped for the governorship as any candidate, male or female, who has sought the position in the past.”
‘A monumental achievement’
Kunin campaigned up to the last possible moment, when the Free Press led its report of her final stop at a Vergennes factory with, “An icy wind whipped through Madeleine Kunin’s hair.”
Just before voting, The New York Times summed up the race with the headline, “Dramatic Vermont Clash Is the Tightest of 13 Races for Governor.” Indeed, on election night that November, the results were so close that most newspapers went to press without declaring a winner.
The Brattleboro Reformer was one of the few to wait. There, the intern reporter who had covered Kunin’s “fashionably late” fundraiser took a phone call relaying the local count shortly after 3 a.m.
Kunin had won the town and, in the end, the state with a margin of 3,600 votes.
“Gender was as much a factor in the election as I thought,” Kunin’s pollster told the press. “I would say maybe 10-15% of the electorate was negatively influenced. That’s why the race was so close. Some people don’t recognize what a monumental achievement this was for her.”
The news of Vermont’s first woman to win the governorship went national. Kunin would serve three terms, then become deputy U.S. education secretary in 1993 and Swiss ambassador in 1996.
Kunin, now retired, is finding life coming full circle. At age 88, she’s fielding calls from young political aspirants seeking advice.
“Women still need affirmation that tells them they’re qualified,” she says. “My message is, ‘Go for it.’”
Bankowski, for her part, hikes regularly with the once-fledgling reporter who covered that “fashionably late” fundraiser — me.
Still following Kunin nearly four decades later, I most recently wrote about her venture into poetry, which has resulted in a 100-page collection that Harvard Review editor Major Jackson hailed as “radiant,” “startling” and “spectacularly fresh and tender.”
I gave a speech yesterday.
I made them laugh —
They clapped the years away.
How old am I, really?
Remembering all the past quotes I reported about gray, mauve and taupe, I decided to steer clear of color in my interview about the poetry collection. Instead, I asked Kunin for its title.
“Red Kite, Blue Sky,” she replied.
