Patricia Ireland.

• Author: CONNIFF, RUTH
• Position: President of the National Organization for Women - Interview

`I don't think we can make change only from the outside. I think we have to get some people inside ... and they're going to have to fight as hard as they can, with us perhaps strengthening their hand by being as rowdy and obnoxious as we can.'

Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, is probably the most visible representative of feminism in the United States. As such, she's continually in the hot seat--called to account for feminists' coziness with the Clinton Administration, and for the perceptions that feminists are a bunch of man-bashing radicals, too gay, or too Junior League.

Ireland defends what she calls NOW's "inside/outside" strategy--working within the mainstream political establishment, and simultaneously through grassroots activism, to try to achieve progress for women.

In her own life, Ireland has been both inside and out. She writes in her autobiography, What Women Want (Dutton, 1996), about her seven-year career as an airline stewardess, and about breaking the "glass ceiling" by becoming one of the first women to make partner in a corporate law firm. She is protective of her private life, which has been a source of controversy since she took over the leadership of NOW and admitted to having a long-term relationship with a female partner while married to a man.

"I am absolutely determined to resist our culture's obsession with evaluating women on the basis of our sexuality," she writes. Gay or straight, rich or poor, women have more in common than not, she says.

Ireland was drawn into politics in the 1960s by a personal event. Pan American Airlines denied dental coverage for surgery on her husband's impacted wisdom teeth--a benefit the airline offered male employees' family members as a matter of course. Ireland called her local chapter of NOW, which referred her to the Department of Labor. Because Pan Am did federal contract work, the airline was bound by federal affirmative action and equal employment laws to offer the same benefits to all employees regardless of sex, a lawyer for NOW explained. A phone call to the Department of Labor got Ireland her benefits (and her husband his oral surgery), and an activist was born. In part because of this experience, Ireland decided to go to law school.

She never imagined herself working as a corporate lawyer for "Big, Big, and Pig," she writes, but a combination of financial insecurity and natural competitiveness propelled her into the offices of Paul, Landy & Bailey, one of Miami's leading international law firms, when she graduated from Florida State University law school in 1975. In 1978, Ireland moved to an even bigger firm, Arky, Fried, Stearns, Watson & Greer, where one of her favorite clients was the flight attendants' union at Eastern Airlines.

While her growing political activism sometimes put her at odds with her firm's clients, Ireland came to believe that there is a role for social action within the system. Still, she writes, "I couldn't escape the fact that most of the time my work involved two wealthy guys fighting for each other's money. And aside from my professional pride, I had to ask myself, `Who cares if my rich guy wins?'"

Meanwhile, her feminist activism was becoming another full-time job. Ireland became deeply involved in the campaign to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and in the abortion rights movement and clinic defense in the 1980s. After spending twelve years juggling her paying clients and pro-bono work as Florida NOW's legal counsel, she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1987 to take a job as NOW's national treasurer. A couple of years later, she was elected president of the group.

As head of the half-million-member organization, she oversees a staff of thirty-five, spends a lot of her time on the lecture circuit and on talk shows, helps organize voters to support pro-choice, female candidates, and works to build joint projects with other feminist and anti-poverty groups. Ireland also prides herself on having recently put the organization's $5.5 million budget in the black.

We talked for a couple of hours in Ireland's corner office at NOW's national headquarters in Washington, D.C. She seemed relaxed and happy. Dressed casually in a sweatshirt and jeans, she spoke openly about her personal and political journey, laughed a lot, and signed my copy of her book: "May you get what you want."

Q: You tell a story in your book about a bomb threat while you were working as an airline stewardess. The pilot asked you to stay on the plane to cook him a steak.

Patricia Ireland: Right, everyone else got off, while the plane was about to be exploded at any moment as far as we could tell.

Q: You decided to turn off the grill and get off the plane, too, and to tell the pilot to cook his own steak. Was that a turning point for you?

Ireland: Oh, yeah. There were those little progressions. I don't think anything radicalized me as much as being a stewardess. It was what made those blinders fall from my eyes. And then I could look back and see those other things in my life that also related to being a girl or a woman that before I had never seen. I was one of those frustrating people who, if you'd asked me, I would have said no, I've never faced discrimination because I was a woman. I'd been harassed sexually when I was in college. I just blew it off and assumed that I had done something to bring this on.

That was why it rang true with me, in the women's movement, when all these women suddenly told their stories. I saw what they'd been through not just as problems that they had as individuals, but as a problem that women face. I had always personalized those things before. And suddenly I had what in my generation was called the "click"--where suddenly you get it. Why in the world am I standing in an airplane that might be blown up at any minute while this...