NOW to Lead L.A. Women’s March : Smeal, Volunteers to Show Pro-Choice Support Sunday

Ellie’s back, and L.A.’s got her.

Eleanor Smeal, the National Organization for Women’s indefatigable president redux, arrived Tuesday night, sensible shoes afoot, with a few words for planners of Sunday’s National March for Women’s Lives, West Coast version. Words about “making some history right here in Los Angeles.” Words about “standing up to be counted.”

Smeal, 46, meeting with about 60 march volunteers at NOW offices on South La Cienega Boulevard, was basking in the success of last Sunday’s march in Washington in support of legal abortion and birth control. Police estimated that 85,000 marchers took part and NOW, which is coordinating the events, claimed closer to 125,000.

It was, Smeal said, “the largest march in women’s rights history” and the largest on the issue of women’s reproductive rights--pro or con--in history. “We’re on a roll, no question about it.”

For NOW, which has been joined in this effort by a coalition of 350 national, state and local organizations and about 300 college campus groups, it is also the first visible demonstration of Smeal’s pledge to lead feminists into the streets in a new era of confrontation.

That was the promise when Smeal, a fighter who during two terms as NOW president (from 1977 to 1982) led the homestretch drive in NOW’s long and losing battle for passage of the equal rights amendment, wrenched the presidency from incumbent Judy Goldsmith, known more as lobbyist and persuader, at NOW’s emotion-charged national conference in July in New Orleans.

“Ellie’s back! Ellie’s back!” supporters had chanted. It was a clear signal that they wanted to be seen and heard. Smeal had responded with a promise to protest any effort by the Reagan Administration to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision legalizing abortion in a voice so loud it “would make the prohibition of liquor seem like just a small accident in history.”

The Washington march, NOW’s first in four years on the reproductive rights issue, by police estimates drew twice as many people as a Jan. 23 anti-abortion “pro-life” rally in Washington. “We want the right wing to know they have a terrible loser (their anti-abortion stance) on their hands,” Smeal said here. “I’m almost starting to feel sorry for Jerry Falwell (who heads the Liberty Foundation, formerly the Moral Majority).”

The Washington march was, as Smeal phrased it, “a bingo.”

The Los Angeles march is scheduled to step off at 11 a.m. Sunday from Century Park East just south of Santa Monica Boulevard along a mile-long route that will take marchers west on Santa Monica Boulevard, south on Avenue of the Stars, west on Pico Boulevard to Motor Avenue to Rancho Park in Cheviot Hills for a noon rally.

March organizers have issued a list of celebrity participants that includes Morgan Fairchild, Carrie Fisher, Cathy Lee Crosby, Linda Lavin, Esther Rolle, William Schallert, Trish Van Devere and Robert Foxworth from the entertainment world, and Mayor Tom Bradley, Assemblywoman Maxine Waters and state Sen. Diane Watson.

Smeal told march organizers here, however, not to expect the kind of turnout the Washington march drew because Los Angeles does not have the nearby population bases from which to draw. Later, in an interview, she said she is thinking “in terms of 20,000 to 25,000.” “We put more effort into the other (march). We felt the political leaders of the nation were there,” she said.

On the same day, the May Co.-sponsored California Woman Walkathon, a 10K walk benefitting the Downtown Women’s Center, a shelter for needy and homeless women in downtown Los Angeles, is to begin at 9 a.m. at 7th and Figueroa streets. Center founder-director Jill Halverson said she expects 2,000 to 3,000 participants.

The march also coincides with the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Beverly Hills, but Smeal said she saw no conflict there. “This is making a commitment,” she said. “They’re just going to look at something.”

No Trouble Expected

Sgt. Jim Myers of West Los Angeles division, LAPD, said police are figuring on 50,000 people for the NOW march and officers have been pulled from six divisions to be on standby in case there is trouble. Myers said no trouble was expected: “It’s a volatile issue but (these are) not people who are prone to violence.”

Meanwhile, at this week’s meeting, march coordinator Kathy Spillar, the NOW-Los Angeles president, Smeal and others were handing out pre-march advice to volunteers. Strategies such as making sure hecklers can’t take over the day. One suggested strategy: “Start a louder chant.” One suggested chant: “Not the church, not the state. Women will decide their fate.”

Marchers will be encouraged to wear white clothes; purple sashes will be for sale. Those colors were adopted by the suffragist movement when women marched for the right to vote 65 years ago.

(Smeal, sporting a Band-Aid on one heel, observed that her bloodied feet--she had borrowed white tennis shoes from her daughter’s friend--and husband Charles’s sunburned bald spot were among the few casualties of the Washington march.)

Smeal, admitting to a bad case of pre-march jitters, said that, blistered feet notwithstanding, “I have to say, going down that street, I did some skipping, hopping and jumping.”

After the two major marches, what then for NOW?

Smeal, who had just come from Vermont, told of plans for an ERA referendum drive in Vermont, of NOW’s plan to disperse “action teams,” including 1,000 summer interns to that state in a door-to-door campaign leading to the November election.

Vermont has been targeted, in part, she said because of its smallness. “We can afford to do the campaign right. It might be the only campaign I’ve ever worked on where the budget is adequate.” In addition, Vermont’s pro-ERA governor, Madeleine Kunin, is running for reelection, and Senate candidates from both major parties have endorsed the amendment. “If we can’t deliver there, we have a serious problem,” Smeal said.

After Vermont, Smeal pledged, NOW will take the ERA cause to the larger states. “We’re not giving up on equal rights.”

She deplored attempts by some on the political right to link the ERA to the AIDS scare. “It has hurt the ERA,” Smeal said. “I don’t know if it has hurt NOW.”

Opponents have been linking ERA to homosexuality, she said, and implying that those who support the amendment “are a bunch of lesbians” and saying (falsely) that lesbianism is linked to acquired immune deficiency disease.

Smeal calls it “gay baiting” and said, “We’ve got to paint (these people) as the Bull Connors they are and expose the bigotry and hatred. It’s one of those tragic things that men use against women, and it’s hurt the women’s movement.”

Although NOW membership has dipped to 150,000 from 200,000-plus during the first ERA campaign--a fact Smeal has attributed in part to the low profile of the Goldsmith years--and the organization is heavily in debt, Smeal nonetheless assessed the situation six months after she regained the presidency: “We’re right back up in super-gear. But I’m 10 years older now.”

The spirit within “is a little more joyous” today, she said, than during the early days of the ERA fight when “our backs were really up against the wall.” Today, she said, “we’re going to do things more on our own terms . . . . Call us communists, call us anything, I don’t care. We’re going to pull the country with us.”

The first time around, Smeal said, those fighting for the ERA were “too focused in” and “people didn’t get the connection” between ERA and the broader equality issues such as women’s salaries and automobile insurance rates that discriminate against women.

“This is not a battle of the sexes,” she said. “It’s an ideology that’s trying to keep a cheap labor pool.” Today, she said, “We’re not as up tight, not as self-critical. And we have a little more self-confidence. We’re not going to jump through one more hoop. Women are hanging very tough this time.”

Anti-Abortion Drives

Another immediate priority for NOW is to defeat anti-abortion referendum drives in such states as Massachusetts, Oregon and Arkansas. In California, the Santa Ana-based “Choose Life” has just abandoned its effort to qualify an amendment banning publicly funded abortions for the November ballot. “We’re through,” said spokesman Robert Sassone. “We did not get enough signatures.” He estimated the group was at least 100,000 signatures short of the needed 630,000. However Sassone said, “We have re-filed. We think we will be able to try again next year. ‘Chose Life’ is not dead.” NOW also wants members of Congress to remove an anti-abortion rider from the pending Civil Rights Restoration Act. “They say the act is dead if we don’t accept (the rider),” Smeal said. She said it isn’t.

In her six months in office, Smeal said, “We’ve sold overwhelmingly the notion that we must be more visible, more global, more hard-hitting.” NOW is out to recruit women on college campuses where, she said, a growing minority now identify themselves as feminists. And NOW is out to recruit minorities.

Future directions? “I feel we should be taking on child care big time,” Smeal said, “and the whole violence issue. Women are sick to death of it.” She would like to see personal defense training in high schools.

“And the thing that intrigues me most is the international (feminism as a global issue). There is a real birth of international feminism.” She told of speaking recently in Washington at a rally of Aquino organizers, most of them women and of Filipino roots. Smeal said she felt their excitement about “the first woman elected in a contested election like this in the history of the world,” their excitement that this bloodless revolution was led by a woman.

Sense of Apprehension

And, she said, she sensed their apprehension. “What they’re afraid of is that, now that the revolution is over, they go into a minority position.”

In Japan, where she recently visited, Smeal said, she senses “the kickoff of a feminist movement.” She told of a Japanese woman, at a reception, telling her it was “the first time in her life where she was in a room with men and women where women were treated equally.”

As feminist issues on a global scale, Smeal noted, abortion, family planning and birth control are an “automatic bingo.” Other concerns of women worldwide: job equality and violence.

And “women are disgusted with the management of international affairs,” she said. “It’s not because they’re mothers worried about sons. They’re just sick to death of being treated like they’re retarded” while men make the decisions.

Smeal was in “super-gear.” Talking up Sunday’s march, she said, “People are with us. That’s why people keep trying to talk us into thinking people aren’t with us.”