NOW’s Smeal Tells of Her New Battle Plans

Eleanor C. Smeal, the combative president of the National Organization for Women who announced last week that she will not seek a fourth term as NOW president, said Wednesday she will, instead, launch a campaign to encourage more women to run for public office.

“In the year ahead I will devote my full time to inject the feminist agenda into the 1988 elections and to recruit feminist candidates . . . flood the tickets from top to bottom,” Smeal said in a passionate speech at the National Press Club. “We must increase the number of feminist women in public office.”

Smeal, 47, said her decision was reached after assessing “the strengths of the feminist movement and of the needs of the country,” which she said has been plagued by scandals during the Reagan presidency.

Smeal, who has served as NOW president longer than any of her predecessors--she was head of the organization from 1977 to 1982 and regained the office in 1985 after a bitter campaign against incumbent Judy Goldsmith--has termed her effort the “Feminization of Power.” The campaign will be backed, she said, by the Fund for the Feminist Majority, a tax exempt organization that has yet to be formed. Her effort, a tour of the country, beginning after Labor Day, will include feminist speakers, leaders, singers and a media campaign.

‘Feminization of Power’

“I believe that if there were a feminization of power, we would have more change,” she said.

Although she said she was pleased to have succeeded in her 1985 pledge to “bring women back onto the streets”--last year, 125,000 people marched here to keep abortion and birth control legal--Smeal said she was ready to “travel as much as humanly possible” before the 1988 elections to ensure that when the 101st Congress convenes, “at least half the new members would be women.”

Today, there are two women among 100 senators, and 15% of the House of Representatives are women.

Smeal criticized a new Democratic Leadership Council agenda that she said “takes no position on abortion.” She said she hoped at least one woman, specifically, Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D.-Colo.), would enter the race for president.

“For a vast majority of men in public office to decide that abortion is the moral issue of our time . . . is an outrage,” she said. “Birth control and abortion is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.”

Until now, she said, “we’ve been spectators. I keep saying we’ve been cheerleaders. I think it’s time for cheerleaders to cheer for themselves, to run for themselves.”

Greatest Challenge

In addition to increasing the number of women in Congress, Smeal said one of the greatest challenges for the women’s movement is to fight President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court.

“We must be prepared to fight any nomination that would deny us our rights and our daughters’ rights,” she said.