A New Look at the Same Agenda : Feminism: After 20 years of triumphs and setbacks, the National Women’s Political Caucus focuses on the next generation.

Co-founder Gloria Steinem, dressed chicly in a short skirt, her hair swept back softly in a black velvet bow, may have offered the most telling question and answer of last weekend’s 20th-anniversary convention of the National Women’s Political Caucus:

“We certainly look more ladylike than we did 20 years ago. But the question is: Are we?”

“Abso-(expletive)-lutely not!” Steinem answered calmly, stressing each syllable from the podium at the convention’s gala. The 300-strong gathering of women and the handful of men greeted her next aside with cheers, as she shrugged: “Someone had to say it.”

Although their movement has been beset by some traumatic failures--like the defeat of the equal rights amendment and reproductive rights bills--NWPC’s founders believe that women have turned the corner--politically, at least. They are now congresswomen, governors, mayors and municipal officials. There’s even been a vice presidential candidate.

That’s encouraging news for the NWPC, which calls itself the political arm of the women’s movement.

After 20 years, caucus members may seem tempered by time and age. Their makeup and personalities are more in tune with a grand party convention than with the radical feminist meeting that founded their movement two decades ago when jeans were de rigueur . Basically, however, they say they are the same--inside. It’s the times, they say, that have changed.

Both on and off stage, the women recalled the harsh climate of earlier years, the barriers they faced when joining the caucus to seek equal rights through equal representation in government. Many were themselves taken aback by the movement’s initial negative image of militant radical man-haters marching toward a revolution.

Founding member Mary Louise Smith said it was difficult for her to attend the NWPC meeting at the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1972, when she was 50 years old.

“I was scared,” Smith said. “I wanted to go there; my new friends were there. But I had this idea that maybe there would be a picture transmitted back to Iowa of this nice little woman entering that den of who knows what.”

Nobody knew what they were entering in 1971, said Ann Richards, a founding member of NWPC and now governor of Texas.

But when a reporter at the caucus’ first party convention asked, with wide and frightened eyes, what she was planning to do, Richards remembers her John Wayne bluff.

“I said, ‘Oh, you’ll see,’ ” Richards said. “I said ‘you’ll see’ because I had no idea. And no one had any idea. The media thought we were this big, slick, powerful organization. That we possessed a master strategy, that we had great resources and volunteers, that we had a big shiny headquarters.

“Smoke ‘n’ mirrors. We were fighting for our life everyday. We were making it up as we went along. We had a transcendent idea, but the rest of it was like a sky diver reading a manual on the way down.”

Richards likened the NWPC in its early days to the false fronts used in Western movies: “We came back to Washington, and we had no money. We were housed in the most disgusting office above a very suspect restaurant. Everyone including the staff was a volunteer. . . . We had a great time. We had press releases. I can’t say we made great change, but we made some change. We became more sophisticated. We discovered that the political game could be played by women with great success.”

Certainly the group has matured, and maybe even changed. To the outsider, sophisticated seems to be another way of saying diverged.

The once floundering grass-roots organization has a shiny office and has grown from 300 founding members to more than 70,000. Young women join more to work the “old girls’ network” than to voice opinion.

Certainly in 1971, slick public relations people didn’t whisk key women like Bella Abzug (no matter how elegant her black-and-white gown and matching hat), Eleanor Holmes Norton and Betty Friedan away from the press.

And young women probably weren’t told not to speak to the press, as one whispered to another as a public relations official walked by with a grand smile.

This more “professional” image--reflected more in the techniques than in the women themselves, who were warm and open--may be part of what is driving the younger women away from the organization. With a little over 77,000 active members, the NWPC doesn’t have to worry about extinction, though many founding members are worried about faltering membership among younger members.

“Sometimes these role models can seem intimidating,” said Jennifer Arenson, 20, Connecticut College student and co-coordinator of the NWPC youth programs. “We need young role models.”

“Most young women are joining NOW (National Organization for Women),” admitted Abigail Sterling, the other co-coordinator. “But when they are interested in careers and resources, they will turn to the NWPC for support.”

Some older members also worry that young people are losing their commitment to the cause.

“What scares me most,” Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman, said privately, “is when I hear the young ladies say to me, ‘Ms. Chisholm, everything was solved in your era.’ These young ladies don’t seem to have the fire in them.”

An 18-year-old woman later tried to explain “politely” out of earshot of the older members: “If we fight like they did, we’re looked at like complainers, like we’re making excuses. The plain fact is that women have to be stronger than men, like they’ve always been, but in a quieter way. It’s like that nursery rhyme they’re selling inside: ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick. Jill be nimble, Jill jump too, if Jack can do it, so can you.’ Just do it. Play their game, don’t fight it.”

Still, some young women are frustrated with NWCP’s techniques.

Stacie Hagenbaugh, newly elected vice president of Rutgers NWPC and founding president of a NOW chapter there this year, said that attending the NWCP convention is like being relegated to the children’s table at Thanksgiving dinner.

“Giving us small knives and forks is not going to empower us,” Hagenbaugh said. Her eager, serious tone starkly contrasted with that of another young delegate who said, “Of course it’s a great place to network.”

The difference between older and younger members is also illustrated by the priorities they set on when listing women’s causes. Young women opted for “pro-choice” and “equal opportunity.” Houston Mayor Kathy Whitmire cited child care, health care for women and reproductive rights as concerns that have “held women back for a long time.”

But that diversity subjugated for a larger cause makes the NWPC politically powerful.

“We’ve shown people what the power of women united over one transcendent idea means,” explained Richards. “We can put aside partisan differences. We can put aside things that will divide political parties into a thousand different factions.”

At the conference, hearty ribbing from the podium showed that the group indeed has overcome partisan differences.

“At the end of the founding meeting we decided to do serious affirmative action to include two more groups--lesbians and Republicans,” Steinem said in her speech. “It was wonderful to see the Republicans’ expression on that one,” she laughed.

Republican activist Bobby Kilberg’s retort received just as many cheers as Steinem’s joust. “It’s OK if they knock the Republican Presidents,” she said. “There’s been so few Democratic Presidents in our history it’s hardly fair to pick on them.”

None roused the gala crowd more than Washington Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon.

“While some may argue . . . that we are the weaker sex, I suggest that all the facts and evidence would point to the reality,” Dixon said.

“If it is so, we have a mighty strong way of showing it. We out-survive men from conception to the casket. We out-register them and we out-vote them. . . . When we gather 20 years from today, let it be that we are in every position and every corridor of power in matters that reflect our strength in this country. Let it be that we exist not only in the state houses but in the White House as well.”