For a Night, It’s the Year of the Woman : Politics: Women will dominate the tube at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday evening, but as they wryly note, they’ll be up against the All-Star Game.

Women are in vogue again.

This year, they’re so politically trendy that they’re getting their own prime-time slot on Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention. In droves, they’ll hijack the podium, dominate the mike, dish about what concerns them--you know, girl stuff: A bleak economy. The teetering status of child care. Abortion rights. The beleaguered family.

But mostly, they’ll celebrate their new status as “change agents”--candidates who can get elected.

“We’re back in fashion,” says Lynn Cutler, vice chair of the Democratic Party since 1981. “We were ‘in’ in the early ‘70s, ‘out’ in the late ‘70s, ‘in’ again in ’84 and definitely ‘out’ in ‘88, when we were a ‘special-interest group,’ thank you very much.”

Still, Tuesday night at the convention has become “girls’ night,” as some party insiders are calling it, in part because the boys of America are expected to tune in to baseball’s All-Star Game at the same time. Some time after 5 p.m. Pacific time, after former President Jimmy Carter speaks and the Rev. Jesse Jackson has a word--well, more than one word, certainly--the Democrats will turn the spotlight in Madison Square Garden to highlight what many are calling the Year of the Woman.

“It’s not that women haven’t participated in a big way in conventions before,” says Cutler, recalling that in 1984, the Democrats had a woman as chair at the convention, a woman as chief executive officer and Geraldine--as in vice presidential nominee Ferraro.

“We have the same deal this year, without a woman vice presidential nominee--at least so far,” Cutler adds. “What’s new, though, is the candidates--oh, so many candidates. And what’s new is women are getting elected.”

California Treasurer Kathleen Brown will take the first 10 minutes of the “women’s segment” to set the stage and expects to sound the themes of why women can win. A total of 153 from both parties are running for the House, 18 for the Senate, seven for governor and scores for other state offices.

“Women represent a new way of doing things and a focus on a different agenda,” Brown said as she recently previewed her speech. “Their agenda is close to home, close to issues that are very much on the public’s mind.”

She intends to underscore her point by noting that “it does make a difference when women are in the room. Last month it made a difference that Sandra Day O’Connor was on the Supreme Court (for the court’s latest key decision on abortion). It would have made a difference if there was a woman on the Senate Judiciary Committee (during the Clarence Thomas hearings), and I know it counts in the statehouse.”

Besides Brown, conventioneers will hear Tuesday night from Washington Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts, Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) and Texas Gov. Ann Richards, the convention chair.

In addition, more than two dozen events for women and dozens more parties honoring female candidates are scheduled. And a group of writers including Jane O’Reilly, Ellen Hopkins and Judy Daniel will be putting out a daily newsletter called “Getting It” to cover details of interest to women.

Schroeder says that although she is thrilled by the array of women running this year, it is dangerous for Democrats to count their candidates before they win. She recalled numerous other “Years of the Woman” and noted that the year she graduated from Harvard Law School, 1964, there were 24 women in Congress.

“Today there are 29 women in Congress, and I don’t think that’s enough progress,” she says.

At the same time, Schroeder says she doesn’t think the Democratic Party is committed enough in its support of women.

“I suppose it’s cultural that they don’t think of us, but they don’t think of us,” she says. “We’re not accepted as friends or part of the mainstream by the party, by people who put the pieces together. When they start thinking of speakers and who’d be good for this and good for that, they don’t think of women, even though we have such large numbers. And you’ll notice there aren’t a lot of women, close advisers, around the candidate other than his wife. . . .”

Schroeder also insists that if the party is giving some prominence to women this year, it’s because “they hope the women candidates will pull women to the polls and that will spill over to the presidential candidate.”

Maryland Sen. Barbara Mikulski also is cautious about heralding this as an isolated year in which women succeed. “Calling it the ‘Year of the Woman’ makes it sound like ‘The Year of the Caribou’ or the ‘The Year of Asparagus,’ ” she snorts derisively.

“We’re neither a fad nor a fancy nor a year,” she says. “This is a rising tide of what is happening. People have a passion for change. They want candidates who have really listened to them and the stories of their lives and who understand the urgency to make a difference for public policy.”

Mikulski, who on Monday night will introduce women running for the Senate--including Californians Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--also will take the podium Tuesday and says it should inspire young women to see that array of feminine political power on stage.

“It’s very impressive to see all those women who started on the City Council and in the Legislature reaching a critical mass and running for higher office,” she says.

Other than Schroeder, most of the top Democratic women say they aren’t bothered that women are being segregated into one prime-time slot. In fact, Harriett Woods, president of the National Women’s Political Caucus, is disappointed that the lineup for Tuesday evening will not be exclusively female: Male speakers, including West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Bob Hattoy and others, also will hold forth.

The National Women’s Political Caucus, Emily’s List and the Women’s Campaign Fund, which are teaming up to run daily women’s caucuses during the convention, lobbied aides to Gov. Bill Clinton, the presumptive nominee, to put only women on the podium Tuesday and to have Mikulski introduce the Senate candidates on that night rather than on Monday.

“It isn’t exactly what we wanted,” says Woods. “It looks on paper like a potpourri of every voice in the party getting a piece of the chorus. What we had proposed was that one night a whole chunk of prime time be dedicated to showcase the real contrast between our party and the Republicans. The sheer numbers of qualified women would have made a very powerful image.”

A Republican source who asked to remain anonymous concedes that the GOP can’t compete with its rival in terms of fielding female candidates. In the 1970s, he notes, Democratic Party rules mandated that delegates and leadership be split by gender so that women were represented at conventions in numbers equal to men.

“Finally, a critical mass is running for office, and that’s just not happening on the Republican side,” says the source.

Nevertheless, putting the women up against the All-Star Game clearly has been a case of “counterprogramming.” Some convention organizers thought women’s events would capture the female audience that presumably was not watching the game, which traditionally commands an impressive share of the television audience. Last year, 33% of households with their televisions on were tuned to the All-Star event, and more than 50% of the viewers were men.

But Lynn Cutler says she isn’t bothered by the possibility that “girls’ night” at the convention will be overshadowed by baseball. “You know, women control the clickers in some households in this country,” she notes dryly.

In 1984, convention organizers were confronted with a conflict not only in timing but also in place: Both the Democratic gathering and the All-Star Game were being held the same week in the same city, San Francisco. Roz Wyman, the Los Angeles activist who was chair and chief executive officer for that convention, recalls working to avert the problem by contacting baseball officials months before and asking if the game could be rescheduled. Baseball complied: The game was played a week before the convention.

Wyman, still a member of the Democratic National Committee, does not fault current organizers for the scheduling conflict.

“Obviously, they just didn’t think about it,” she says. “It’s just when you start planning these things, you cannot believe the details. And everybody goes about it differently, and it’s one of those things that slipped by.”

This year, when the conflict was noticed months ago, Wyman was asked to intervene. She talked to her contacts in baseball, who talked to Commissioner Fay Vincent’s office, which contacted CBS, which is broadcasting the game. The network agreed to air periodic updates from the convention between innings.

Alexis Herman, the convention’s chief executive officer, says that this year’s organizers did consider the conflict early in their planning but that baseball officials were also stuck trying to fit their event between the July 4 weekend and the Olympics.

“Neither event could be changed,” she says.

But Herman is convinced that viewers who tune to the convention will be impressed: “Kathleen Brown will set it up, and then we will bring on other women elected officials who will bring on others--and what we will have at the conclusion of this segment is this beautiful picture of women leaders. I’m a baseball fan, too, but this is a picture I wouldn’t miss.”

Staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Los Angeles contributed to this story.