PERSPECTIVE ON POLITICS : ‘Year of the Woman’--or the Womb? : Female candidates want to talk about issues beyond gender but the bias against intellect prevails.

Carla Hills graduated from Yale Law School in 1958. Back when the feminine mystique still defined the lives of American women, she pursued a law career, raised three kids and made her way in the male-dominated world of corporate Republicanism. Now, as U.S. trade representative, she negotiates as an equal with the representatives of Japan, a nation where women’s inferiority is built into the language itself.

Hills is among the most important policy-makers in the Bush Administration, and the North American Free Trade Agreement is the Administration’s most important economic-policy achievement. But when Hills spoke at the Republican convention, none of the Big Three networks broadcast a single sentence of her speech. They were too busy talking about abortion. It is, after all, the year of the woman.

As scripted by the parties and filtered by the major media, this year’s political conventions told an old story, torn from yesteryear’s women’s pages. Women, they said, know and care only about feminine issues: sexual harassment, “family values,” child care, women in the military and abortion, abortion, abortion.

That’s why Hills had no place on network TV. Trade isn’t a proper subject for traditional ladies and it’s beneath mention for feminists. It has nothing to do with reproduction.

Watching the conventions, we saw two visions of women collide. Each vision has political force and cultural power. Each has its partisans, tending toward one party or the other. But in covering this culture war, journalists have overlooked a third, more powerful and popular vision.

For the Democrats, women were a victim class defined by their oppression. And since women’s oppression stems from their vulnerability to pregnancy, the Democrats made abortion the single litmus-test issue of the convention--and the surest way to get a cheer.

The party marched female Senate candidate after female Senate candidate up to the microphone to denounce the evil anti-abortion rulings of the Supreme Court and the shameful spectacle of an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee. Each candidate in turn equated femininity with “change.”

Lynn Yeakel of Pennsylvania and Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois were singled out as giant-killers, women who had knocked off favored male primary opponents. But nobody said much about either woman’s views or did anything to differentiate any female candidate from any other--as though, for instance, technocratic centrist Dianne Feinstein and passionate leftist Barbara Boxer were interchangeable examples of the same aggrieved class.

Among the Republicans, by contrast, a sizable minority of the party prefers to see women strictly as wives and mothers. In Houston, the Republicans featured unprecedented prime-time speeches by the President’s and vice president’s wives--intelligent women, to be sure, but women famous as helpmates rather than achievers.

In her speech, Marilyn Quayle declared: “Most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women. Most of us love being mothers and wives, which gives our lives a richness that few men or women get from professional accomplishment alone.” (Or, as Murphy Brown sang to her newborn, putting down every childless professional, “You make me feel like a natural woman.”)

Real women have babies, the Republicans said. Bad women have abortions. Either way, pregnancy is the story.

Lost in the cross-fire between collectivist liberals and traditionalist conservatives was the third vision: of individual women creating their own destinies, destinies determined neither by victimhood nor by a gender-based “essential nature.” In the convention coverage, this vision--the common-sense individualism that most American women claim as their own--crept out only around the edges of the main story. And it continues to get short shrift.

At the Democratic convention, only former Rep. Barbara Jordan’s voice rang out from the equal-opportunity past, transcending gender, race and disability with perfect diction and professorial authority. Jordan cast women not as victims defined by their oppression but as Americans defined by their greatness: “This country can ill afford to continue to function using less than half its human resources, brain power and kinetic energy. Our 19th-Century visitor from France, De Tocqueville, observed in his work, ‘Democracy in America,’ ‘If I were asked to what singular substance do I mainly attribute the prosperity and growing strength of the American people, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.’ ”

Jordan spoke of the value of reason and never once mentioned abortion. She was a woman distinguished not by her body but by her mind. And despite her status as a keynote speaker, her speech was all but ignored by the press corps.

Reporters’ determination to stick to the victims-versus-mothers script was even more glaring at the Republican convention. The GOP has a strong individualist wing and remains the party ideologically committed to meritocracy. In Houston, Republican women did talk about trade and taxes, war and peace. They just didn’t get much air time doing it. Former national security official Condoleezza Rice, for example, delivered a moving and intellectual speech about America and its meaning. ABC carried part of it. CBS and NBC ignored it. Rice, like Hills, didn’t play the weaker sex, didn’t fit the formula.

That formula comes partly from the old equation of women’s concerns with hearth and home; partly from the notion that since sex sells, so must abortion politics; and partly from an inclination by many journalists to tell the story that the Democrats wanted to tell--the pro-woman party versus the barefoot-and-pregnant party.

Nowhere is this last motivation clearer than in the case of Labor Secretary Lynn Martin, who gave the speech nominating George Bush and served as the Administration’s main spokesperson during the Democratic convention. Although she gave numerous interviews, reporters missed Martin’s own story, one that would have undercut the Democrats’ “party of women” theme. In 1990, then-Rep. Martin ran for the Senate. One of several strong Republican women challengers that year, she took on Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), campaigned as the candidate of change, and won the Chicago Tribune’s endorsement.

During the campaign, Martin was savaged by the co-chairman of Simon’s campaign--none other than Carol Moseley Braun, the Democrats’ “year of the woman” poster girl. Braun attacked Martin not simply as a candidate but as a woman. She called Martin “a Mata Hari” and said, “I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that this lady is no friend of the family, no friend of children.” Pat Buchanan deriding Hillary Clinton couldn’t have been nastier. Simon won big, returning to the famously all-male Senate Judiciary Committee.

When conservatives like Buchanan attack Hillary Clinton, many female journalists instinctively rush to defend her. They recoil at the attacks, feeling personally rebuked by the implication that an outspoken, even sarcastic, professional wife might be a detriment to a presidential candidate. They want Hillary to be free to be herself because they want that freedom, too.

It is sadly ironic, then, that the female journalists who two decades ago would have been stuck covering “women’s news” are letting this political season define women as wombs--indeed, are promoting that definition with their constant repetition of the same stories on abortion, sexual harassment and family values. There are other stories to tell, other voices to quote. Not every woman in public life knows, or cares, only about “women’s issues.” Not everyone fits the formula.