New Leader Brings New Vision To NOW

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MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.

Coming up, plans to raise money to pay for health care reform by taxing employer-sponsored health benefits. We'll have that conversation a bit later. But first, a newsmaker interview with the new president of NOW. This weekend, the National Organization for Women, believed to be the country's largest grassroots feminist organization, elected its latest leader. Attorney Terry O'Neill, who is 56 years old, bested Latifa Lyles, a 33-year-old former vice president at the organization, in what has been described as a close and hard-fought contest. Terry O'Neill joins us now from Indianapolis. Welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Ms. TERRY O'NEILL (Attorney, President of National Organization for Women): Thank you, Michel.

MARTIN: Congratulations on the win, of course.

Ms. O'NEILL: Thank you. I appreciate it.

MARTIN: What do you think made the difference in your victory, which I understand was quite close, just a few votes under a dozen?

Ms. O'NEILL: It was close. And I think what made the real difference was my dedication to grassroots organizing at the community level. My message all weekend was that NOW is the grassroots arm of the women's movement. And if we don't have a grassroots, we really don't have a movement.

MARTIN: That is interesting because, as I mentioned, you beat out 33-year-old Latifa Lyles who, had she won, would have become the youngest president and the second African-American to hold that post. The outgoing president, Kim Gandy, is among those who described this race kind of in the Obama v. Clinton terms as change versus experience - Latifa Lyles representing change, yourself representing experience. Do you buy that?

Ms. O'NEILL: Not entirely. I think I represent change. I think that getting massively into the grassroots will represent a change for the organization. Our issues, we have six core issues in our founding documents that we are dedicated to - reproductive rights, ending racism, lesbian rights, getting women into the Constitution, ending violence against women and achieving economic justice for women. Those are the six issues that we work on. My candidacy offered a change in the sense that it is - I am going to be emphasizing the grassroots, the marching, the letters to the editor, all at the community level.

MARTIN: Can you really - do you really have the resources, the energy to address six priorities at a time like this?

Ms. O'NEILL: You know, they're not separate. The thing that got me into NOW back when I lived in Louisiana, and I found NOW shortly after shortly after David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. My first political participation was to join the stop David Duke campaign.

MARTIN: And just for those who don't recall, David Duke is a former leader, former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, whom we actually have interviewed on this program, who ran for governor in Louisiana and actually was in striking distance of winning.

Ms. O'NEILL: Very much in striking distance and I felt - the reason I think that I got so involved in politics after that is that I felt that my participation made a real difference. I made phone calls. I walked door to door. I talked to people. I found that people at the community level are really interested in engaging in debate and in thoughtful consideration. And I think I changed some minds by talking to people one on one, and I was really thrilled when we stopped David Duke, because going in we didn't think we would.

NOW is committed to understanding the linkages between sexism and racism and homophobia. These are of a piece. And you will not end sexism unless you uproot racism. We believe that. We act on it.

MARTIN: To that point, if I could ask you this, last week we had a conversation with Tina Tchen. She was recently appointed the executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls. She's also, of course, the head of the Office of Public Engagement now, the renamed office of Public Liaison. And we had a call from a listener who asks this question. I just want to play it for you. Here it is.

Unidentified Man: No matter how you phrase it or engage it, the program to empower women, it's just basically robbing from Peter to Paul. We fortunately already live in a society where we have equality. The recent election of Obama proved that, and a woman runs, Hillary Clinton came close to it. The nation is over that.

MARTIN: It's the same question that is being asked of other civil rights organizations - which yours is, right?

Ms. O'NEILL: Right.

MARTIN: Which is, why do you still need a national organization for women, and what metric are you using to determine how well women and girls are doing in this society? What is it that women particularly need right now? How do you particularly need to focus your energies?

Ms. O'NEILL: Currently, we are over 50 percent of the voting population, 50, maybe a little over 50 percent of the total population, and women comprise only 16 percent of the United States Congress, both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. We are 16 percent of the governorships around the state. That's not political parity. That's not even close. Today, women, on average, earn $.78 to the dollar earned by a white male.

And if you compare white male earnings to African-American women, it's around $.64 to the dollar. Latinas is $.58 to the dollar. That's not equality. It's not even close. Today, women cluster in the kinds of jobs, part-time jobs and low-wage or minimum-wage jobs that don't carry health insurance benefits and that don't have real opportunities for promotion. That's not equality. It's not even close. So when I hear people say, gee, you have equality, I think to myself, we've made progress. We used to hear people say, you don't need equality or you don't deserve equality.

So now they're saying, yes, you need it and you deserve it but you already have it. So go away now. Well, we don't have it. And we're not going away until we do get it.

MARTIN: If you're just tuning in, this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm speaking with Terry O'Neill. She's the newly elected president of the National Organization for Women. So, your first 100 days, madam president - I know you're not in office, that you take office in July.

Ms. O'NEILL: Yes.

MARTIN: What will your priorities be in the first 100 days? Doesn't seem reasonable that the president of the United States has to answer that question and you don't. So…

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. O'NEILL: I love being compared to the president of the United States. We really are a powerful grassroots movement. We really are. My first 100 days, grassroots action campaigns, national action campaigns, one after another after another, coupled with a very aggressive membership recruitment program. And they go hand in hand. You can't really have one without the other, and, in fact, one feeds on the other.

MARTIN: How do you make the case for that, though, at a time when it is generally believed and understood that organizations like yours do better on the outs? Is your challenge different that you have an administration in office - the Obama administration - which is perceived as far more receptive to your issues and priorities than the preceding one?

Ms. O'NEILL: Yeah. It's just so wonderful to have a friend in the White House. And we do have a friend in the White House. We were pushed back severely in the past eight years. Government dollars are being diverted to programs such as marriage promotion to poor women. If you're in poverty and you're a woman, the government is partly telling you, oh, just find a man. That's how you get yourself out of poverty. It's an outrage. We've been pushed back severely. We are ready to fight back and to gain ground and, in fact, to move forward.

So I think that we have entered a new era. Now we're going to absolutely work with our friends in the White House and in Congress. But my belief is that friends tell friends when they've made a mistake. And we won't be shy about telling our friends that if they've made a mistake. And we won't be shy about celebrating the work that we and our friends can do together.

MARTIN: And have they made any mistakes in your view, so far?

Ms. O'NEILL: Sure. They just - President Obama just appointed a woman who is very actively anti-choice to a senior position in Health and Human Services. And…

MARTIN: Is it your view that people who are not pro-choice have no voice in government at all, or should not?

Ms. O'NEILL: Well, you know, that's really not for me to say. I think that as the president-elect of NOW, I'm just interested in getting pro-choice people into positions of decision-making authority. And so yeah, we objected to it, and we will continue to object to it. Now, President Obama also has nominated judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States. And we are thrilled. And we are - indeed, one of the things we're going to be doing immediately is a campaign to get her confirmed. We don't intend to allow the right wing to slow her down, much less stop her.

MARTIN: When you think about the women you represent and what they want out of life and how you can help them get there, how do you fit a Sarah Palin into that story? Who is a conservative, who is not pro-choice, who - yet, is operating at - she is one of those women governors, the few, the proud…

Ms. O'NEILL: Mm-hmm.

MARTIN: …has five children, was, you know, vice-presidential nominee, the second in our history. Where does she fit into this story?

Ms. O'NEILL: Governor Palin doesn't support NOW's issues. And I don't support her. I respect her. She certainly has a right to run for office and to promote the policies that she promotes. But I would not support her because, in my view, she promotes policies that are anti-women around the country achieving equality.

MARTIN: So do you buy the argument that sometimes the best woman for a job is a man?

Ms. O'NEILL: I would buy the argument that sometimes when you have to choose between just two, we would choose the man. That's certainly what I did. I watched the precincts and made the phone calls in Manassas, Virginia for Obama. And I think that was material in his winning Virginia. And I was thrilled to be - actually to be part of that. That was sort of my strategy there. Yeah, sometimes when you have that choice. That's the choice that I made.

MARTIN: You'd mentioned in the press release announcing your selection as president of NOW that you were, at one point in your life, a victim of - a survivor of, I should say, domestic violence. And I'm curious - and you only recently started talking about this…

Ms. O'NEILL: Yeah.

MARTIN: …within the last couple of years. And you've been a member of this organization for a while. And I'm just interested in how you think that experience might inform your advocacy.

Ms. O'NEILL: Hmm. I have actually more recently - because in Montgomery County, we just created a Family Justice Center. It's a one-stop shop of services for survivors of domestic violence. And I've been working in setting it up and getting it funded and so forth. So I guess it's been very much in my mind, particularly lately. One of the things that I recalled in doing this work over the past year or so is the embarrassment and humiliation. And people don't necessarily get that, yes, you're afraid. Yes, you need to be safe. But you're just so embarrassed that this could happen to you. And I think that that experience really made me begin to understand that at a certain level, we all share - women, no matter what walk of life we come from, share some fundamental desires and aspirations, all of us, in common. And that really has - that is why I said in my speech. It was that experience that really changed the direction of my life.

MARTIN: Terry O'Neill is the newly elected president of the National Organization for Women. She will assume the post on July 21st, along with other members of her team. She was kind enough to join us from NPR member station WFYI in Indianapolis, where the election was held. Terry O'Neill, thank you so much for joining us. We hope we'll speak again.

Ms. O'NEILL: Thank you so much. I appreciate talking to you.

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