Geraldine Ferraro, the U.S. representative from New York's 9th District from 1979-85 and the first woman to to run on a major party presidential ticket, losing with Walter Mondale to Reagan and Bush in 1984, has died at the age of 75:
Geraldine A. Ferraro, the former Queens congresswoman who strode onto a podium in 1984 to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president and to take her place in American history as the first woman nominated for national office by a major party, died Saturday in Boston.
She was 75 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that she had battled for 12 years, her family said in a statement. She died at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she had been undergoing treatment since Monday.
"If we can do this, we can do anything," Ms. Ferraro declared on a July evening to a cheering Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. And for a moment, for the Democratic Party and for an untold number of American women, anything seemed possible: a woman occupying the second-highest office in the land, a derailing of the Republican juggernaut led by President Ronald Reagan, a President Walter F. Mondale.
I don't wish to speak ill of her, but I never much cared for her. She was never all that liberal and in fact called herself a conservative (and, at least early on, "a tough Democrat," that is a right-leaning Democrat who leaned Republican at least in terms of temperament). And she was simply appalling in her support for Hillary (and in her various attacks on Obama) during the '08 Democratic primaries, proving to be something of a racist, and ending up just embarrassing herself and being dumped from the campaign.
Still, she was a remarkable woman in many ways, and what she did was undeniably remarkable, too. It wasn't easy to be a prominent woman politician at that time, just as it still isn't, but she broke new ground by running on the national stage and, even before that, was a powerful voice on issues such as gender equity, the plight of seniors, and the environment. She was certainly conservative on a number of other issues, and her record was pretty much the record of an ideologically-fluctuating moderate from a fairly socially conservative district, but, whatever her flaws, she was one of the most significant political figures of her time.
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