


Paula Hawkins
Geraldine Ferraro's lasting legacy

On Friday, the Showtime cable-television channel will air "Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way," a documentary about her 1984 race for vice president. Although she was defeated, it was a seminal moment in politics that was validated by the subsequent extraordinary leap in the number of female officeholders. In three decades, political women have gone from anomalies to mainstream, though they still are underrepresented. The odds are the Democrats will nominate a woman for president in two years, and there's an even chance the Republican candidate will tap a female running mate. The best research on these issues is from the Center for American Women and Politics, a unit of the...