She’s A ‘Feminist, And A Lady’ Planned Parenthood President Gets High Marks For Skills As A Consensus-Builder

As symbols go, you couldn’t ask for a better one than Gloria Feldt.

She’s 55 and elegant in a soft pink blazer, with tasteful jewelry, her shiny brown hair done in a neat bob, her West Texas accent a faint, pleasant twang. Her thoughts, usually phrased in complete, complicated paragraphs, are delivered soft and calm. And in her purse, along with a “Talking About Sex” videotape, the new president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, its 144 affiliates and 900 clinics, carries pictures of her nine grandchildren.

There’s not a hint of the radical in her handshake or smile, or in her long, fluid musings on what the nation’s oldest, largest family-planning institution needs to offer women in the next century. Certainly, the steel is there - you know you’ve struck it when Feldt starts in on how teaching abstinence alone is “a great disservice to young people” - but it comes cloaked in the warm tones and soft touch of the consensus-builder.

“Gloria is absolutely right for this time and for what we need to accomplish,” says Joan Coombs, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood’s Southeastern Pennsylvania affiliate. “She’s so clear about the mission - an incredibly strong feminist, and a lady at the same time.”

Feldt didn’t start out with the kind of resume that would make you think future leader of America much less of Planned Parenthood.

At 15, she was a high-school dropout who’d eloped with her 19-year-old high-school sweetheart.

“Very shortly thereafter,” she was pregnant. By the time the West Texas native was 20, she was the mother of three - none of them planned.

“It was,” she says, and rolls her eyes extravagantly, “stupidity. I didn’t do the little rebellions - the drinking, or smoking, or whatever. I went for the big one.

“Some of it is still painful to think about,” she said. “I think I knew it was pretty stupid pretty quickly. But I was too proud to say so. So I stuck it out for 18 years.”

Plus, in Texas, in the 1950s, getting married young wasn’t so unusual.

“I wanted to be the all-American girl,” she said. “And in 1957, that meant getting married and having babies.”

But in Feldt’s life, it would also turn out to be much more.

She finished high school through correspondence, went back to community college, and stumbled into Planned Parenthood through work she was doing at a local church. For her final college course, Feldt wrote a paper on population and the environment and interviewed the staff at the Permian Basin Planned Parenthood. They were so impressed, they asked the 32-year-old, who’d just graduated from the University of Texas, to apply for the executive director position.

She got the job, worked there for almost four years, then moved on to become executive director and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Central and Northern Arizona in Phoenix. Among Planned Parenthood staffers and supporters, Feldt’s work in Phoenix is practically legendary. She increased the budget from $1.2 million to $8.5 million, increased fund-raising twentyfold, added 13 clinics to the area and, along the way, held numerous positions in national Planned Parenthood, all while handling herself with the kind of grace and sharp wit that made her a natural for the national stage.

When anti-abortion groups persuaded Phoenix Memorial Hospital to stop leasing space to Planned Parenthood, Feldt turned that into a fund-raising opportunity and got enough money to buy a new building in a more central location.

“She’s a great fund-raiser. She can bring two groups together - say, a gay group and Republican women - and find out what they have in common. She’s tenacious, and a very positive thinker. When most people get hung up on minor issues, she’s looking for the higher road,” said Gary Hammond, a longtime Planned Parenthood volunteer in Phoenix, who was on the committee that brought Feldt to Arizona.

Now she’s brought those skills - and her considerable public presence - to a national arena, where the right to abortion is still contested and where, to some, Planned Parenthood is still the enemy.

Feldt still smiles when she recalls, in the same tone of voice women use to talk about their first grandchild, “my first congressional testimony,” which included jousting with Henry Hyde, the congressman considered Public Enemy No. 1 by pro-choice and family-planning groups.

During the meeting, on CNN, just after she’d gotten the national job, “it was clear he was going to go straight to the same old rhetoric: ‘Does it concern you that there are so many repeat abortions?”’

Feldt’s brown eyes shine at the memory of what she said to the senator: “Well, if it concerns ‘you,’ why have you never once supported family planning?”

“That was just wonderful,” said Sharon Allison, chairman of the board of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and head of the search committee that just over a year ago gave Feldt the top job.

“She’s very good at making our points. When someone pushes her into a corner, she can turn it around without ever being combative.”

Feldt dismisses the likes of Henry Hyde as annoyances who are partly cynical (“How can we create an issue to divert people from the fact that we aren’t solving the country’s problems?”) and partly misogynistic (“I think they are terrified of a world where women have an equal place, as equal citizens, and as moral decision-makers in this world. I think, to them, that represents a real threat”).

But it’s not the religious right or the anti-abortion folks who worry Feldt the most.

That honor goes to supporters - people who are pro-choice, who believe that teenagers need information, that women need options, that family planning is a good thing, but who don’t speak up, or who say things like, “Well, I agree with you, but I think too many choices are confusing.”

That, and young women who’ve grown up with feminism’s gains and so don’t feel the need to support the right to choose.

“There’s a reason why there was a movement to make abortion legal,” she says. “Because women died from illegal abortions. Because women had very little power to choose the course of their own lives if they couldn’t control their fertility.”