Mother Jones
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A few days before the 1986 Vermont gubernatorial election, Bernie Sanders held a rally in downtown Burlington. Sanders, then the independent mayor of the state’s largest city, was trailing badly in a three-way race with Democratic Gov. Madeleine Kunin, the state’s first female chief executive, and Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Smith, and he was running out of time.
So, as Kunin recounts in her 1994 memoir, Living a Political Life, Sanders leveled a tough attack against her. At that rally, Kunin wrote, Sanders declared that “he would be a better feminist than I.” According to her account, Sanders shouted that Kunin had “done nothing for women.” And, she recalled in her book, “When my husband, there as my surrogate (I was scheduled to speak elsewhere), rose to speak in my defense, he was booed by the crowd. Arthur’s red-faced anger became the children’s horror story of the campaign, which they embellished in the retelling—our private macabre joke.” Kunin was already coming under attack from the right for her vocal support of the Equal Rights Amendment; now she was being hammered for not being feminist enough.
Original source:
That Time Bernie Sanders Said He Was a Bigger Feminist Than His Female Opponent
