Geraldine Ferraro

Geraldine Anne Ferraro was an attorney and a Democratic politician and a former member of the United States House of Representatives. She was the first female Vice-Presidential candidate representing a major American political party.

Ferraro grew up in New York and became a teacher and lawyer. In 1974 she joined the Queens County District Attorney's Office, where she headed the new Special Victims Bureau that dealt with sex crimes, child abuse, and domestic violence. She was elected to Congress in 1978, where she rose rapidly in the party hierarchy while focusing on legislation to bring equity for women in the areas of wages, pensions, and retirement plans. In 1984, former Vice President and Presidential candidate Walter Mondale selected Ferraro to be his running mate in the upcoming election. In doing so she also became the only Italian American to be a major-party national nominee. The positive polling Mondale received when she joined him did not last until November, and they were defeated in an electoral landslide by incumbent President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush.

She ran two campaigns for a seat in the United States Senate in 1992 and 1998, but twice lost the nomination of her party in the primaries. She served as a United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1993 until 1996 in the Presidential administration of Bill Clinton. She has also continued her career as a journalist, author, and businesswoman, and served in the 2008 presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton.