Brown Downplays Gender Issue as Voters’ Mood Shifts : Politics: Low-key approach to women’s concerns is a sharp change from Feinstein’s strategy in 1990 race.

It was a crack unthinkable a mere four years ago. Before several hundred women lunching in the penthouse of a Westside hotel, Kathleen Brown praised the political connections of a female friend who had introduced her, then added one more line:

“More importantly, we go to the same hairdresser and manicurist,” the candidate for governor said a few days ago, “so we can gossip and catch up when it really counts.”

Had Dianne Feinstein, the state’s first serious female gubernatorial candidate, uttered that remark, it would have ricocheted across the political landscape, raising eyebrows here, prompting aggrieved tut-tuts there, providing yet another unnerving bit of gender Angst in her 1990 battle, the one Feinstein herself characterized as pitting “a skirt” against “a suit.”

Instead Brown’s remark fluttered into nothingness, accompanied by polite laughs from the audience, serving only to underscore the vast changes under which California’s second major female gubernatorial candidate is running for her political life.

Put simply, things are a lot less cataclysmic this time out. If Feinstein’s unsuccessful race for the governorship in 1990 was historic, so is Brown’s--but barely a word about the import of becoming the first woman in the statehouse can be heard from her campaign.

Where Feinstein traveled around the state with a laundry list of positions on “women’s issues,” Brown has issued a one-sheet campaign paper on her views. Rarely does she speak of them publicly.

In part, the differences between Feinstein’s race and Brown’s reflect their different personalities and their standings among activist women. In part, they reflect Brown’s caution at repeating Feinstein’s mistakes.

But two years after California elected two women to the U.S. Senate--Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--the changes also reflect greater understandings among female candidates in general and the voters they seek to woo, a maturing of what is still a young and evolving relationship into one that has a silent language.

“Woman candidates now don’t have to sort of sell themselves to the women’s community,” said Harriett Woods, head of the National Women’s Political Caucus. “There is an assumption of a commitment there that will be fulfilled.”

Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, agreed.

“Kathleen Brown and the female candidates after the Feinstein race and the Ann Richards race (for governor of Texas in 1990) have benefited from not having to explain themselves,” Bruce said. “People now know that women, regardless of party involvement and rhetoric, do look at issues differently in office.”

The political ground on which all candidates tread has shifted remarkably in the last four years, in ways that have largely helped female candidates.

Six months before the heat of Feinstein’s race for governor came a U.S. Supreme Court decision curtailing abortion rights, a ruling that fired the campaigns of women running for office in 1990. After the mixed results of that election came the national controversy over Clarence Thomas’ appointment to the Supreme Court, and its prompting of a national debate over sexual harassment.

The furor over Thomas and Anita Hill, the law professor who accused the justice of harassment, fueled the 1992 campaigns of female candidates for Senate, including Feinstein and Boxer, who constitute the first all-woman team to represent any state in Washington.

Rose Kapolczynski, who managed Boxer’s 1992 bid for the Senate, contends that there is a huge gulf between the skepticism that greeted 1992’s candidates in California and the matter-of-fact attitude that attends Brown’s campaign.

“I don’t see nearly as many questions of Kathleen Brown of the type that, say, we got in the general election--’How could California elect two Northern California women to the Senate? It’s a virtual impossibility.’ I think electing a woman governor isn’t much questioned in this race. . . . Those questions may have been answered.”

Surveys taken by The Times emphasize the changes wrought in four years. In 1990, when registered voters were asked if the time was right for a female governor, 39% said it was. By this spring, that number had risen to 52%, suggesting that Brown faces an easier road than did Feinstein.

The advantage for a female candidate is particularly profound in the Democratic primary. According to a demographic study of the electorate prepared by Brown’s campaign manager, Clint Reilly, 58% of the voters in the June 7 Democratic primary will be women. In a recent Times Poll, Brown held a 20-point advantage over her male counterparts among female voters.

Feinstein saw similar numbers in 1990, and chose a campaign strategy that played heavily on appeals to women. Unfortunately for Feinstein, those appeals backfired somewhat in the general election.

The most famous of Feinstein’s appeals was her pledge to appoint women and minorities to her Administration in keeping with their presence among the state’s voters--in other words, more than 50% of the positions, Feinstein said, would go to women.

Her general election opponent, Republican Pete Wilson, seized the issue, running television ads that proclaimed she stood for “quotas over qualifications.” While Feinstein denied she advocated quotas, she said after the election that the claim had hurt her candidacy.

Feinstein was outspoken on other issues of interest to female voters in 1990, from her advocacy of reproductive rights to her proposal that developers be forced to construct day-care centers.

In part, political observers say, Feinstein’s relative stridence came from a desire to win over women’s groups that were not particularly friendly to her.

Bill Carrick, who ran Feinstein’s 1990 campaign, said some of her difficulties can be blamed on the historic nature of her effort.

“There had not really been a serious (female) candidate in either party,” he said. “. . . We had no history to rely on, no polling history to say we were going to get a huge block of women voters.”

Brown’s relative silence about issues on which Feinstein was outspoken reflects her campaign’s concern that it not risk offending male voters as it courts women.

“The lesson is that (the feminist) message did not sell in the general election to white Democratic men,” said a Brown adviser.

Brown also has been able to keep her appeal low-key because she has had little challenge on the gender front from Democrats John Garamendi and state Sen. Tom Hayden or Republican Wilson. In 1990, in contrast, Feinstein’s primary opponent, John K. Van de Kamp, characterized himself as the “best feminist in the race,” and Wilson also made special appeals to women.

Brown’s soft-sell approach was apparent at her recent address to women on the Westside. There, she told folksy tales about the difficulties of melding her political and personal lives. Like the time, she said, she was pulled out of a heated meeting of the Los Angeles school board, during the school busing negotiations, to take an important phone call.

“Mom,” she heard as she picked up the phone, her daughter’s voice ringing in her ear. “Zeb’s hitting me!”

Beyond the humor of Brown’s description of mediating daughter-son squabbles, the anecdote was clearly meant to suggest that the treasurer was a figure for all those in the audience to emulate and support--a working mother and grandmother, trying to have it all.

Never mentioned by Brown were the items on her list of “women’s issue” positions: abortion rights, comparable worth pay, gender equity for medical research, a federal Equal Rights Amendment.

Asked after her speech how a Brown victory would affect the lives of California women, the treasurer characterized the prospective change as a largely symbolic one that could cause a “ripple effect” elsewhere.

“There are not very many women in power that you can look to, in politics or business,” she said. “. . . I think it just goes without saying that if you have a qualified woman who will represent us well and who will be good for the state, there’s an opportunity to make history as well as vote for a great candidate.”

Among some of Brown’s supporters, there is concern that she may be making a mistake with her low-key approach. They point to New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who remained largely silent on women’s issues until she nearly lost her 1993 election. Last-minute support from women was credited for helping her overcome a surge by then-incumbent Gov. James Florio.

“When people want change and reform, they turn to women,” said NOW’s Bruce. “And if the women seem like the men, why vote for them?