Sixty-four years after American women won the right to vote Geraldine Ferraro (born 1935) became the first woman candidate for the vice presidency of a major political party. She had previously served three consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Geraldine Ferraro was born on August 26, 1935. She was the third child of Dominick and Antonetta Ferraro. The Ferraros had only one surviving son, Carl, at the time of Geraldine's birth--the other, Gerard, had been killed in a family automobile accident two years earlier. Dominick Ferraro, an Italian immigrant, operated a night club in Newburgh, a small city north of New York City reputed to be wide-open to organized crime.

In 1944, when Ferraro was eight years old, her father was arrested and charged with operating a numbers racket. He died of a heart attack the day he was to appear for trial. The Ferraro family was forced to...