Changing the Face of Politics

It was nearly one hundred years ago when women were first granted the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment. Women have come a long way since and yet far too few women have made their way to Capitol Hill.

Of the more than 12,000 members of Congress since the country’s founding, only 215 have been women. Today, women hold only 14 percent of the seats of U.S. Congress while they account for 52 percent of the population. It wasn’t until 1948 that a woman, Margaret Chase Smith, became elected to the Senate in her own right. And it would take 54 more years before a woman, Nancy Pelosi, would earn the top leadership position in a national party in the House of Representatives.

The number of women holding office in statehouses across the country is either stagnant or falling: Women held 27.6 percent of statewide elective office in 1999 and hold 26 percent as of 2002 according to research by the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University. Their percentage of state legislative seats has barely budged in 10 years.

And to this day, no woman has ever been president of the United States. It has been 20 years since Geraldine Ferraro broke barriers in 1984 to become the first female Democratic vice-presidential candidate.

It is then not surprising that young and unmarried women make up the largest demographic group that do not register to vote nor actually vote in this country.

According to the U.S. Census, unmarried women (never married, divorced, widowed and separated) are 46 percent of all voting-age women and 56 percent of all unregistered women voters. As of 2000, there were 16 million unmarried, unregistered women and 22 million registered unmarried women who did not vote. In other words, if unmarried women voted at the same rate as married women, there would have been more than six million more voters in the electorate.

Just imagine, what could have happened if those 22 million registered female voters did vote? What could happen if they vote today?

If they participate, these female voters have the power to dramatically change the outcomes of elections and the course of this nation.

These female voters could elect more women to office, which would dramatically change the demographics of Congress and challenge the current view that politics is a male-dominated arena.

Important rights and protections gained in the last half of the 20th century would be ensured for future generations of women. Too often people forget that the rights women currently embrace were only recently attained. It was only 82 years ago when women obtained the right to vote, 18 years since sexual harassment in the workplace was deemed illegal and 13 years since women won the right to serve in the military in combat positions. Moreover, it was just a year ago when Title IX, a controversial rule granting all women’s athletic programs equal funding, was reaffirmed as legitimate.

These are hard-won rights that would not have been possible without political action taken by women across the country. Yet, these are rights that will be ephemeral if women do not continually safeguard them in the same way.

Most important, women can wield their voting power further by becoming actively involved in the political process themselves. They could volunteer in political offices, work on electoral campaigns or organize grassroots efforts for specific issues they are passionate about. In fact, these female voters could even run for office themselves!

Unfortunately, however, not enough women believe they are qualified for office. CAWP also found in their research that of today’s young political leaders (under age 35), 86 percent are men. What’s worse, almost half of those 86 percent of young men “self-started,” but only 28 percent of the women said they struck out on their own initiative. Half of the women had been “encouraged,” but 22 percent had to be “persuaded” to run for office as opposed to 14 percent for men.

Women have to recognize that they do have a voice—a powerful one—both as voters and as leaders. And this remains true even after the events on Sept.11, 2001 put foreign policy and military action at the forefront of public debate. The nation’s most powerful leaders on national security and terrorism have been and still are women: former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and current White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Today, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) serves as the chair of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Women need to hear the call to run for office, to vote and to encourage their female peers to join them. Women need to wake up in the morning like men and say to themselves, “I can and will run for office.” Women need to realize the enormous power they can have in politics. After all, as Eleanor Roosevelt once proclaimed, “It’s up to the women!”

Anat Maytal ’05, a Crimson editor, is a government and women, gender, and sexuality concentrator in Leverett House.