Commentary—

Women — Vote (And Run) For Your Life

By Martha Burk

Women’s Equality Day, August 26, was this week. What did you do to celebrate it? Most people won’t be able to answer this question, because they don’t know what it is. The female half of the population actually celebrates each time they go to the polls. Women’s Equality Day is the anniversary of women getting the vote in 1920. When the country was founded, only white men had the franchise. Black men were granted voting citizenship with the 14th Amendment after the Civil War, but women had to wait until the 20th Century.

The struggle was not easy. Alice Paul and her band of suffragists went to prison, were put in solitary confinement, beaten and kicked and force-fed before President Woodrow Wilson relented and backed their crusade. Let’s hope their sacrifices are not forgotten, because it seems like what they fought for is increasingly less valued by the younger generation. Young women are the largest group of nonvoters.

Speculation varies as to why these women — particularly unmarried ones — are skipping the polling booth; a recent poll by Lifetime Television revealed that 90 percent did not believe they had heard candidates talk much about their issues, and 20 percent had heard nothing at all from those seeking their votes.

Organized women’s groups have taken notice, and many are conducting get out the vote drives. The National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) has a nonpartisan voter guide to women’s issues, detailing questions every woman should ask the candidates (www.womensorganizations.org). The idea is that if candidates aren’t talking about the things women care about, like the pay gap, they should be asked.

If enough people challenge them, the candidates may just get the idea that the majority of citizens in this country (females) ought to be talked to directly instead of always being lumped in with their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The women’s vote is certainly more powerful than the so-called NASCAR dad vote, the veteran’s vote, the black, Hispanic, gay and lesbian, or fundamentalist vote. Why shouldn’t candidates tell us exactly what they’re going to do to preserve our fundamental right to reproductive choice, for example?

Or maybe how they’re going to close that pay gap? What about the minimum wage? The majority of folks working at that level are adult women.

Maybe the reason so few candidates address “women’s issues” is that so few of them are women. The number of women in elected office has stagnated for the last ten years — 22 percent at the state level, 13.8 percent of Congress. And a scarier thought is that most people start their political careers early, before age 35, and that’s exactly the age group where women are feeling most alienated from the political process. Of today’s young political leaders under 35 years old, 86 percent are men.

The White House Project is working to train 1,000 women to run for political office and more than 25,000 women to get out the vote. To address the growing problem of young female political dropouts, the group is launching “Take Our Girls and Boys to the Polls” as an organizing tool through its national Vote, Run, Lead™ initiative in early September. Organizer Marie Wilson says, “If we show girls that getting involved affects politics and policies, they will grow up thinking of themselves not only as future voters but as potential political leaders,” she says. Details can be found at www.VoteRunLead.org.

Right now women are the majority of registered voters, and turn out in greater numbers than men. That means women have the power to control any election. But unless there is engagement on both sides — younger women and candidates talking to each other — that may not be true in the future. With so many politicians wanting to take away the gains women have made in the last generation, the next generation ought to take the slogan on the outside of that NCWO voter guide seriously: Vote As If Your Life Depends On It — Because It Does.

(Martha Burk is a political psychologist who heads the Center for Advancement of Public Policy in Washington, D.C., a think tank focusing on the wisdom of providing for equal treatment of women in society.)