CAMPAIGN ’88 : Drive for Women Voters

The Women’s Vote Project, a nonpartisan coalition of national women’s groups, announced a campaign to encourage low-income, less-educated women to participate in the political process.

At the same time, the project said it would encourage political candidates of both major parties “to find new language to ‘reach’ women and bring them into the electoral arena and to find linguistic means to show women the connection between their personal lives and public policy.”

“Our goal is to locate the intersection between politics, public policy and women’s lives and then present it to women in a way that can draw them into politics,” Joanne Howes, executive director of the project, said in Washington.

The campaign stems from a study of about 120 low- and moderate-income occasional voters.

The study took issue with the political truism that “economic issues are only peripherally important” to women, finding instead that “many are preoccupied with economic concerns” but that they use a different vocabulary that does not include such words as inflation, budget deficit, economic competitiveness or pay equity.