For Women to Gain in Congress, Parties Ought to Even the Odds

In 1960 there were two women in the U.S. Senate. Today, nearly three decades and one feminist movement later, there are two women in the Senate. This is progress?

In 1960 there were 17 women in the House. In the new 101st Congress there are 25. They include two new Democrats--Nita Lowey, who beat incumbent Joseph Dio Guardi in New York, and Jolene Unsoeld, who won a close and caustic contest in Washington state. At this rate, says long-time activist Eleanor Smeal, it will take 345 years to achieve parity on Capitol Hill.

So what? What difference would it make if there were double the current number of women ready to be sworn in as members of Congress? And, if their presence is such a big deal, what can be done to ensure better representation of women?

Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) concludes that even doubling the number of women would make little difference. She says the theory is that you need to have about one-fourth of the members of any organization to make any difference. One-fourth of the House’s 435 members is 109, four times the current membership.

But she believes that if there were significantly more women the tone would change on everything from combatting sexual harassment on Capitol Hill to determining how the government spends money. With more women in Congress, the bill that would have vastly expanded child-care programs would have had a far better chance of passing last year. The family medical-leave act might be law now, too.

Women in politics tend to pay more attention than men to issues that especially affect other women--whether it’s childcare, money for breast-cancer research or better pay for jobs traditionally held by women. Women also tend to put other women on their staffs, thus further opening the process, says Ruth Mandel, who has been studying the subject for years at Rutgers University’s Center for the American Woman and Politics.

Women now fill 15% of the seats in state legislatures and have even higher representation in local government. In West Virginia last year, women in the Legislature got their colleagues to override the governor’s veto of a bill providing medical care for poor pregnant women and poor children. Mandel reports in a new study that, to win that battle, the female legislators threatened to filibuster in the closing days of the session and called a candlelight protest outside the Capitol.

Smeal, who has been comparing the political representation of women in European parliaments with our own dismal scene, reports that 8 of the 18 Cabinet members in Norway are women. When the country faced budget cuts recently, those female Cabinet members made sure that child-care programs were not affected.

Smeal, former president of the National Organization for Women, heads the Fund for the Feminist Majority, a new group that is trying to improve women’s representation in elective offices. Where, she was asked recently, do you start? On the college campuses and in the law schools. Smeal’s organization, backed financially by Los Angeles feminist Peg Yorkin, has been telling young women that they shouldn’t buy the notion that they have to wait or that they have to be better than the men. Young men don’t wait to run.

But women need some help from the system, help that they rarely get now because that system supports incumbents. Smeal wants the political parties to engage in some affirmative action. She wants them to require that a certain portion--maybe half--of the party’s candidates be female, and many of them should be black or Latina. We now have a national legislature with only one black woman--Cardiss Collins (D-Ill.)--and no Latinas. How representative is that?

At first blush, Smeal’s proposal seems like an idea that no one in power would buy. But the political parties have already taken some steps down that road. Internally, the Democrats have already guaranteed parity. They require equal representation by sex on all party committees and commissions and at the national convention (which of course doesn’t mean all that much any more). The Supreme Court has upheld the delegate-selection rule.

Smeal hopes that women and sympathetic men in each party will see the advantages, in terms of both politics and social programs, in requiring that more women get party encouragement in primaries, are selected as candidates for open seats and get solid party backing in general elections. The 1988 Democratic platform endorses the idea, and the Republican platform says that the party should move toward this equality.

It has become obvious that women playing by the existing rules will achieve political office no faster than I can run a 10K. Trust me--that is not fast. That brings to mind a scene in the ultimate runners’ film, “Chariots of Fire.” The Ben Cross character, who works at running to prove himself in a prejudiced world, has just lost a race. He’s sitting in the grandstand, and his girlfriend--you remember, the beautiful singer--finds him. He says that if he can’t win, he won’t run. She replies that if you don’t run, you can’t win. Women can win, too, if they run with a little more help from their friends in the parties.