McClure once battled homelessness as a single mother. But her determination and grit through the years earned her a job as a grassroots organizer, a home for her family and, eventually, gave her the nerve to run for office. Last fall, she was one of the thousands of black women who helped deliver victory for Doug Jones — the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the US Senate in 21 years.
And that got her thinking: Why should she merely support someone else? Why not be the change herself.
She’s far from alone. There’s an unprecedented wave of female candidates — many of them first-timers — running for office up and down the ballot this year. So far, 61 women have run for governor in 2018, nearly doubling the record of female candidates set in 1994, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.
Women have also set a new record in the race for seats in the US House of Representatives, with a total of 185 women — Democrats and Republicans combined — landing a major-party nomination to run.
And since Donald Trump was elected President, 36,000 women have expressed interest in running for office, according to Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List, a progressive pro-choice organization that recruits and funds female candidates.
Think about that: 36,000 women.
In Texas, that includes Gina Ortiz Jones, who is running for Congress. If she wins, she’ll be the first Filipina-American to do so — ever. She’s also an Iraq war veteran, first-generation American and a lesbian. Dismayed by the current political climate, Ortiz Jones felt called to step up and serve.
Katie Porter and the politics of real life
Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) in March. (Michael Robinson Chávez/The Washington Post)
September 20, 2023 at 5:00 a.m. EDT
Comment on this storyComment
I had been granted an hour with the congresswoman, which felt generous, but she was about 15 minutes late, which was understandable. The House is an insane place to work, running for Senate is an insane thing to do, and having three underage kids, and about 755,000 constituent bosses, and 19 hours of commuting every week between Washington and Orange County, Calif. — well, time is scarce for Rep. Katie Porter. When the California Democrat arrived earlier this year for our meeting at a coffee shop near her basement apartment on Capitol Hill, she enthused about the shamrock hue of her outfit, which jibed with the unusually green lapel pin of the 118th Congress. She herself hasn’t been a great match for the House of Representatives, which she describes in her book, published in the spring, with startling honesty.
“Being a single mom of young kids in Congress was not possible,” she writes of her first year in office. The job was “just too hard.”
The day before the 2019 in-person deadline to file for her first reelection campaign, Porter was here in Washington, far from the Orange County Registrar of Voters, and “so tired I couldn’t see straight.” She was resigned to failure, to being a one-term congresswoman, because she couldn’t get her act together to run again. She was “seething” that the Founding Fathers had wives and servants “to do their bidding while they endlessly debated in Washington, without worry about their children getting to bed on time.”
But 3½ years later — near the beginning of her third term, a campaign for Senate and a book tour — Porter was a vision of energy and focus. The growing pains had been tough, but now she was ready to reach higher, for the upper chamber.
“With Senator Feinstein ending her service, with Nancy [Pelosi] not being speaker” and “with Gavin [Newsom] on a different path, shall we say, there are big shoes to fill in California, politically,” said Porter, 49, shaking a Splenda into her coffee. “And if we don’t have a scrappy, strategic, strong messenger in that role, we will not be able to win in every part and pocket of California.”
Women in Politics – The Fight to End Violence Against Women
Despite the remarkable progress of women in many professions, politics is not one of them. Indeed, around the world, women have been conspicuous by their absence in decision and policy making in government. When the United Nations First World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City in 1975, the international community was reminded that discrimination against women remained a persistent problem in many countries; and even though governments were called upon to develop strategies to promote the equal participation of women, political participation was not yet identified as a priority. Since then, though there has been an increasing focus on women’s representation and their impact on decision-making structures, the increased attention did not reflect in immediate results. For example, in 1975 women accounted for 10.9 per cent of parliamentarians worldwide; ten years later it increased by one mere percentage point to 11.9 per cent.
It was not until the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, held in 1985 in Nairobi, that governments and parliaments pledged to promote gender equality in all areas of political life. The initiatives were further consolidated ten years later in the Beijing Plan of Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women. It was also at this conference that violence against women was identified as an obstacle to the advancement of women requiring specific attention.
Since the Beijing Plan of Action, women’s representation in parliaments and impact on political decision making has been the subject of much attention. The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), which has been engaged in research and the collection of data on women in parliaments, threw its weight behind United Nations initiatives to achieve women’s full participation in politics. Although articulated many times, IPU’s commitment at its best was perhaps seen in its statement in 1992:
“The concept of democracy will only achieve true and dynamic significance when political policies and national legislation are decided jointly by men and women with equitable regard for the interests and aptitudes of both halves of the population.”