I was listening to the radio this morning, and apparently today August 26, 1920 was the date in history on which women got the right to vote. Yay for voting!!!! (you should try it) The radio talk show host talked for a bit about the numbers of women who vote, and according to them, women vote more than men do. Then they started talking about the very small number of black women who run and are elected to office. As they were talking, I kept thinking that, in my experience, the numbers of women, in general, who run for public office are very, very low, especially in relation to the large numbers in which women vote.
I, at 24 and 25 have been asked by my county political party to attend candidate trainings so that I can go ahead and be in the pipeline to run in the future. I know numerous other women in North Carolina who have been asked to run for higher office; be it on a city or county level, or on a state or national level. And I know that these women refuse time and time again. And often, when an older women wants to retire from office, there aren’t any qualified women to take her place, and that’s sad.
Sometimes women refuse to run for monetary reasons, they work and can’t afford to quit or they can’t afford childcare, or sometimes they simply can’t afford the campaign. Sometimes potential female candidates site the stress of the campaign trail, or the ugliness of campaigning. Sometimes, potential candidates don’t want to put their life under the public’s microscope.
However, the excuse that I have heard most often for why women don’t run for office is that they don’t want to take the time away from their families. And every time I hear that, I roll my eyes and shake my head. I HATE this excuse. How often do men worry about being away from their families when working or bettering themselves? I’d bet that generally men don’t worry very much about being away from their families. Men understand that the better they are, the better their families are. And I get frustrated that women continue to put themselves in the back seat and allow men to take the drivers seat in politics and determine all of our destinies.
September 5, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I saw an email forward recently about what women in the sufferage movement had to go through and it makes me appreciate it more!
There is an HBO movie about their experience “Iron Jawed Angels” and my reading led me to the following book available online..
Jailed for Freedom By Doris Stevens
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/j4fre10.txt
Regarding the women who don’t want to take time away from their families, they have a valid point. If they know their husband enough to know that he is not going to pick up the slack for her, then she would not want to put her kids in danger of being neglected. Of course poor women and single mothers don’t have the luxury of even considering it!
Everyone that aspires to our nations highest offices will have to put their family on a back burner, and it is not likely anyone will want to do that unless there is someone to pick up the slack…
September 6, 2008 at 9:07 pm
“Everyone that aspires to our nations highest offices will have to put their family on a back burner, and it is not likely anyone will want to do that unless there is someone to pick up the slack…”
@ Danielle: At the risk of sounding like a totally crazy person, this is a reason why I think that children should be raised by specific people (and it should be their only job/responsibility) and leave the rest of us to do other things like,… oh I don’t know, make the world a better place or something…
Women, especially, get stuck raising kids and they don’t get to do anything else. It’s not fair to them, it makes them hate their kids, and it keeps them from being productive citizens, and the world loses out.
Oh no, now I sound like a lunatic, feminist, commie crazy…lol.