Upon Her Shoulder: In ’07, Women Gain Wider Role in Government and Politics

When Condoleeza Rice came to Washington’s Kennedy Center in late December to take in “The Messiah,” the familiar lyrics drowned out for an evening the drumbeat of criticism over a war and an election lost by her party’s leaders.

Rice and the administration need no reminder of the biblical prophecy proclaimed by the chorus that all can “be changed in a moment.” The very working women who broke the glass ceiling to facilitate Rice’s rise to executive power abandoned the GOP at the polls in 2006. Women gave 56 percent of their votes last November to Democrats. According to the Center for American Women in Politics, they gave Democratic women their highest share ever of governors (six), senators (11), representatives (53) and state legislators (1,182).

The most enduring afterimage from the nation’s change in course remains Nancy Pelosi’s brandishing the speaker’s gavel before a new Congress. But her ascension is merely one manifestation of a massive but subtle shift in authority toward women leaders wrought during the last election cycle.

Even the post-election was rich with symbolism and significance. Two weeks after the landmark win by Claire McCaskill in Missouri’s marquee Senate race, besting the man who had beaten Jean Carnahan just four years earlier, Democrats claimed another victory in a battleground watched closely for clues to the nation’s mood: Chester County, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, has been a Republican bastion since the days of the women’s suffrage movement.

But in the last major state legislative contest to be decided, Barbara McIlvaine Smith, a grandmother whose campaign manager summoned her to the election office from a pre-Thanksgiving hair appointment, won a dramatic 23-vote victory on absentee ballots. The win handed control of the state House of Representatives back to her party for the first time in 12 years.

Like Missouri, whose outcome in Presidential contests most closely predicts the country’s result, Chester County is home to a host of independent and moderate Republican women. This bloc has held the keys to political power in state and national races since Hillary Rodham Clinton’s husband wooed them in ’92, reversing a two-decade trend toward conservatives.

In the new year, even as Betty Ford was kissing the coffin of her late husband, writers and historians marked the passing of a feminist pioneer. At 95, poet and teacher Tillie Olsen had spent more than 70 years describing the circumstances of working women and resurrecting the careers of female authors excluded from great-books surveys. Most notable was her extended 1978 essay Silences. As irascible as she was illuminating, Olsen attracted two generations of scholars to her work and her apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay to gain insight on her background, blending art and labor organizing.

Olsen first gained notice with “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” a 1934 poem exposing sweatshop abuse of preteen girls in a San Antonio toy factory. She lived just long enough to see South Texas union members beat an incumbent Congressman and working-family nemesis, Henry Bonilla, in a December runoff he was favored to win. The victory capped Democrats’ Congressional resurgence at a 30-seat gain.

Amid the ceremony of claiming their new majority, Democratic women made note of a changing of the guard both in Washington and in the women’s movement. Lost in 2006 was one icon whom Pelosi paused to lionize, former Texas governor Ann Richards. But in her footsteps treads daughter Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, a pivotal force in women’s health care, leadership training, and political mobilization. Equally formidable are other feminist leaders in important non-feminist organizations: Mary Jean Collins at People For the American Way, Kristina Wilfore at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, and Janet Murguia at the National Council of La Raza.

Presenting a challenge to these standard-bearers was the 34th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision earlier this week. Preserving this precedent has been a triumph of women’s bipartisan empowerment. Its longevity has relied as much on leaders like Republican and former justice Sandra Day O’Connor as on Democrat and longtime legal crusader Eleanor Holmes Norton. With GOP front-runner for ’08 John McCain flip-flopping and now favoring Roe’s demise, the next two years will be a crucial test of women’s influence. Bush’s male Supreme Court appointees may have the legal say-so. But the coalitions forged by Pelosi, McCaskill and the women leaders in Washington’s top interest groups around nominations, legislation and the next election will determine whether Roe’s promise of privacy, autonomy and bodily integrity will be extended to a new generation.

Like the specter of regression on choice, the term of Rice and Bush may be recalled for their failure on basic freedom. Close to home, the president in November named an anti-abortion activist, Eric Keroack, to head the federal Office of Population Affairs. On the international front, the administration launched a preemptive war against forces of extreme Islam in Afghanistan whom they blamed for, among other crimes, repression of women. Yet they have sided with the same forces in withholding funds for lifesaving family planning services through the United Nations Population Fund. The cut of $161 million over six years may be responsible for the needless suffering and deaths of several hundred women who rely on the U.N. bureau in 140 countries. The total funding cut does not cover even one full day of the Iraq war.

Provoked in part by these misplaced priorities, women leaders such as Barbara Boxer are framing new foreign aid goals aimed at providing basic needs and promoting freedom not at gunpoint. The challenge, to cite 2006 National Book Award medalist Adrienne Rich, is to allow women “to stand to their full height,” not presuming they should hew to secondary roles in civic or economic life. In realms both foreign and domestic, the opportunity remains similar to Eleanor Roosevelt’s vision: a fuller taste of liberty for all people, through access to food, school, finance, and family planning and a greater ability to join unions.

In this way, the diverse corps of women leaders now answering the call to public service revive a legacy that converted protest into policy and made the founding principles of this country a credible standard for reform the world over. So powerful is this collective force of conscience that it will outlast even the Bush years.

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