Women and Politics

A Quest for Political Equality in an Age of Economic Inequality

Barbara Burrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138856547
• eBook ISBN: 9781317516279
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This textbook for courses on women and politics thematically integrates two profound historical developments focusing on women's political participation in contemporary public life in the United States. The second wave of women's rights activism has now spanned a half century producing a revolution in women's presence and influence in the public realm of American life. Over the course of this same era, however, a second phenomenon of rising economic inequality has also dramatically changed the American landscape. Burrell's text uniquely examines the effect of the age of inequality on women's advancement toward economic and political equality and in turn how policy initiatives of the women's movement have addressed inequality issues. Students will come to better understand what's at stake in the politics and policy issues from the women's rights movement to the "war on women" debate.

Explaining a diverse set of issues and viewpoints, Burrell brings a fresh approach to the engagement of women in the public realm over the past half century. Framing this activism in the great economic divide of the same time period provides a thought-provoking, challenging, and broad thematic approach to this history. The text chronicles the many diverse types of actions women have taken in the contemporary era to achieve gender equity, empowerment, and a greater public voice. Women—both liberal feminist and conservative— have run for and been elected to positions of leadership at all levels of government. Women have formed organizations to lobby for equity in employment and education, in the military and to promote reproductive rights. They have engaged in unconventional political activities marching against and protesting the actions and policies of economic corporations and governmental institutions. Women with few economic resources have joined together to challenge local power structures. In addition to efforts to improve the lives and status of women in the United States, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have formed to promote global women's rights. Readers of this text will gain a great appreciation of the multiple political voices of American women and the challenges to continued unequal voices.

1
Introduction

A half-century has passed since the emergence of what is commonly referred to as the second women’s rights movement in the United States. Over the decades that followed, the movement has profoundly affected women’s political lives. Women are now not only the majority of voters but also vote in higher percentages than men. Winning the “women’s vote” has become a key focus of political campaigns across the country and at all levels of public office. Hillary Clinton won a majority of the popular vote in 2016 as the Democratic Party nominee, although her opponent, Republican Donald Trump, won the Electoral College vote, giving him the presidency. Thus, the last political glass ceiling remains to be broken. Women have become governor, secretary of state (but not defense), and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, three of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices were women. A woman also chaired the Federal Reserve Board. Beginning in January 2016, all combat jobs in the military were opened to women. Women’s groups have organized to raise huge amounts of money for female candidates and to recruit and train them to be successful office seekers. A host of laws have been enacted, dismantling discriminatory public policies and mandating political equity for women.

At the same time, after all these decades, women as political leaders and issues of particular concern to women are still subjects of political debate. In the second decade of the 21st century, the major political parties became engaged in what has been popularly called a war on women battle in a public policy dispute encompassing social and economic issues. Illustrative of this “war” is a debate that occurred on April 8, 2011, in the midst of a budget showdown between Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Congress with a government shutdown imminent. Nine female Democratic U.S. senators held a press conference in which they accused Republican members of Congress of promoting a federal budget that would “throw women and children under the bus,” a phrase repeatedly used in their briefing. In response, fourteen Republican female representatives held an opposing conference later that same day with the dominant theme that sound fiscal policy and cutting spending would help their children and their grandchildren. The Democratic budget proposal was not fiscally sound, they argued.

In these competing press briefings, the senators stressed how their party’s position would help women and how the other party’s approach would hurt women. A key sticking point that day to solving the immediate budget impasse from the perspective of the female Democratic senators was the Republican insistence that no federal money go to Planned Parenthood. As the federal government was about to be shut down, Republicans demanded that any legislation keeping the government operating bar federal dollars for Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider but also a major provider of reproductive and other health care for low-income women. The overarching issue Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski iterated was that the Republicans “want to cut funding for prenatal care by fifty million dollars … they want to take our mammograms away from us; they want to take prenatal care away from us, take counseling and family planning away from us and we just say ‘no.’” Senator Dianne Feinstein added that the Republican cuts “hurt women and we women in the Senate will not let it happen. What is at stake is about the ability of poor American women to get health services.”

In response, as Republican Representative Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia put it, “The argument is about spending and there is nothing more important to the health of my granddaughter who is going to be one next week, my daughter and every woman in America is good sound fiscal policy and that the women of America are not swallowed up by a huge debt and deficit … that is about healthy women.” Each of the speakers reiterated this theme, relating spending cuts to creating a healthy future for children and grandchildren.

This event illustrates several significant features of the contemporary engagement of women in American politics. This event, which was part of a larger policy debate between Democrats and Republicans, highlighted women’s prominence as policy makers. Their sex also had symbolic meaning in advocating for public policy. In addition, it highlights public policy continuing to have a gendered nature to it, with economic and social politics both being important in the debate. Further, the public presentations of Democratic female U.S. senators and Republican female U.S. representatives were meant to send a message to the American public that each group saw itself as representing women in the political process. It was female leaders speaking for women, but the substance of their arguments was starkly different between the parties, with social and economic policy implications. Related to that point, it showed the importance of women as a voting bloc to which the parties needed to appeal. It highlights the continued significance and unsettling of “women’s issues” in national debates a half-century after the emergence of the second women’s rights movement and the engagement of women in the political process.

Although a proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) banning discrimination based on sex had never become part of the Constitution, major legislative enactments and judicial rulings in the latter quarter of the 20th century contributed greatly to making women more equal citizens with men. Thus, “women” being an issue at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century seemed strange and out of place. As one commentator put it during the 2012 election, “Women ponder how they became a campaign issue” (Arrillaga 2012). In 2016, the country came very close to electing the first woman to the presidency of the United States.

Sidebar 1.1 The Equal Rights Amendment

The Equal Rights Amendment as approved by Congress and sent to the states for ratification in 1972 read as follows:

• Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
• Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
• Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

Political Voice and Practice

This book is about how women practice politics and use their voices in contemporary American politics. Political voice refers to engagement in political practices “to communicate information about preferences and needs and generate pressure on public officials to respond” (Schlozman et al. 2005, 2). It is the heart of the democratic process. The women’s rights movement of the last decades of the 20th century following the civil rights movement profoundly influenced public policy and political leadership in the United States through women organizing to raise their voices for greater political equality. Women and Politics: A Quest for Political Equality in an Age of Economic Inequality describes the many ways in which women have used their voices in the political process in the United States. Women and Politics is about both the involvement of women as individuals in the political process and group efforts to achieve equity and become empowered. It also places political involvement in an age of increasing economic inequality that has impacted the contours of that quest. It is both historical, examining trends, and contemporary, focusing on participation and public policy of specific concern to women in the early decades of the 21st century. The text is divided into three sections. This chapter and the two that follow take a historical and conceptual perspective. Then Chapters 4 through 7 examine various ways of participating in the political process. Chapters 8, 9, and 10 focus on representation and public policy. The book concludes with Chapter 11, which assesses the comparative political status of U.S. women and looks to the future as the United States approaches the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.

The political involvement of women as individual citizens and as groups promoting equal rights and empowerment are important and intriguing facets of American political history and contemporary politics. This text takes a broad view of what constitutes political practice, an essential task if one is to take women’s citizenship seriously; assesses trends in their involvement and their current status in the public realm; and considers their efforts to achieve equality a half-century after the beginning of the second women’s rights movement in the 1960s. Several diverse political practices are given attention in the chapters of this text to provide readers with a broad sense of what it means to engage in politics and how access to different resources across class and race have affected the practice of politics for women.

A second parallel phenomenon of this era—an economic one—also has significantly affected Americans’ lives. We now live in a time of increasing economic inequality. In the past half-century, Americans have “become vastly richer and vastly more unequal” (Bartels 2008, 1). From 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of the total increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent (Noah 2010). The United States is unique among advanced countries in its growth in economic inequality. This growth in inequality is at the center of much political and economic debate.

These two societal phenomena, the second women’s rights movement and the age of increasing economic inequality, have continued into the second decade of the 21st century as prominent and challenging features of American public life. The contours of economic inequality and women’s quests for greater political influence and equality are certainly intertwined, yet these two trends have rarely been considered together in the political history of contemporary women’s lives. What have been the implications of this growing economic divergence across income classes on women’s quests for a greater political voice and involvement in the public life of the nation? Connecting questions center on how the increased divergence in American income across classes has impacted, conditioned, and constrained the movement toward political equality between men and women. What distinctive impact has it had on women’s economic status and across groups of women? In what ways have women’s greater participation in the political and economic life of the nation mitigated or exacerbated income inequality? The chapters in this book consider these questions as they explore women’s political voices and practices and quests for political equality. Cohen et al. (1997, 2–3) have posed the question in the following terms:

How do we explain the fact that many women’s lives have significantly improved in the United States during the last two decades, and that all women have seen their legal status enhanced, while for many women daily life has become more tenuous and threatening?

In a very narrow legal sense, women have always been considered citizens along with men. Their numbers were included when representation in the U.S. Congress was allocated according to population among the states in the initial adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But that citizenship did not give them a political voice in what public policy should be or who should be the governors. They were not considered political beings. Well into the 20th century, women’s political voice was only a whisper, even after winning the right to vote in 1920. Their seemingly different natures and abilities from that of men’s, plus their distinctive social roles, limited their sense of a political self and political activism. In this regard, they were second-class political citizens. Throughout these years, women’s participation in political activities such as voting, contacting elected officials, and contributing to political causes lagged far behind men’s. Women running for and being elected to public office was a rare event. Few championed equal rights for their sex.

The 1960s marked a turning point for the gender dynamics of mass politics in the United States. Women’s voices became stronger in the public realm. Advances in women’s educational attainment and substantial increases in their employment outside the home stimulated greater parity with men in political engagement. Women also became more conscious of their second-class citizenship and organized to demand equal status with men in the public realm. Thus began a movement toward first-class, full, and effective political citizenship.

What constitutes participation in the political process? This text explores a variety of ways in which women have expanded their involvement in the public life of the nation since the second women’s rights movement began in the 1960s. Participation in the political process consists of many different actions and a variety of ways of having one’s voice heard. Political scientists have grouped several political practices under the rubric of conventional acts, focusing primarily on electoral politics and between elections on groups lobbying and advocating for particular policies. The American National Election Study (ANES) has surveyed participation in several electoral activities over the entire time frame of the contemporary women’s rights movement. These activities center on attending a political meeting, trying to influence others’ voting decisions, wearing a campaign button, putting up a yard sign for a candidate, contributing financially to a party or campaign, and of course, voting. Chapter 4 presents trends in the activism of men and women in this domain of political engagement.

In contrast to these conventional electoral political practices are a group of unconventional or contentious actions involving protest demonstrations and social movements challenging dominant political structures. Women have been participants in these latter activities throughout American history, from involvement in the Revolutionary War and the abolitionist movement against slavery, to the very recent Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street protests and Black Lives Matter movements centered on economic and social justice issues within the United States, to participation in transnational peace and antiglobalization movements. Women have also formed their own movements promoting women’s rights, notably the suffrage movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries to win the right to vote and the second women’s rights movement seeking more general political, social, and economic equality that emerged in the 1960s and that has continued since then, including efforts to affect women’s rights globally.

Importantly, feminist scholars have also called attention to the “invisible politics” of working-class, minority, and poor women by challenging power systems in their communities. “Doing politics” is a distinctive way in which feminists have characterized this engagement in the public realm by challenging traditional ideas of what engaging in politics means. They challenge the private/public boundary. Women challenging community and economic power structures alter the traditional divide between private and public. Thus, surveying the political practices of women must include attention to invisible politics and “doing politics” actions, not just the conventional actions centered on elections. Our lens on political participation requires setting its sights on the many examples of women engaging in activities to gain control over their lives and those of their families by challenging the power structures in their communities. These practices have often involved actions women with few resources have taken to make their voices heard. I group this loose collection of activities together under the concept of empowerment.

Empowerment activities as described in this work center on efforts to upend power relations within one’s community. Bookman and Morgen (1988) defined empowerment as consisting of “a spectrum of political activity ranging from acts of individual resistance to mass political mobilizations that challenge the basic power relations in our society” (4). Challenges to local power structures that individual and diverse groups of women have undertaken encompass fascinating, innovative, and sometimes dangerous actions that attack many aspects of their disempowerment. It is an area of participation that has received minimal attention in other texts focusing on American women and politics. This domain is distinctive in that it centers on women who most often have few of the traditional resources used to gain political influence. Their activities involve efforts regarding economic challenges within their communities, fighting for their families, and protesting against violence. Researchers have shown that women engaged in empowerment activities have often not even viewed them as political actions but more as civic involvement and survival mechanisms (see, for example, Naples 1998). They are not included in major surveys of political participation. But they are many, varied, and often actions minority groups and low-income groups have undertaken throughout the country to gain voice and achieve policy changes. Shining a spotlight on women’s engagement in these “invisible” activities provides for a broader understanding of citizenship and its inequalities and challenges for women acro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Boxes and Sidebars
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Pictures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The First and Second Women’s Rights Movements
• 3 Women’s Political Voice and Economic Inequality
• 4 Gender, Voting, Electioneering, and Public Opinion
• 5 Political Parties: Bringing Women into the Electoral Arena
• 6 “Doing Politics”: Women’s Empowerment and Community Activism
• 7 Women’s NGOs: Advocating for Global Women’s Rights
• 8 Women’s Candidacies for Elected Office
• 9 The 2016 Presidential Election and the First Woman President?
• 10 Public Policy on Women’s Rights and Equity Issues
• 11 Women’s Political Participation in a Comparative Perspective
• Index