Women and Politics

This post submitted by WCF Fellow, Stephanie Glover.

Many of us in the WCF office spent Sunday and Monday at the Feminist Majority’s amazing summit on Women, Money, and Power. The two days were jam packed with speakers, workshops, and discussions.

Throughout the conference, speakers and panelists emphasized many of the issues important to us at the Women’s Campaign Forum and the opening general assembly featured Senator Amy Klobuchar, the first female senator from Minnesota. While her speech focused on a variety of women’s issues including health care, reproductive health, extending unemployment, and the importance of women on the bench, she ended with a poignant call for more women in office. Senator Klobuchar told the story of walking past her young daughter’s bedroom who was playing dolls with a friend when the friend announced that she wanted to have a baby. The senator’s daughter replied that she also wanted to have a baby one day, but that first she had to run for office and win! That’s what we like to hear.

The second day of the summit featured a lively event, “Recruiting Feminists for Leadership” where President and CEO of WCF, Sam Bennett spoke about our work at WCF and her experiences running for office. Sam highlighted the importance of asking women to run for office and supporting their candidacy early—two tenets of the WCF philosophy.  Sam was accompanied on the panel by Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers and founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, who also spoke about the need for feminization of power. Dolores called on the audience to stop thinking about it (because you’ll likely focus on the obstacles) and to just run for office!

Sam echoed this sentiment when she said, “even if you lose, you win.” Running for office offers more than just the chance to win elected office, it also helps build political capital for future endeavors and campaigns.

The dire need for more women in elected office was reiterated by feminist icon and hero, Gloria Steinem. She pointed out the many ways in which our country is lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of how we treat women. Thanks to women like her, we’ve come a long way, but as Gloria points out, we still have a long way to go – and ensuring more women are serving in public office is crucial to changing things.

Finally, I want to end with some thing that Susan Scanlan, chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations announced to the general assembly of the conference: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Remember this—women have to be in positions of power to have our voices heard.

Other prominent and exciting speakers included Amy Brennaman, feminist actress; Ellie Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority; Congresswoman Gwen Moore; and Congresswoman Donna Edwards.