Wendy Quinn
At the Women’s March last month in Fort Wayne, Indiana, things felt very different than when my husband and I moved here in 2004. That was the year incumbent Democrat, Joe Kernan, lost the gubernatorial election to Mitch Daniels. Daniels’s victory helped bring about a shift of all statewide leadership positions to Republican control.
I questioned our decision to move. Indiana felt very, very red compared to my then-blue home state of Wisconsin. But Fort Wayne is different from the rest of Indiana: Tom Henry, a Democrat, is serving his third consecutive term as mayor, a post the Dems have held for the last twenty years. But Republicans control seven of the city’s nine council seats, and the surrounding Allen County is staunchly Republican.
At the Women’s March in downtown Fort Wayne, hundreds of people showed up and seemed ready to support female candidates running for office. I saw neighbors, coworkers, friends, faces I recognized from the gym, even the woman who owns one of my favorite coffee shops.
People are talking about 2018 being “The Year of the Woman.” This march, and ones like it throughout the country, seemed to support that.
People are talking about 2018 being “The Year of the Woman.”
A survey conducted in May by American University political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox found a 40 percent increase in political activism among Democratic women since Trump’s election. We have not seen a national groundswell like this since 1992, the last time the label “Year of the Woman” was bantered about. That was the year Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas. Male indifference to Hill’s testimony, and the broader culture of workplace sexual harassment her allegations represented, drove record numbers of women to run for office and vote, and a record-breaking five women were elected to the U.S. Senate.
This year is set to outpace 1992. As of January 23, the Center for American Women and American Politics reports 178 Republican and 437 Democratic women have filed to run for Congress and statewide executive positions. Of these 615 women, only 125 were incumbents—meaning a record-breaking 490 new female candidates are throwing their hats into the ring.
Moreover, OpenSecrets reports that women are outspending their male counterparts when it comes to campaign donations, and favoring female Democratic candidates. The trend started with Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and is continuing to gain momentum.
Clearly, the details of sexual harassment by politicians, celebrities, and other public figures weigh heavily on the minds of many women. (To date, nineteen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct.)
Erin Loos Cutraro, founder of She Should Run, which recruits and trains women to run for office, is spearheading a “250kby2030” campaign with the goal of parity in the electoral representation of women over the next thirteen years. Part of the problem, she says, are ingrained attitudes. As Cutraro told Axios, “Research shows that women question their qualifications in a way that men don’t.”
For every woman holding national office in the United States, there are three men. In Indiana, it’s one woman to four men. At our current rate, it will take a century before gender parity in elected office is achieved. But Cutraro says that since November 2016, 15,000 women have reached out to her organization.
For every woman holding national office in the United States, there are three men.
Thus far in Indiana, ten women—five Republicans and five Democrats—have filed for state executive and national office. The Republican candidates are all incumbents.
I reached out to Andrew Downs, director of the Mike Downs Center for Indiana Politics, who told me that one way women will be able to sustain a political movement will be to become embedded in the leadership of parties at local, state, and national levels. There are women elected to political offices in the state, he notes, but they are largely administrative positions—clerk of courts, county recorder, and auditor, for example.
“It’s a glass ceiling until it’s broken,” Downs says. If women are to break through, Hoosiers must elect women as mayors, county commissioners, and governors.
While the last four of five lieutenant governors in Indiana have been female, Downs reminded me, none have been candidates for governor. In its 202-year history, Indiana has never elected a female governor. And while Indiana did elect their first female to Congress in 1933, women continue to see a lack of representation in the state house.
“It’s a glass ceiling until it’s broken.”
Currently, Indiana has only two women representing it at the national level in the House of Representatives, and only eight of fifty state senators are women. “On the gender front, there is a long way to go for the demographic that represents 51 percent of the population,” notes the publication Howey Politics Indiana, “[T]here have been virtually no caucus leaders in the General Assembly, no speaker or Senate president pro tempore, no female Ways and Means or Senate Appropriations chair.”
I asked Downs if the issue of sexual misconduct will be enough to break the glass ceiling and elect women in record numbers. Downs responded that issue-driven movements are particularly hard to sustain: Our attention is easily diverted when the next big issue comes along.
True. Consider that we are fifty-three years past signing the Civil Rights Act, but racial inequality is an ever present problem in America. So, while women are very motivated by the public discourse around sexual misconduct—perhaps because it crosses race, class, and sexual orientation lines—it may be difficult to maintain a fickle public’s interest.
One example of new women entering the political arena is Courtney Tritch, a Democrat running against the incumbent Republican Jim Banks in Indiana 3rd Congressional District. (Full disclosure: My husband, Fred McKissack, is Tritch’s press secretary.) Tritch is a business owner, as well as being involved in community and economic development in Northeast Indiana.
At the Fort Wayne Women’s March, Tritch laid out her reasons for wanting to represent women. These included the lack of female input in developing the health care bill (prompting jokes that being a woman was considered “a preexisting condition”); woeful representation in Congress, where women comprise only twenty percent of membership; and continued pay inequity for women.
“How loud is your voice going to be in 2018?” Tritch asked in her speech. She also called for unity: “White women, women of color, the LGBT community, immigrants, every faith community there is––all of us.”
My friend, Wendy Quinn, forty-seven, a Montessori classroom assistant, attended the Fort Wayne Women’s March. “It’s important for my two daughters to know they have a voice. I want them to make the same wage as their brother someday,” she said. “I want them to walk down the street without fear and be safe. I want their brother to stand for equality.”
“It’s important for my two daughters to know they have a voice.”
Betty Barry, eighty, a life-long resident of Fort Wayne and retired social worker, felt that her presence at the march was imperative. To her, “Hoosier values” should be about the Golden Rule and being truthful—something she feels is lacking in American politics today. “Maybe it was the fog, but my eyes were watering,” she said about her emotions during the march.
I also spoke with Judith Harris, seventy, at the Fort Wayne March. A former adjunct in Women’s Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne, and retired trainer at Planned Parenthood, Harris told me that as an African American voter she sometimes privileges her race over gender. Nationally, the Women’s March has received some heat for being overwhelming white and middle class. And it’s true, there’s a long way to go: only 7 percent of the 541 members of the U.S. Congress are women of color. Only five women of color currently serve at the Indiana State House, making up just 3 percent of the 150 member body.
But overall, Harris was unequivocal in her support of a women’s movement at this moment in our history. “It’s time to trust women with the big decisions,” she said.
I asked her what she thought of this “pink wave,” and she grimaced. “Pink seems dainty, unintelligent, cute, attractive, and unthreatening,” she said, “It should be a Woman’s Wave.”
“You’re OK with women being considered threatening?” I asked.
“As a woman, you damn well better be!” she responded.