San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
A CENTURY OF WOMEN IN SAN DIEGO POLITICS
In 100 years, much has changed, but ample opportunity for more progress
The first women to hold top elected offices in San Diego County local governments after women in California got the right to vote weren’t chosen at the ballot box.
It was a pattern in the early years. Soon after California gave women the right to vote in 1911 and the 19th Amendment enfranchised women nationally in 1920, many of the groundbreaking women in San Diego County politics got a foothold in the top tiers of government when powerful men chose them to fill seats vacated by incumbents.
One of them was Mildred Greene, the first woman to hold elected office in San Diego County, in 1918.
Gov. William D. Stephens appointed her to the County Board of Supervisors when Greene’s husband, the incumbent, died before the end of his term.
The Red Star Lodge No. 143, Knights of Pythias of San Diego, “numbering about seventeen hundred men,”
published an appeal to Stephens in the Nov. 3, 1918, edition of the San Diego Union, asking him to appoint Greene. They noted they usually refrained from “taking part in political questions” but this time they had “entirely different motives.”
Specifically, they said, the death of Greene’s husband had left her penniless.
“The four months during which time (Greene) would fill the position would afford Mrs. Green an opportunity to earn sufficient money to assist in completing her eighteen-year-old son’s course in high school ... and at the same time put her on her feet to begin the battle of life anew,” the group wrote in the paper.
Greene finished her husband’s term and ran for reelection, listed on the ballot as “Mrs. Mildred Green” among men whose names were not preceded by “Mr.” She was re-elected in 1920 and again in 1924 before losing her third bid in 1928.
A century of change
In the past century, much has changed for women in San Diego County and California state politics.
For one thing, in the decades after women’s suffrage in the 1920s, more women of color and women with fewer financial resources or less formal education were enfranchised to vote. Roadblocks such as literacy tests and racist laws became less commonplace leading up to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices.
Now, in 2020, a California woman of color, Sen. Kamala Harris, is set to become the nation’s first female vice president.
And in San Diego County, women hold — or are set to hold — 41 of 99 elected seats in city and county government, a San Diego Union-tribune analysis of city council and board of supervisor membership found. Fifty years ago, women held just three of 72 seats.
Before this year’s election, eight cities in San Diego County had women mayors, and the city councils of Solana Beach, Encinitas, Lemon Grove, Vista, San Marcos, Del Mar and San Diego had women majorities, according to records of the county’s 18 incorporated cities.
In November, women were elected mayor in nine cities, and women had a majority on city councils in Chula Vista, Carlsbad, San Marcos, Vista, Lemon Grove, Encinitas and Solana Beach.
Starting off slow
It took a while for American women to flex their power at the ballot box.
Women’s voter turnout generally lagged behind men in presidential and congressional general elections until 1980, when it stepped ahead and stayed ahead, according to national census data.
In 1964, the first year such data was collected, nearly 72 percent of American men reported voting, compared to about 67 percent of women. In 2018, about 47 percent of men reported voting, compared to nearly 51 percent of women.
In the 2018 general election, about 52.5 percent of San Diego County women voted, as did 48.7 percent of women statewide, according to the California Budget and Policy Center’s Women’s Wellbeing Index. It did not include a percentage of men.
Women took a while to wield their voting power because voting is a habit, and that habit had not been passed down through generations of women as it had been for men, said Kathleen Dolan, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and co-editor in chief of the American Journal of Political Science.
Cultural norms and expectations for women also didn’t encourage women to run for office — women were still trying to making inroads in the workplace — until the “second wave” of the feminist movement gripped the nation in the 1960s and 1970s, Dolan said.
Even then, women didn’t start running for office in large numbers until the 1990s.
“It was largely about the fruits of the second wave of the feminist movement bringing forward the idea that they had to be a part of government to get it to change,” Dolan said.
Still playing catch-up
There has been progress, but not parity, she said.
“Women are still a significant minority of candidates at almost all levels of office,” Doland said. “We’re evolving, but we’re nowhere near parity and won’t be for a long time.”
Women don’t vote for women just because they’re women, research has found. Researchers say political party is a bigger driver than gender when it comes to who someone picks in the ballot booth.
Researchers say that when women run for office, they are as likely as males to win.
Incumbency is a bigger obstacle for women candidates than men because fewer incumbents are women and, when there are no term limits, it can take decades for a seat to become accessible to newcomers.
For example, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors had the same five members — three men and two women — from 1995 to 2012. When one of the women, Pam Slater-price left her seat in 2012, Supervisor Dave Roberts, a man, succeeded her. Five years later he was succeeded by a woman, Supervisor Kristin Gaspar.
After the most recent election, there are three new county supervisors but the gender balance remains at two women and three men.
‘The ambition gap’
For women to be elected to office, they have to run. That means overcoming something researchers call “the ambition gap.”
Women are less likely than men to want to run for office, and they are also less likely to consider themselves qualified for office even if, objectively, they are, many researchers have found.
Women seem to gravitate toward pushing for political change through movements and nonprofits, rather than seeking elected office, according to a paper published in 2013 by American University’s School for Public Policy.
Female respondents to the survey were 50 percent more likely than male respondents to say working for a charity is “the best way to bring about change,” according to the paper. “Men, on the other hand, were nearly twice as likely as women to see running for elective office as the best way to bring about change.”
Initiating change
Women have long influenced politics by leading social movements that have dramatically changed society, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, founded by three women, and the #Metoo movement. Also, in recent years, women have made up a bigger share of the “large donor” class in national politics, according to a USA Today story published in October.
Oceanside’s new mayor, longtime councilwoman Esther Sanchez, recently became the city’s first woman and first Latina elected to the top office. She said her working-class parents passed on to her an interest in community advocacy.
Her interest in politics started later, when she attended Brown University on a scholarship in the early 1970s and discovered she was one of only five Chicano students on campus, she said. Sanchez started working with the university to recruit students from diverse backgrounds and her efforts got results.
Social changes under way in age of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal also inspired her, she said. She worked as a community advocate and volunteered for some political campaigns while earning her law degree.
“I had met (former Lt. Gov.) Cruz Bustamante and some of our representatives and, because of term limits, there were now people like me who were representing us in Sacramento and I thought, ‘That is so darn cool,’” Sanchez said. “And that’s when I realized that’s what I wanted to do. I was helping people on an individual basis, but it was not systemic change.”
Sanchez ran for City Council in Oceanside, her hometown, in 2000. She won and held her seat for 20 years. She said she hopes to set an example for young people.
“For me the hardest part was believing in myself and not giving in to doubt,” Sanchez said. “Like, ‘What am I doing in an Ivy League school, and how can I compete?’ But I learned that I could. It’s about giving yourself that same respect that you would give to others.”
Finding empowerment
Marni von Wilpert, the recently elected City Council member for San Diego’s District 5, said she didn’t immediately feel confident that she had what it takes to run for office, even though she had a law degree and experience working in government.
Then she went through the Emerge California training program. Emerge California is a nonprofit dedicated to empowering Democratic women leaders to run for elected office.
Emerge required von Wilpert to work for another female candidate’s state Assembly campaign. Even though the candidate, Sunday Gover, lost a close race in 2018, von Wilpert said she knew that she, too, could be a political contender.
A deputy city attorney for San Diego, von Wilpert ran for the District 5 seat — which had been held by White men since 2000 — because she’s from Scripps Ranch. The incumbent, Councilman Mark Kersey, could not run again because of term limits.
Von Wilpert said she still had to contend with an “old boys club” on the campaign trail.
“When I declared, it was me and four men running against me,” von Wilpert said.
“I had to really push through. I heard at the beginning of the campaign that I was being called ‘a little girl running for office.’ ‘That little girl won’t get any money and she won’t get any votes.’ And that really motivated me. I was like, ‘I’m going to prove you wrong; I’m going to show you what this little girl can do.’”
The campaign for von Wilpert’s opponent in the general election, Joe Leventhal, reportedly outraised her, with about $275,000 as of Oct. 17, while she raised $206,000.
She won the election, 53 percent to 47 percent.