Local women are jubilant after Harris’ election as vice president

After hearing the news that Kamala Harris will be the first female, first Black and first person of South Asian descent to be vice president, Norwich NAACP President Shiela Hayes went online and ordered four sets of Mattel’s Barbie 2020 Campaign Team — four ethnically diverse female dolls — for her four nieces.

“This is a historic moment,” Hayes said.

Women across the country, and here locally, are marking the historic election of Harris, who is of Jamaican and Indian descent, as vice president — an achievement that comes amid the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote and the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.

“Finally, finally, we have cracked that glass ceiling,” Hayes said.

Martha Marx, chair of the New London Democratic

Town Committee, said she was watching a video of Harris on Saturday with tears in her eyes.

“This is a big step forward for women across the country and for women of color, it’s huge,” she said.

“Everything changes when there’s a woman at the table,” she said. “When there’s a woman reporter things are different, when there’s a woman at the table working for economic development things are different, when there’s a woman of color at the table where decisions are being made, it makes a huge difference. And women of color have never had that type of representation before this.”

Democratic state Sen. Cathy Osten of Sprague said having the first female vice president is “kind of like the icing on the cake,” and that it’s time for us to move our politics forward and recognize that the ideas of women have value.

Ballots are still being counted, but at least 131 women will serve in the next Congress, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. State Sen. Heather Somers said she was pleased to see more Republican women, including women of color, elected to Congress. In the U. S. House, there will be at least 13 newly elected Republican women serving.

Sitting in her car outside a store, New London NAACP President Jean Jordan burst into tears when she heard the news.

“It is such a historic moment,” she said. “A presidentelect who has gotten the highest popular vote in history and a female vice presidentelect who is an HBCU graduate ( historically black colleges and universities), AfricanJamaican and Asian, and who became the first female state attorney general in California, it’s just historic on all levels.”

In talking to her friends, she says the impact is not lost on them, either.

“Little Black girls were always told that there were things that we could not do, and as vice president, it proves that we can do anything we want to do, and there’s a whole generation now of little Black girls who will see that they can do and be anything they want to be,” she said.

“I mean we tell them that, but now there is someone who is showing them that.”