U.S. gains on region’s ‘feminist Utopia’
Bay Area has had women in power for years; now, rest of nation may be starting to catch up
Bay Area women have been at the forefront of politics for years, holding both of California’s U.S. Senate seats, five of the region’s eight House seats, and the most powerful one — the speaker of the House — that likely will be reclaimed in January by veteran Nancy Pelosi.
Is the rest of the country finally catching up?
“You’re a little feminist Utopia out there,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Politics and Women at Rutgers University in New Jersey, a state without a female congresswoman for more than a decade until it elected one in 2014 and a second on Tuesday.
While Bay Area leaders are welcoming 2018’s “women’s wave” that helped flip the Republicancontrolled House to the Democrats, bringing historic diversity and a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s brand of politics, some are still asking: Is that all you’ve got?
“I’ll celebrate that we’ve had a mini wave,” U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, a San Mateo Democrat, said last week. “But it’s not time to crow. We don’t have true equality.”
At least 35 female newcomers were elected to the House on Tuesday, predominantly Democrats. Come January, when all the votes will have been counted,
the total for the first time will eclipse 100 congresswomen out of 435 House members. Still, more than half of all voters are women, and the number of women in the House will rise just a few percentage points, from 19.3 percent to about 23 percent.
When you consider it’s been nearly a century since the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote (the 100th anniversary will coincide with the 2020 presidential race), less than a quarter of the House in women’s hands doesn’t sound like much.
Still, it’s heading in the right direction, women’s advocates say. And California’s veteran congresswomen can be role models, said Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, director of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Studies.
“It’s no surprise that the state with the largest economy in the country has the most women” in national
office, she said. “Hopefully that’s another lesson.”
California women can’t get too smug, however. The Golden State ranks 25th in the country when it comes to women in the state legislature. Only 31 of 120 California legislators — or 26 percent — are women.
And another thing: California has never elected a female governor. Wyoming, ranked last on the list for women in the legislature, elected the first female governor in the country in 1925.
But while another man — Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom — will be California’s next governor, “at least he’s got a great wife,” said Alameda activist Kate Schatz, who co-founded the grassroots women’s organization Solidarity Sundays. The state’s next first lady, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wrote, produced and directed the highly acclaimed “Miss Representation,” a documentary about how women in power have been underrepresented in the media.
“I do think we’re in a pivotal place, but it’s very funky and messy,” said
Schatz, 40. “Maybe the best way to put it is that we’re at that part of the Sisyphean climb where we’ve just slid back down the hill to the bottom and are feeling really furious. Trump knocked us back and we’re slogging forward.”
What’s different this time, Schatz said, is that “it’s not just about resisting and being mad, but actually organizing and fueling something meaningful like running for office, starting a nonprofit. It does feel like a shift toward some kind of reclamation of power.”
In the Bay Area, the women’s movement — as well as its foothold on power — has ebbed and flowed over the decades.
In the 1970s, San Jose was heralded in newspapers across the country as “the feminist capital of the world.” Janet Gray Hayes became the first female mayor of a major American city when she was elected in 1974, and shortly after, eight of San Jose’s 11 City Council members and three of five Santa Clara County supervisors were women, as were the county executive
and the president of San Jose State University.
After Tuesday’s election, however, Santa Clara County will bump up from one to just two female supervisors. Three women now serve on the San Jose City Council, but if tight elections swing their way, one or two women could be added. Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith, who has held office since 1998, was re-elected Tuesday, as was Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.
It’s been 26 years since Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco and Barbara Boxer of Marin helped usher in the first “Year of the Woman” to Washington in 1992 — after the fateful Anita Hill hearings — making California the first state to be represented in the U.S. Senate by two women.
Since then, the number of women in Congress has grown steadily but slowly — and Democrats have far outpaced Republicans. Women will make up nearly 40 percent of the Democratic caucus, while Republican congresswomen lost substantial ground Tuesday,
from 23 down to 13. That could climb to 14 as Young Kim, a former state assemblywoman, closes in on winning an open seat in Southern California’s 39th District. She would become the first Korean-American woman elected to Congress.
If Pelosi holds on to her leadership position, she has plans for the newcomers. While traditional women’s issues will remain on the agenda, Pelosi said Wednesday that she will be encouraging the new members to apply for security credentials to serve on such maledominated committees as Armed Services, National Security and Foreign Affairs.
“This is very important for the face of security in our country, not to just be the men who have been doing it all along, with all due respect to their terrific leadership,” Pelosi said, “but for women to take command and have standing on those issues.”
Speier, elected in 2008, has served on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees and is expecting to chair a Military
Personnel subcommittee next year, when she plans to make sure women in the military are well treated and given access to birth control, among other women’s and family-focused issues.
“You bet I’m going to be talking about those issues,” Speier said. “It harkens me back to when I got elected to the state Legislature in 1986. A campaign consultant said I shouldn’t focus on women’s issues, but on a broader range of issues. For a while I did that; then I realized, if I didn’t take up women’s issues, who was going to do it?”
As the new faces of the U.S. House prepare for their January inaugurations, Walsh from Rutgers said she will be looking forward to one thing in particular: the new photograph of the freshman class.
“We don’t know what the final numbers are going to be at this point,” Walsh said, “but there will be an awful lot of women in that picture.”