There are many good reasons why we still need a women's movement in this country. Here I shall focus on just one: I argue that we need a women's movement to recruit and support women as candidates for public office.
We are in an era of the decline of women's civic voice (Goss Reference Goss2013). The broad-based women's and feminist groups of yesteryear have given way to a multitude of smaller, Washington- or New York-based single-issue groups scrambling competitively for dollars. Skocpol (Reference Skocpol, Skocpol and Fiorina1999) calls such groups “advocates without members” because the participation of “members” is usually limited to check writing (and now occasionally signing an online petition). This decline is ironic because, as Goss (Reference Goss2013) points out, it was women's activism that led to the welfare state as we know it. But perhaps it no longer exists as we've known it. There is often less and less for young women to do in these organizations. Having worked professionally in several feminist organizations, I've seen young women (interns especially) leave disillusioned rather than inspired after a summer or semester.
With the mass-based civic-engagement-style women's groups dwindling in activity, reach, and prestige, fewer and fewer young women are being exposed to the most important insight of feminism: the personal is political. Gender-linked problems, which the first-wave and second-wave movements saw as large-scale social projects (child care, workplace discrimination, reproductive matters) are increasingly seen as just the responsibility of individual women to figure out. The advent of “choice feminism” exacerbates this tendency, as it encourages women to believe they can “have it all” if they just make the “right choices,” either as a consumer, such as buying the right time-saving technology, or in the workplace and the marriage market (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2010; see also Sandberg Reference Sandberg2013).
The lack of a thriving women's movement also means that women are less likely to view politics as useful and worth their time (Shames N.d.). Perhaps the day of women's civic organizations as the heart of the movement has passed (Goss Reference Goss2013). But we still need a women's movement to connect women to politics and especially to help women get elected to office.
Women are now—for the most part—moving away from politics and flocking to nonprofits, advocacy, and direct service in their desire to make change and to help people. Anyone who teaches college students knows how desperately young women want to change the world. It's a wonderful and inspiring thing to see, but only rarely do young women think they can make change through politics. Direct service and nonprofit advocacy are both critical; the former helps the individuals caught up in a bad system, while the latter suggests positive reforms for systemic change. Neither, however, harnesses the power of the state in the form of changing policy. Political change is essential to any lasting, large-scale reform.
But women are not equally involved in politics, nor are men equally involved in direct service/nonprofit advocacy. Fully 75% of elected politicians are male, while 75% of nonprofit workers are female (Center for American Women and Politics 2013; The White House Project 2009). This is not to fault people who believe that advocacy and direct service make more of an impact than policymaking. Especially at the national level, politics looks a whole lot like gridlock, hyperpartisanship, acrimony, and privacy intrusion. A lot of young women see officeholders as angry, older white men shouting at each other (Shames N.d.). Unfortunately, the avoidance of politics is completely rational for those who don't believe that politics can lead to positive change.
It's not just about women, either; most extremely bright, compassionate, hopeful young people in my sample—of all colors, men as well as women—are just not interested in public service through politics and especially not through elections. This means we all lose out. It makes for an impoverished democracy when so many good young people don't want to go into politics. The “candidate deterrence effects” are, however, more severe for women than for men, and are especially strong for women of color (Shames N.d.).
Consider a few examples from my survey of elite law and policy school students in the Boston area (n = 716), as well as more than 50 interviews with select survey respondents. In a sample characterized by extremely high ambition, where 90% or more of every relevant race-gender subgroup identified themselves as “ambitious,” there were strong differences in political ambition (see Figure 1).
Have you thought seriously of running for office? Percentage answering yes, based on data from the Law and Policy Student Political Ambition Survey (LPS-PAS) (Shames N.d.). All respondents were U.S. citizens and were law or policy school students in the Boston, MA, area.
Women showed greater sensitivity to the costs of running, especially what they perceive to be the invasion of privacy and the need to beg for money. They also strongly expected to face discrimination from a number of sources including voters, funders, and party leaders. And a whole host of work in political science tells us that they are not wrong in these expectations.
For instance, I asked if survey respondents thought Hillary Clinton was treated fairly by the news media when she ran for the Democratic nomination for president. Only 10% of women and 35% of men thought she had been treated fairly, which tells us two things: First, a sizeable majority thought that she received some unfair treatment. Second, women were far more sensitive to it than the men. The perceived costs seemed heavy to everyone, but higher for women.
Women also perceived the rewards of politics as being lower. Female respondents, especially women of color, were far less likely to believe that politics can solve the problems they most care about (see Figure 2).
Politics can solve the problems I most care about. Percentage agreeing, based on data from the LPS-PAS (Shames N.d.). Note that Hispanic men are the lowest-n subgroup, so the variability of this group is higher than for the other race-gender subgroups.
Members of disadvantaged groups have, at many points in U.S. history, made extraordinary and unlikely political gains that would not have been predicted by their relative political powerlessness. Activists fighting for abolition, women's right to vote, black civil rights, gay/lesbian rights, and other forms of political inclusion dedicated their lives (and sometimes lost them) to such causes because they felt deeply that they mattered, that successes in the political realm would have real effects for people and places they cared about. Black political participation continues to be higher than we would predict from individuals' socioeconomic status, a fact that researchers often attribute to the legacy of the civil rights movement, which emphasized the importance of politics. Those who participate are those who think it worth their while to do so. The subjects in my study who really do want to run for office feel the same—running for office is, they think, worth their while. But they are a small and unrepresentative group in terms of gender, and women of color are especially underrepresented.
This must be the new women's movement: to get women—especially young and minority women—to care about politics, to get them involved, and to inspire them to run. Young women are always looking for role models and for mentors. I have been lucky enough to have many, including political scientists and some politicians, almost all of whom emerged from the feminist movement. These mentors have showed me that politics matter. Because of them, I have spent my life engaged in politics. Who will recruit young women into political life without a women's movement that makes political the seemingly individual problems of women's lives?
The most powerful tool in the arsenal of previous feminist movements has been showing women that many of their problems (even those that seem most private, like reproduction, sexual violence, sexual harassment at work, and balancing work and family) are collective, that the personal is political. The new women's movement, whatever form it takes in the future, needs to show women also that the political must be personal.
