Ninety one years ago women across the United States won the right to vote. This came after a decades-long suffragist movement and following a very slow progression of women gaining rights, state by state. In Oregon, women were actually granted the right to vote eight years before the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 26, 1920 thanks to local activist Abigail Scott Duniway who was an effective advocate for promoting suffrage and an entire agenda of women’s issues.
Duniway would be pleased and probably surprised to see Ellen Rosenblum became Oregon’s first women attorney general, June 29 after being appointed to the position by Governor John Kitzhaber. Subsequently she won the Democratic nomination in May. But the job is only secure until the November election when Rosenblum will face Republican James Buchal.
Rosenblum’s federal counterpart is another woman, U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall who was appointed to the office last October.
A recent Associated Press report quoted Debbie Walsh, director of the Central for American Women and Politics, “The idea that your two chief law enforcers are going to be women is really out the box in some ways,” she said. But if you were going to tell me it happens in a state, Oregon would be one of the states.”
Still in Oregon politics, women are struggling to gain equal footing. In fact there’s some evidence that they have lost ground. This year, women comprise 27.8 percent of the Oregon Legislature, down from 33.3 percent a decade ago.
The state has had only one woman U.S. senator, who served more than 40 years ago. Currently, Oregon has an all-male congressional delegation.
Oregon has elected only one woman governor, with no competitive woman candidate for Oregon’s top executive in more than a decade.
The state has never had a woman serve as state treasurer or chief justice of the state supreme court. The statistics maybe dismal, but Oregon is known for its trailblazing women leaders including Kate Brown now serving as Oregon’s Secretary of State.
Katharine Firestone of Emerge Oregon says “there is nowhere near gender equity” in politics today. We may see powerhouses like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi on the national scene, but according to The Center for American Women and Politics, only 16.8 percent of the U.S. Congress is women.
To be sure, women have made progress since the early 1970s, when Gretchen Kafoury, wearing a hard hat and waving a rolling pin, protested with her friends to force the City Club of Portland to admit women members. Kafoury served in the Legislature, on the Multnomah County Commission and the Portland City Council. Her daughter, Deborah Kafoury, followed her into politics, first in the Legislature and as a Multnomah County commissioner.
During the last half-century, women and minorities have made modest gains in Oregon’s elective politics. Nan Wood Honeyman, a Democrat and the daughter of writer C.E.S. Wood, was Oregon’s first congresswoman, representing the state’s Third District for one term during the late 1930s. Edith Green, a liberal Democrat who represented the Third District from 1955 to 1975, became a powerful force in the U.S. House education committee.
Only two other women have been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Liberal Democrat Elizabeth Furse represented the First District between 1993 and 1999 and survived three very close election campaigns. Democrat Darlene Hooley, elected to the Fifth District seat in 1996, served three terms.
In the U.S. Senate, Maurine Neuberger was appointed to Richard Neuberger’s U.S. Senate seat when he died in 1960. She was elected in her own right later that year and served one full term.
Republican Norma Paulus, the first woman elected secretary of state, served two terms (1977-1985) and then ran for governor, losing to Democrat Neil Goldschmidt in the 1986 election. She later was elected to two terms as superintendent of public instruction (1991-1999), a period of considerable ferment in public education. Barbara Roberts, a Democrat who served as secretary of state from 1985 to 1991, was elected Oregon’s first woman governor in 1990. She served one term, deciding against another campaign when John Kitzhaber challenged her in the primary.
Melody Rose, founding director of the Center for Women and Politics and Policy at Portland State University, says women still battle cultural stereotypes, including the belief that men are better on budgets, crime and foreign issues.
Other noted Oregon women leaders include Eleanor Davis who helped form the Oregon Council for Women’s Equality in 1971, and became a chief advocate for the advancement of women in Oregon. Through her social activism and political advocacy, Oregon passed the Equal Rights Amendment, after which Davis went on to serve the state in a variety of volunteer capacities.
As the first African-American woman to be elected to the Oregon State Senate, Avel Gorldy has been a dedicated advocate for civil rights and education for all Oregonians. Senator Gordly represented the Oregon Senate’s 23rd District from 1997 to 2009. Previously she was a member of the Oregon House of Representatives from 1991 through 1996.
Vera Katz was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1972, where she became the first woman Speaker of the House in 1985 and served as Speaker for three consecutive terms. During her tenure she authored the landmark school reform bill, the state’s groundbreaking gun control legislation and legislation prohibiting discrimination based on gender. In 1992 she was elected Mayor of Portland and served from 1993 until 2005.
Barbara Roberts was elected the first woman Governor of the state of Oregon in 1990, serving from 1991 through 1995. During her term as Governor, Roberts worked with the Clinton administration to secure federal waivers and funding for the Oregon Health Plan. Prior to her tenure as Governor, Roberts was a member of the Oregon House and was Oregon’s first female House Majority Leader from 1983 to 1984. She was elected the first female Secretary of State in 1984 and reelected to that position in 1988.
Betty Roberts’s political career began in 1964 when she was elected as a state representative in the Oregon legislature. Four years later, she was elected the sole woman in the state Senate. In 1974 she narrowly lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary, but her strong showing prompted the winner, Bob Straub, to appoint her in 1977 to the Oregon Court of Appeals, where she became the first woman judge. In 1982 she became the first woman to serve as an associate justice on the state Supreme Court with her appointment by Governor Victor Atiyeh.
In the elected official arena, women remain chronically underrepresented. Why don’t more women run for office? Perhaps they just don’t have the stomach for, remembering how Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, among others, were treated when they ran.
Political writer Melinda Henneberger traveled to 20 states and talked to hundreds of women of all political stripes. She said the thing she heard most often, in all regions of the country and from women of every age, race, tax bracket and political leaning, was that the toxicity of the process was such a turnoff that they could barely stand to tune in at all.
In the United States, women make up only 16.9 percent of our national legislature (i.e., Congress). That places us 91st in the world. There are several big reasons why women continue to lag so far behind men in the political world (according to PundiMom and Mother Jones).
Women are substantially more likely than men to perceive the electoral environment as highly competitive and biased against female candidates. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s candidacies aggravated women’s perceptions of gender bias in the electoral arena. Political rhetoric has become increasingly violent and vindictive and women react more negatively than men to many aspects of modern campaigns.
Women are much less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office and female potential candidates are less competitive, less confident and more risk averse than their male counterparts.
Women are less likely than men to receive the suggestion to run for office—from anyone. They need to be convinced that they can win.
Women are still responsible for the majority of childcare and household tasks and don’t want to subject their families to the uber-scrutiny that comes with being a candidate these days.
And lastly getting elected doesn’t mean getting anything done. One Congressman from Texas said in a recent interview that the only bills that have a snowball’s chance of getting passed in Washington, D.C. right now are ones just to keep the government from shutting down.
It’s a sad commentary that politics of today is so screwed up and could really use a strong dose of women in office who could help set a new tone of cooperation.
