Who Said You Can a Long Way Baby
If yous were alive and in America in 1968, you might call up the phrase "You've Come A Long Style, Baby."
It was an advertisement slogan for a brand of cigarettes, known as Virginia Slims.
This collection of television set commercials shows how the company framed the product as "tailored for the feminine hand," and, more to the bespeak, as a symbol of women'due south empowerment.
The ad campaign successfully captured the zeitgeist of the United states at that time with an image of a confident, tall, slender, pants suit-wearing woman on the become, mirroring the country'due south mainstream awareness of the women's rights movement, led by feminist Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan and many other activists.
Some xl years later on the launch of the ad, much has inverse: advertising cigarettes is banned on radio and television, and a woman, Hillary Clinton, has clinched the nomination for president for the start time in American history.
"When women attain critical mass, somewhere between 20 to 30 percent of any institution, they modify fundamentally the manner that institution functions," said Jay Newton-Small, writer of Wide Influence: How Women Are Irresolute the Manner America Works and a contributor for Time mag.
"And certainly women are reaching that point in Congress, as well as in the [Obama] administration and [U.Due south.] courts."
Just wait at the numbers, said Newton-Small. American women have reached that disquisitional mass in all 3 branches of the federal government.
"30 per centum of the government in terms of high-level civil service and political appointees are women, 35 percent of the federal bench are women, including twoscore percent of state judges."
The notion that women are affecting political change is being tested past Clinton—whose resume every bit an elected female person is unmatched, having served as a quondam commencement lady, two-term senator and secretary of state—every bit she heads towards the November vote, near likely against presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.
How much ability?
Women currently contain 53 pct of eligible American voters. Furthermore, Newton-Small-scale pointed out, women on average actually pull the lever 10 percent more often than eligible male voters. Their votes have been decisive in every presidential election since President Ronald Reagan'southward 2-terms in the 1980s.
There is no uncertainty that women voters in America are a force to exist dealt with.
Only that doesn't answer a key question: how much ability do women in elected office really have to make things happen? And what factors contribute to a woman'due south decision to run for office?
A few years ago, ii scholars spotted an intriguing tendency in New Jersey, one that resulted in landmark research.
Susan Carroll, Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers Academy and a professor of gender studies, and her colleague Kelly Dittmar, noticed a big jump in the number of women in New Bailiwick of jersey'due south state legislature between 2004 and 2011: 25 women—16 Democrats and 9 Republicans—entered the legislature for the first time, and five women already in the land assembly moved to the upper bedchamber.
Their 2012 study, "Preparedness Meets Opportunity: Women's Increased Representation in the New Jersey Legislature," teased out the whys backside the spike: Opportunity, corruption, scandals, deaths and resignations opened 12 seats; women, they found, were seen as a more than upstanding alternative.
Perhaps more importantly, Carroll and Dittmar establish those female function-holders were groomed at the grassroots level and encouraged to run.
And since then?
"We've maintained," Carroll said. "We haven't necessarily continued to move upward. As you become more women in that location, it gets harder to maintain the numbers considering you take to take a lot of success just to keep the numbers where they are."
In other words, Carroll said it's a lot easier to go from ane to three women in elected function than from 30 to 90.
Tipping the balance
The growing and—at present sustained—presence of women in the halls of political power has already made possible what was once what drove Steinem and thousands of women into the streets: family medical exit, a police force protecting women from domestic violence and a dramatic increase in funding for chest cancer inquiry. In the final year, information technology was female senators, Newton-Modest said, who forced huge reforms in the handling of sexual assault in the U.S. war machine.
The examples of women pushing hard to get big issues on the table, and winning, are compelling. That said, at that place remain notable gaps in the American political landscape:
Women currently serve every bit governor in only six of the fifty states.
"We still have a long mode to go before nosotros attain parity in terms of role-holding," said Carroll, a seasoned political scientist. "It's still a male-dominated enterprise, in that location'due south no question about it."
Hillary
All of this leaves American women waiting to see: Can Hillary Clinton punch through the thickest and most of import drinking glass ceiling in American politics to become the nation'south starting time adult female president?
"Existence a woman and having ability is still somewhat oxymoronic in our society," said Jo Freeman, a long-time feminist scholar, activist and author of the 2008 book We Will Be Heard: Women'due south Struggles for Political Power in the U.s..
"It's better than it was 40 years ago. But a adult female with ability still makes people uncomfortable," she said. "And the presidency is the about powerful position in the state, and maybe even the most powerful position in the world."
Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/youve-come-along-way-baby-but-its-still-a-mans-game/3380920.html
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