(MintPress) — On a scorching, humid, 95 degree day, Minnesota Sen. Ann Rest arrived at my front door.
The 70-year-old democratic senator had invited me to join her in door-knocking, whereby one goes door-to-door, persuading voters to vote for a particular cause or candidate. In this case, we would be stumping for Rest, who’s up for reelecton in November.
Sweat dripping from our brows, we tag team the block around my suburban neighborhood.
Knocking doors, greeting residents with a smile, then introducing ourselves, explaining that Rest is running for office again, and she’d appreciate their support. We hand out a laminated brochure of constituent information – on the front is a picture of Rest, inside is contact information for various state and national political offices, including Rest’s.
Some might find the task daunting, especially considering it’s one of the hottest days on record in the state, Rest takes it in stride. “You don’t run a marathon without having prepared for it,” she says.
“What are you going to do? It might not be pleasant to be out in this heat, but it needs to be done in order to be ready for the fall election,” she says, adding, “Besides, it’s fun. I enjoy it.”
Rest has been involved with politics since 1985, serving in both the Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives.
However, Rest is uncommon amongst women of her time. A trailblazer for her time, she entered politics at a time when a woman holding an elected office was an anomoly.
As of the 1970s, women occupied almost no major elective positions in U.S. political institutions.By 1979, women comprised fewer than five percent of the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and only about ten percent of state legislative positions across the country.
Sen. Rest says she got involved because after teaching high school English, raising a family and then having a second career in the accounting industry and many years of involvement as a volunteer on local political campaigns, she wanted to make a difference.
“I thought with my background in public service and finance, I had the ability to help. I looked at what the legislature was doing and thought, ‘I can do that.’ It wasn’t as though this was something I had wanted to do since I was 12 years old, but I thought I’d give it a try,” she said.
But being a woman and an elected official in America today is uncommon, to say the least. And Rest knows this. There are many challenges they face in becoming an elected official as well actually being an elected official.
“Many women candidates feel that they have to be super qualified before they take on a new challenge,” she said, disclosing that in her first election, she had no experience in running for a political office, and won in a re-count by only 57 votes.
She says that many candidates also look at the mud-slinging and toxic environment of negative campaigning today and are discouraged. A few weeks ago, for example, Sarah Palin (who is not seeking any elected office this year) went on FOX News to falsely claim Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren is a Marxist.
“A lot of people look at that and say, ‘ I don’t need that stress in my life or my family’s life’.”
Yet, she would still like to see more women electing to run for political offices in the U.S., a country with an embarrassingly low percentage of women in elected positions.
“We have to strive for the point at which it becomes unremarkable when women are running for office.”
Putting political parity in perspective
Eighty-nine nations surpass the U.S. in terms of women’s representation in government. Some nations not known for human rights. Nations such as Rwanda, Uganda, Tajikistan, South Africa and Cuba. In fact, in the United States, where men make up 83 percent of Congress, we rank embarrassingly low worldwide in terms of women in elected to office.
The United States ranks 78th in women’s representation in national legislatures (we’re tied with Turkmenistan, for the record, a country in which the U.S. Department of State notes in a report on human rights abuses by country that “The Government does not acknowledge that women suffer discrimination,” and therefore has no specific program for rectifying women’s disadvantaged position in society.)
However, some sources say that’s a conservative number, and that the United States trails further behind much of the world—ranking 90th in the number of women in our national legislature, according to the the Women’s Campaign Forum Foundation (WCF).
The group also reports that only 22 percent of all statewide elective executive office positions are currently held by women. State Legislatures are only 24 percent women, and only 6 out of 50 states have a female governor.
Fifty percent less women than men consider of running for office. Of those, 30 less actually run, with only a fraction seeking higher office.
Other countries like India, for example, do recognize discrimination against women, and have enacted political measures in order to work towards parity in politics. Indian legislators voted in 2010 to require 30 percent female representation in government. That same year, France voted to require 40 percent female board membership in business. Today, half of all national governments include some form of legally required minimums for women, while the U.S. remains silent on such measures.
What makes the matter all the more frustrating perhaps is the knowledge that women constituted 54 percent of voters in 2008 elections in the U.S.
Changing times?
With the cost of elections running into the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars in some countries (especially the U.S., where there is little public financing of campaigns), political success is overwhelmingly linked to economic power, experts point out.
Rest also says that once in office, financial challenges continue. Jobs as elected officials don’t pay exceedingly well, and unless one has a spouse or another source of income, it’s difficult to support oneself of the salary of a legislator, much less an entire family.
“It’s a full-time job with slightly better than part-time pay,” says Rest.
But some say, despite the challenges, the days of women in America sitting idly by as their male counterparts are elected to make the rules are about to change.
“Republicans have declared a war on women — congressional panels discuss birth control with no women in sight, and GOP-led legislatures all over the country are finding more creative ways to limit our access to health care. In this environment, you couldn’t blame women for deciding that politics was not for them. There are some folks out there with reports suggesting that women are shying away from public office, not interested in running,” says Stephanie Schirock, President of Emily’s List, a Washington-D.C. based organization which helps to get women elected in office, in an article she wrote for the Huffington Post.
But, as Schirock relays, the truth is far different, as a record number of women are stepping forward in greater numbers than ever before this year as activists, volunteers, donors as candidates. Moreover, 2012 is actually poised to be an historic year for women candidates as there are 15 women running for the 33 open U.S. Senate seats.
Is this because of the so-called “war on women” in which a wide-range of policy efforts were introduced in the past year to place restrictions on women’s health care and erode protections for women and their families? It very well could be.
Measures at the state and federal level aimed at curtailing women’s rights have included restricting contraception; cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood; state-mandated, medically unnecessary ultrasounds; abortion taxes; abortion waiting periods; forcing women to tell their employers why they want birth control, and prohibiting insurance companies from including abortion coverage in their policies.
It could be that women across the nation are saying “enough is enough” and stepping up to demand their rights and get involved with politics because they don’t want to go back to the dark ages of marginalization.
It could be that women are ready to build a lasting progressive majority dedicated to social justice, civil rights, diversity, economic reform, and compassion — and construct a society that values the contributions of all of its members.
And it could be that that’s just what America needs right now.