Friday, April 28, 2017

2017 Biennial Convention

Join the National Women's Political Caucus for the 2017 Biennial Convention! The convention will be held at the Hilton Boston Back Bay Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts from July 27 through July 30.

We will be gathering Caucus members, supporters, and leaders from across the country for a 4-day event of noteworthy speakers, campaign trainings, receptions, luncheons, and more. Members will vote for National officers and members of the political planning committee for the 2017-2019 term.

Take a look through the official handbook and register here!

We look forward to seeing you in Boston!

Donna Lent, President
National Women's Political Caucus
1001 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 1020
Washington DC 20036
202.785.1100

Thursday, April 13, 2017

A message from NWPC California president, Karen Humphrey - April 2017

A message from NWPC California president, Karen Humphrey

Are you angry yet? Do you agree we need to change a national politics that is toxic for women and families at the national level, and not all that great even in progressive California? Are you ready to get to work finding and supporting great women for public office?

Even in the face of great resistance, it’s disheartening to see our national administration and Congress attack and defund program after program critical to the health and welfare of all Americans, especially women. An administration eager to cut off mandatory health care for maternity and childbirth services shows that being “pro-life” is a philosophy which ends at birth. The potential defunding of Planned Parenthood is just the tip of the iceberg for a Congress that is now awash in anti-choice politicians and a president who once famously said women who get abortions should be “punished.”

Almost as disheartening is the great state of California, where women’s numbers in the legislature have fallen by 8 or 9 percent since the mid-2000s, and where women-focused policies pushed by great women leaders struggle for enactment or governor’s signature. If we had at least a third of the legislature—instead of well under a quarter as we do now--maybe the struggle to pass pro-woman bills and get them signed would be a lot easier.

As this is being written, we just learned the primary results in Congressional District 34, which was vacated when Xavier Becerra became California Attorney General. Of more than 20 candidates, women were half, which is amazing. NWPC considered several of them eligible for endorsement, and selected Wendy Carillo as most viable. Sadly, not a single woman made it into the runoff; both top vote-getters were men, one of them a sitting Assemblymember who was expected to win. A bright spot is a woman placed third, probably because she was endorsed by the Los Angeles Times. In a low-turnout special election, that showed newspaper endorsements can help, but aren’t enough to win.

NWPC-CA’s Political Action Committee is going to consider what we need to do going forward. Filling the electoral pipeline at ALL levels of government with progressive, pro-choice women is a necessary component. If you are not already active in your local caucus’ efforts to recruit and support candidates for every elected office in your area, you need to join those efforts and help ramp them up.

We have only 14 months to go until the June 2018 primary.

We need to support viable women candidates in that election, including Delaine Eastin for Governor, who has already been endorsed by NWPC-CA. But we also need to focus on 2020 (the next Presidential election, and the Centennial of Women’s Right to Vote), 2022, 2024 and beyond. NWPC’s work and your role in it will never be more important than it is right now!

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IMPORTANT DATES

Tentative calendar event for May 16 in Fresno: a reception for Delaine Eastin, candidate for Governor. If your local caucus would like to have a reception or other event for her, check with Karriann Farrell-Hinds, VP for Political Action, to make contact with the campaign.

NWPC National Convention will be held July 27-30 in Boston, MA. It will be inspirational as well as interesting and fun, and offer chances to work on a national agenda for changing American politics by gaining parity for women. Watch NWPC-CA (www.nwpcca.org) or National (www.nwpc.org) websites for more information.

Friday, March 31, 2017

From Ms Representation - March 2017

Taking the bull by the patriarchyEarly this month, State Street Global Advisors, the world’s third-largest asset manager, placed a statue of a young girl directly in front of the Wall Street bull. Her powerful pose, with hands placed at her hips, sends a clear message and I’m still hoarse from cheering. State Street’s message was, relatively, lost in the wash though it was surely encouraging. Point is: if this kind of thing happens only one month out of twelve, it’s time to observe National Women’s Month every month. Here’s a starting point.

Ladies, let’s celebrate!Remembering Jeannette Rankin! On April 2, we should all take a moment to clink glasses – one hundred years ago, as a Republican Representative from Montana, she became the first elected woman to sit as a member of Congress. Of course, this wasn’t without furious debate, but still…there she sat. Respect.

Give credit where it’s due!“It’s a tale as old as time: A man took credit for a woman’s idea” is the beginning of this piece, and that hardly needs an end. But if it didn’t, you might miss out on recognizing these 11 badass women’s historical accomplishments. And that would be a shame.

Looking for the good on social media?In an age where logging on to your social platform of choice can easily be akin to watching a red-hot dumpster fire, there is some good out there. If Instagram is your thing, @femalecollective might just be the (mostly millennial) online community you’ve been missing. I ran into the founder at the Women’s March and I’ve been hooked ever since. #follow

Tomi Lahren fired for defending her right to chooseYep, you read that right. Conservative pundit and host – well, now formerly so – on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze just lost her job after declaring, “…[the government] can stay out of my body…” Yikes.

In case you missed it…Faux feminism is the worst. The. Worst. Thankfully, the social commentary savants at Saturday Night Live painted the picture that plenty of women, myself included, have seen and experienced. It’s so spot on that I’m probably having more girls’ nights in this month than usual. Ladies, keep an eye out for this because it’s real and it’s ugly.

#WomenWearWhite for women’s rightsYou may have noticed something if you watched President Trump’s joint address to Congress weeks ago. All the white outfits in the audience were not the product of an impressive coincidence; they were a statement – not just a fashion statement. AND they looked downright fabulous.

Why It’s Become So Hard to Get an Abortion

When you can’t ban something outright, it’s possible to make the process of obtaining it so onerous as to be a kind of punishment.

By Margaret Talbot

At a town-hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last March, Donald Trump was prompted for his views about abortion. He’d been pro-choice once, but as a Presidential candidate he was an eager, if ill-informed, pro-lifer. Much of his answer took the form of free-floating clauses, like dialogue from a bad experimental play, which made his actual positions challenging to parse. But Trump did manage to make one point clearly, and to repeat it. When the interviewer, Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, asked whether women who’d had abortions should be punished, Trump answered in the affirmative.

Illustration by Harry Campbell

Politically speaking, this was not good. In recent years, the anti-abortion movement has tried hard to show that it cares as much about women as it does about fetuses. Right-to-life groups criticized Trump’s wayward messaging, and, later that day, his campaign issued a statement explaining that it was actually doctors who ought to be punished if abortion were made illegal again: “The woman is a victim in this case as is the life in her womb.”

Trump kept more or less to that script for the rest of the campaign; his choice of Mike Pence, a flawlessly anti-abortion evangelical Christian, as his running mate surely helped. But Trump’s off-the-cuff comment had briefly exposed a truth at the core of anti-abortion politics. Since the nineteen-nineties, states have enacted hundreds of new restrictions on the constitutional right to abortion, from obligatory waiting periods and mandated state counselling to limits on public and even private insurance funding. The cumulative effect has been to transform the experience and the reputation of a safe, legal medical procedure into something shady and disgraceful that women pursue only because they don’t know enough about it or because they are easily manipulated emotional time bombs.

In a clear and persuasive new book, “About Abortion” (Harvard), Carol Sanger, a professor of law at Columbia, explores the roots and the ramifications of this chastening regime. “Much of current abortion regulation operates to punish women for their decision to terminate a pregnancy,” Sanger writes. “This is so even though abortion has not been a crime since 1973, and even then, women themselves were rarely included within criminal abortion statutes.” When you cannot ban something outright, it’s possible to make the process of obtaining it so onerous as to be a kind of punishment, Sanger argues, drawing on the ideas of the legal scholar Malcolm Feeley.

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