You Can Be the Voice
I have a new hero and her name is Midge Maisel. She’s the star of the Amazon hit show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and she is everything I want to be: fearless, funny and resilient (not to mention perfectly dressed). In the first season, after she is left by her husband, she channels her grief into action by bursting into public life as a stand-up comic (a really good one) who is not afraid to speak the truth about what life is really like for women in the patriarchal society in which she lives. On the morning of the second Women’s March, I’m thinking a lot about how strong women are and how wonderfully many of us respond to adversity. A year ago so many women’s hearts were broken when our dream of electing a woman as President turned into a bitter nightmare. But instead of lying down and licking our wounds, women all over the country are rising up and turning their grief into real, concrete action. Like the unstoppable Mrs. Maisel, we will have a second act that reveals just how powerful we really are.
The Center for American Women in Politics reports that record numbers of women are planning to run for office this year, although how big a jump it will be remains to be seen. Gubernatorial races are especially promising: in 2016, only six women ran for Governor. This year there are already 79 women who’ve stated they intend to run. In the Senate, there are some exciting races including the Senate race in Arizona where there are two Republican and two Democratic women running. In the 2017 off-year elections, we saw Virginia elect the first transgender woman, Danica Roem, as well as the first Latina, Asian American and openly lesbian women to the State House. And while the surge is mainly made up of Democratic women, there are a number of first time female candidates on the Republican side who Newsweek reports are “forming their own kind of ‘resistance’ within the GOP”. These female candidates are not to be taken lightly. They are prepared, they have good stories about why they are running, and they are angry.
This outpouring of women running is remarkable because it is not easy to stand up and speak out. It is easier to embrace the status quo and hope things change on their own. I was at Claremont McKenna College this weekend, speaking to a bright group of college women about why it is so important for them to run. They are unequivocally in favor of women in office, but they question why they have to be the ones to run. One of them asked me a question that I am still thinking about: don’t I think it is unfair that women have to fight for a place in society that should by rights be ours? But the power we are fighting to gain has never been ours. We’ve never had equal rights with men and our work to get more women in power is an act of real rebellion against the status quo. We are fighting to make women’s leadership the norm, not the exception. And so now we march and launch movements and run for office because we are peaceful revolutionaries who are sick and tired of the way things are and we are finally, in large numbers, ready to take action.
How ironic to think that if Hillary Clinton had won the race for the Presidency, we might not be having this mass awakening that we are having now. We might feel like, of course, it’s time, this is what we deserve and now we’ve got it. There would be no marches, no deluge of women candidates, no outrage and no sense that each one of us has the duty to stand up and use our voice to finally change things that have long been out of balance. As so often happens, it is that failure, that disaster that throws you out of your safe space and compels you to action. Huge, cultural shifts are like childbirth – bloody, messy and painful but worth it in the end. I think of Mrs. Maisel standing on stage, poised and powerful, rising from the ashes of her marriage to use her voice to speak out not just for herself but for all women. She’s a great symbol because Midge always deserved a spot on the stage and her story always mattered. It took a major life-altering event for her to tear down the barriers blocking her from where she always belonged. Women are living through that exact moment right now as we work to claim our political power.
