More Than A Magazine, A Movement
RepresentWomen just published the 11th annual Gender Parity Index, a comprehensive measure of women’s representation at the national, state and local levels of government.
The good news? For the first time, no state earns an “F” grade.
The bad: Progress toward gender balance is slow and possibly even stagnating.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Influential figures in Brussels are backing away from equality commitments; women make up less than 27 percent of all U.S. House candidates; rank your presidential dream team; two U.S. states receive an “A” grade for gender parity; and more.
Trump said Harris was Indian and then “made a turn” and “became a Black person.”
This is blatant mischaracterization of Harris’ heritage and how she has spoken about, and has identified with, her racial background and ethnicity. Harris, born of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, has long identified as a Black woman who grew up in a multicultural household. She attended a historically Black university, pledged a historically Black sorority, and has given interviews and written about her experience embracing her Indian culture while living as a Black woman.
Americans with children are more likely to be unhappy, compared to people without children.
The two policy issues that could immediately alleviate stressors on U.S. families: paid leave and universal childcare. But Republican lawmakers are standing in the way.
“It’s time for white men to have a Black woman’s back.”
Before more than 190,000 men joined a “White Dudes for Harris” call on July 29, the common wisdom in the media suggested that most white men support extreme right causes and candidates. Not so fast. “We’re taking white men back from the MAGA movement,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of White Dudes for Harris, at the start of a three-hour telethon that raised more than $4 million for Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. “By our silence, we white men have allowed white nationalists to speak for us.”
Power the Polls is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that’s recruiting the next generation of poll workers. National Poll Worker Recruitment Day, observed this year on Aug. 1, is somewhat of the organization’s Super Bowl. The annual nationwide day of action provides a unique opportunity for all generations to step up and play a crucial role in shaping the democratic process.
Marta Hanson, Power the Polls’ national program manager, was instrumental in building the nonprofit’s partnership coalitions in 2022 and continues the work ahead of the upcoming elections. Amidst her many responsibilities, Hanson spoke with Ms. two days before National Poll Worker Recruitment Day.
Vice President Kamala Harris—the presumed Democratic presidential candidate and a storied politician—is on track to break all kinds of records for women of color. And yet as soon as she ascended to the top of the ticket, without fail, the conservative right began hurling racist, misogynist insults and tropes at her.
Harris’ experience of being questioned and labeled a “DEI hire” is one shared by many marginalized groups in society, where their identity eclipses their qualifications and leads to systematic racist and sexist practices that negatively impact their life and career trajectories. Contrary to the conservative narrative, DEI has unquestionably improved the lives of Americans.
Within hours of President Joe Biden’s announcing he would withdraw from the presidential race, 44,000 Black women met online and raised over $1.5 million for Vice President Kamala Harris in just an hour and a half. On the popular fundraising website Act Blue, Democrats raised over $90 million in the first 24 hours from 888,000 donors, 60 percent giving for the first time, making it the third-largest single day in the website’s history. “This might be the greatest fundraising moment in Democratic Party history,” said Democratic digital strategist Kenneth Pennington.
While there are many factors as to why Harris has received such enthusiastic support, one hugely important reason is her leadership on reproductive rights.
Conservative politicians are complaining about childless cat ladies, declining marriage rates, unstable families and single-parent households. Their strategy so far has been to ban abortion, offer families no real support, do nothing to help struggling Americans find greater financial stability, promote a deeply misogynistic worldview to young men, and then yell at young women that they need to get married and have babies. Shockingly, this is not working very well.
On the other side, liberals have de-emphasized marriage and the nuclear family as the primary organizing unit for society, while offering women and men alike more choices about when, how, and if to start families, and more support if they do. And while marriage and childbearing rates are down generally, the prototypical Democratic voter—the college-educated woman working for pay in or near a large city in a blue state—is more likely to find herself in a happy, stable marriage than the prototypical Republican voter.
This isn’t a coincidence.
U.S. patriarchal authoritarianism is on the rise, and democracy is on the decline. But day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. The fight is far from over. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.
Since our last report: RFK’s historic mistreatment of women; the Trump-Vance ticket comes into focus; Biden passes the torch to Kamala Harris; rest in power, Sonya Massey; Iowa becomes the 17th state with an extreme abortion ban; and more.
