It is now Summer, 1997. The new group "Now We Rise" is forming around the issue of creating a national campaign to elect women to Congress. There is a need for such a campaign because women still constitute only a small percentage of the membership of Congress, far lower than their percentage of the population in the nation. Women and women's issues are thus under-represented, and a shift in the makeup of Congress could be very important for altering the long-standing patriarchal structure of society and especially of the leadership. The purpose is to increase the role of women in Congress, not to increase the power of either political party a such. Therefore, this will be neither a Republican nor a Democratic group but a group that helps promote women and that encourages women to run.
The public clearly has a predisposition to vote for males, and this will need to be countered in getting more women elected. There is also some predisposition to pretend that gender, like race, does not matter, but it is apparent that both do matter to a large segment of the voting population. Our campaign will also offer a challenge to the justifying myth of American politics, a myth with a dual face: 1) women are not interested in running for office and so are not represented for this reason; and 2) men are better suited to the rough and tumble of politics, are more aggressive, and so are more successful in running for office.
The rationale for this organization is that there is a need to encourage more women to run for office and to help them win in order to change the nature of our leadership and of the policies undertaken by the government. The reason for this begins with the needs of women themselves to be more a part of the world in order to combat prevailing notions of women's place in the modern world. There has been a perceived need for this sort of shift since the 1950s, and while it has taken place in much of society, Con...