FROM THE ARCHIVES

In the November 1992 U.S. elections, female candidates ran for and were elected to political office in unprecedented numbers. A record 47 women won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, 24 for the first time, and four women were elected to the Senate, among them the first African American female senator.

Commentators labelled the phenomenon “The Year of the Woman”, and attributed the wave of support for female candidates to the anger and disillusionment following the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. One of the two female incumbents, then-Senator Barbara Mikulski, objected to the media’s moniker, remarking, “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus. We’re not a fad, fancy, or a year.”

Last Tuesday, 100 women were elected to the House, 12 to the Senate and nine to governor’s mansions. Among them were Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland, the first Native American women elected to Congress, and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first Muslim women elected to Congress. In the wake of the results, pundits have taken to calling 2018 “(Another) Year of the Woman.” As in 1992, the number of women elected has shattered records, bolstering arguments that Donald Trump and the Kavanaugh hearings have delivered an awakening to women, precipitating, in the words of the Washington Post, “A New Era of Women in Politics.”

Much has changed since 1992. Much hasn’t. This week, the Herald pulls from its archives an article written by Marny Helfrich, MC ’94, discussing her skepticism of the idea of “The Year of the Woman”, first published in the Herald on October 23, 1992, a few weeks before the election.

The Year of the Woman? Maybe not quite yet…

By Marny Helfrich, MC ’94

Did you watch the political conventions this summer? If you did, you probably noticed the red, white, and blue bunting, the balloons, the donkeys and elephants. You may also have noticed Democratic unity and Republican discord, a reversal of the expected pattern. But whether you were focusing on the speeches or the spectacle, you must have noticed the women.

Women running for Congress. Republican women for choice. Republican women for Clinton. Women with cookie recipes. Women with children. Women with AIDS. Women with children with aids. Hillary Clinton. Marilyn Quayle. Barbara Bush. Murphy Brown.

Never before have women been so prominent in presidential politics, not even when Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman on a major party presidential ticket in 1984. Democrats and Republicans, pundits and pollsters, all are calling 1992 “the year of the woman.”

In many ways the name is deserved. More women are running for the Senate than have been elected in the nation’s history. The number of women in the House is also likely to increase dramatically. Similar changes are happening in state and local government throughout the country.

In this year of Congressional scandal and widespread discontent with the status quo, the fact that women are often left out of the political mainstream has worked to the advantage of female candidates. Though some, like California senatorial candidate Diane (sic) Feinstein, are experienced political insiders, many are newcomers, like Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois and Lynn Yenkel of Pennsylvania, whose main qualification in the eyes of many voters is that they haven’t been “part of the system.”

Last fall’s Hill-Thomas hearings, before the entirely white male Judiciary Committee, showed many people that a nation that is 52 percent women is not well served by a Senate which is two percent women.

However positive these changes may be, the picture is not entirely rosy. First, even if every woman running for Congress won (which is guaranteed not to happen, since in several races women are opposing each other), neither the House nor the Senate would be even close to gender parity. There is still a long way to go.

Many of the women are running largely on the strength of their records and positions on “women’s issues”, a situation that in the long term is bad for these issues and for women. Until we come to see daycare as a “children’s issue”, parental leave as a family issue, breast and ovarian cancer as a health issue, comparable worth as an economic issue, and reproductive rights as a civil liberties issue, we cannot address them properly. The increase of women in Congress may be dramatic, but it will not be large enough to demand for these issues the attention they deserve until they are seen as “human issues,” not just “women’s issues.”

The association of women with these issues also means that female politics who are more interested in free trade than free formula or more concerned about B-2 bombers than about babysitters may have difficulty being taken seriously.

Concurrent with the increase in women’s participation in national politics has been an increase in anti-feminist rhetoric, especially from Republicans. As a result of feminism and other movements, the world in which people rear their children today is very different from the one in which they were reared. It is not surprising that many people, including those who have benefited from the women’s movement, remain fearful of “feminism.” The movement for gender equality has come far enough that to be openly anti-feminist is a political liability, but not far enough that political advantage can’t be gained by exploiting the fears of a changing society, as the Murphy Brown and “family values” rhetoric shows.

As George Bush said, 1992 is a weird political year. For the time being, women are benefitting from the chaos. It remains to be seen whether women candidates will be able to hold onto their giant in a year without rampant anti-incumbent sentiment and whether “family values” and other subtly anti-feminist tactics would have more impact if voters’ attention were not focused on a troubled economy, The “year of the woman” is a remarkable and positive phenomenon, but as long as eight women running for the Senate is surprising, the Congress and the country have a long way to go.

The Year of Fewer Men Than Usual was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.