| AU’s Women and Politics Institute bridges generations to advance women in Washington BY MATT GETTY “Most of the women in this country have lived through an era in which they’ve been able to take their rights pretty much for granted,” says Karen O’Connor, who launched AU’s Women and Politics Institute (WPI) five years ago to study, teach, protect, and promote those rights. “I’m soon to be 54, and that’s about as young as you can be and still recollect an era when there wasn’t a Title IX, when abortions weren’t legal, [and] when want ads said, ‘help wanted male’ and ‘help wanted female.’” Good news, right? But it’s not the only news. Though female representation in Congress quadrupled in the 1980s and ’90s, progress has stalled since 2001; today the number hovers at a spare 15 percent. The proportion of women in state elected positions, which more than doubled in that same 20-year period, has recently declined. And yet even as the Iraqi parliament boasts greater gender parity than the U.S. Congress, Americans aren’t exactly taking to the streets to protest. In fact, many, O’Connor has found, are more likely to ask why she’s still talking about equality for women when we solved that problem years ago. 
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), left, with WPI director Karen O’Connor, center, and associate director Sarah Brewer at the institute’s five-year anniversary “It’s what [Stanford law professor] Deborah Rhode calls the ‘no problem’ problem,” explains WPI associate director Sarah Brewer. “It looks like there’s no problem, and that’s our problem.” Though Rhode was describing the legal profession, the same phenomenon, Brewer, O’Connor, and others argue, applies to politics. We’ve seen many of the high-profile firsts that make gender-based inequity look like a thing of the past—the first woman secretary of state, the first woman attorney general, the first woman House minority leader. But when it comes to equality, it’s not the firsts that count. It’s the twenty-firsts, the thirty-firsts, and the forty-firsts. To get us there O’Connor treats the “no problem” problem like an opportunity. While the increased visibility of women in politics may mask an underlying inequality, it also provides a valuable tool for dismantling that inequality. “You also have to see this as a time with a lot of promise,” explains Brewer. “It’s no longer just that one senator out there. You can find women across the sectors and at all levels, so there’s more role models available to younger women . . . We have to take advantage of that.” Bridging Generations To help the next generation of women recognize and overcome the obstacles in their path to leadership, the institute has, since opening in 2001, offered more courses and weekend seminars on Title IX, the politics of reproductive rights, social change litigation, and other feminist political issues than any other university in the country. Perhaps more importantly, however, it tackles these subjects in a context that unites those firsts, twenty-firsts, and potential forty-firsts.
We’ve seen many of the high-profile firsts that make gender-based inequity look like a thing of the past. But when it comes to equality, it’s not the firsts that count. It’s the twenty-firsts, the thirty-firsts, and the forty-firsts. |
WPI’s bipartisan advisory board, which supplies numerous event speakers, boasts the House of Representatives’ first female minority leader, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Texas’s first female senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.), and nearly every other major female politician in Washington. Its faculty includes the Army’s first female three-star general, Claudia Kennedy, and the former director of President Clinton’s Interagency Council on Women, Theresa Loar. “Karen’s like a beacon that just attracts people to the institute,” says Loar. “She’s well known in Washington, and her work draws a lot of respect.” Capital classroom As the only university-based center probing feminist politics in Washington, WPI uses the capital as its classroom. Classes win access to exclusive D.C. events like last year’s NARAL Pro-Choice America dinner, where students chatted with former attorney general Janet Reno over a $100-a-plate dinner. “You’re in D.C.; the number of opportunities for our students is mind-boggling,” says O’Connor, whose own class twice visited the Supreme Court and met with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on days the court considered sex discrimination cases. “Getting people involved has just been a matter of asking. You end up at a reception; you meet somebody; and you say, they’d be a great person to bring in as a speaker . . . Then once people come in to speak, they all want to teach.” Weekend WPI classes enable many of those teachers to bring lessons from the office straight to campus. Last year, for instance, Susan Wood, then director of FDA’s Office of Women’s Health, taught a course on the political theories behind reproductive rights while simultaneously wrestling with the subject’s political realities in the fight over emergency contraception that eventually led to her resignation. “The training [the institute] provides future leaders is very important,” says Wood. “They’re getting an understanding both of how policy should be made . . . as well as what are the best practices for advancing that policy in the real world.” continued next page >> top |
