American Magazine | Spring 2006
http://www.american.edu/american/fall06_noproblem.html
The ‘No Problem’ Opportunity
AU’s Women and Politics Institute bridges generations to advance women in Washington
“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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.”
According to Christine Gettings ’02, who spent a day shadowing Representative Janice Schakowsky (D-Ill.) as a WPI certificate student, this approach creates some unique opportunities. “Talk about access; that was access,” says Gettings on the experience. “I’d already interned on the Hill, but this was so different . . . I followed her to every meeting, we had lunch together. I could ask her questions. It was definitely more personal.”
In politics, of course, it’s not just what you know that counts, but also who you know—which has long proved challenging for women. “If you’re going to serve in political office or even just work on the Hill, you need those contacts and connections,” explains Lisa Pace Vetter, who teaches WPI’s feminist political theory course.
When guest speakers like Pelosi or Hutchison come to WPI classes and events, O’Connor recognizes that they bring with them not only inside-the-beltway information but also inside-the-beltway connections. “We really stress the importance of networking,” she explains. “We encourage all of our students to come up to our speakers, to exchange business cards, to follow up.”
While the advisory board offers access to many of those “firsts,” the institute’s Young Women Leaders Board formalizes WPI’s commitment to networking and fills in the generation gap with a mentorship program made up of female congressional staffers, nonprofit professionals, and business women closer to the start of their careers. For Dana Begley ’04, one of the program’s first students, the formal networking opportunity has already paid off. Matched with the board’s chair, Jennifer Sarver, who then worked as a speech writer for Sen. Hutchison, Begley landed an internship and then a legislative correspondent post in the senator’s office. “Their guidance,” says Begley of the contacts she’s made through Sarver, “brought me to Capitol Hill.”
Though the institute opened in 2001, for O’Connor its work has been nearly a lifelong pursuit. Long before she wrote the country’s most widely used government textbook or earned any of her half-dozen teaching and mentoring awards, O’Connor was just a seventh-grader unhappy with an assignment on New York state history. “I wanted to write my paper on a famous woman, but [my history teacher] said, ‘There are no famous women in New York state history,’” says O’Connor. “So I said, ‘Well, if I find one, can I write my paper on one?’”
Of course, O’Connor found more than one, but she settled on Susan B. Anthony, with whom, her research determined, she shares a birthday. “Well, if you’re in seventh grade, that’s pretty cool,” she recalls.
From such modest beginnings, O’Connor has gone on to argue in federal court against the Hyde Amendment (which banned public abortion funding in 1976) and testify on Roe v. Wade before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Yet she sees her biggest contribution to women’s rights in WPI’s efforts to kick-start careers for young women whether they be pro-choice or pro-life. “I knew from the start that if this was going to work, it was going to have to be bipartisan,” she explains. “My position is that we need to get more women at the table regardless of whether they agree on the issues . . . Our main goal is just getting young women to recognize the critical role that politics play in their lives.”
With the Supreme Court’s return to having only one female justice, O’Connor sees that recognition as more critical than ever. “Many of the education decisions for women have been five to four decisions,” she explains. “So we could see Title IX cut back . . . We could be where we were back in the ’60s, when we had to really engage.” But ironically, though she hopes young women don’t take their rights for granted, O’Connor is working to make sure they still can. “I don’t want women to walk into a job interview and be told, ‘Aren’t you lucky? You’re the first woman we interviewed’—because I was told that,” she explains.
After just five years, it may still be too early to tell whether the institute can have such an impact, but judging from the results so far, O’Connor is hopeful. “We’re still relatively new, but almost all of the graduates from our certificate programs have gone on to further their educations . . . or they’re working in congressional offices or with the parties,” she says with a smile. “In 10 more years, we’ll have them strategically placed everywhere.”
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