April 16, 2019
NEWS & NOTES
From the nation's leading source on all things women and politics.
Last Day to Apply for NEW Leadership ® New Jersey! 
Do you know a young woman with leadership potential? Are you a young woman with leadership potential?? Today is the last day to apply to join the 2019 NEW Leadership ® flagship summer institute in New Jersey, so if you are or know a student in a New Jersey college or university, now is the last chance to submit an application! NEW Leadership ® combines workshops, hands-on projects, and opportunities to meet and learn from successful political leaders and government professionals to teach young women about politics and give them the skills and knowledge to deepen their political engagement. Find out more about the program and how to apply here.

Not in New Jersey? Our NEW Leadership ® national network partners host institutes in states around the country. Find one near you now!
Tiffany Palmer to Receive 2019 Hazel Frank Gluck Award
2019 Hazel Frank Gluck Recipient Tiffany Palmer
CAWP is pleased to announce that the 2019 Hazel Frank Gluck award recognizing distinguished alumnae of the Center's NEW Leadership ® program will be awarded to 1992 alumna Tiffany Palmer, and will be presented during the keynote dinner at the 2019 NEW Leadership ® New Jersey summer institute on June 7th. The Hazel Frank Gluck award is given annually to a NEW Leadership ® New Jersey graduate who has emerged as an inspiring advocate, candidate for office, or community leader. The award is named in honor of Hazel Frank Gluck, whose career in the New Jersey Assembly and in multiple roles in the cabinet of Governor Tom Kean remains an inspiration to future women leaders. This year's recipient, Tiffany Palmer, was a participant in the second year of the NEW Leadership ® program in 1992. Since then, Palmer has dedicated herself to public service by building a legal career devoted to ensuring the legal equality of LGBTQ families through a focus on family law, adoption, and assisted reproductive technology law.
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The 2019 Lipman Chair Event is Less Than Two Weeks Away! 
On Monday, April 29th, CAWP will welcome Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore for a conversation about their book For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics . The four will headline this year's Senator Wynona Lipman Chair in Women's Political Leadership public program. Based on their extensive experience as political operatives and strategists, they tell the story of modern American political history through their careers and their friendship. The authors will appear at the Douglass Student Center at 7pm on the 29 th . Learn more about the Lipman chair , its namesake , and our 2019 chairs .



See the Women Running for Office in 2019
The New Jersey filing deadline for political candidates passed earlier this month, and 64 women have officially joined the race for State Assembly in districts around the state, the largest number of filed women candidates for NJ Assembly races since we started tracking that figure in 2011. You can see all the women running for the Assembly at our 2019 Women Candidates for Statewide Elected Executive and State Legislative Office page, as well as candidates in races in Kentucky and Mississippi, a partial list of Virginia candidates, and, when their filing deadline passes, a list of women running for office in Louisiana. We're also tracking 2019 special elections, currently consisting of two U.S. Congress specials in North Carolina. New Jersey's primary will be held on June 4th, after which CAWP will update this page with the women headed into the general election in November.  

Every election matters. Watch the elections that matter to you.




 
Like a Thunderbolt, Lightfoot Wins

Lori Lightfoot will become the first Black woman mayor of Chicago, and, in the same stroke, Chicago will become the largest American city to be led by a Black woman and an openly gay person; The Chicago Tribune breaks down race results. Lightfoot wasn't the only openly gay woman to be elected to a mayor's office that night, however. As Channel 3000 reports, Satya Rhodes-Conway won the election to become the next mayor of Madison, WI. Meanwhile, Governing covered the growing number of LGBTQ candidates around the country, highlighting two races in Tampa and Kansas City that may further increase the number of openly gay women mayors that have served major American cities. To date, among the top 100 U.S. cities, only Houston and Seattle have seen openly gay women mayors. When Mayor-elect Lightfoot is sworn in, Chicago will (maybe) become the eighth major American city currently led by a Black woman, though with the caveat that a scandal in Baltimore may unseat Mayor Catherine Pugh before Lightfoot can be inaugurated.


A Veritable Smorgasbord

Here's a taste of the CAWP appearances, interesting news, and �� takes over the past two weeks:

With the "too close, Joe Biden!" scandal still in the news, Debbie Walsh told the AP that "There's a bit of 'not getting it' when it comes to the gender story here."

More from the 2020 Is Already Exhausting beat: Northeastern University's School of Journalism published a media sentiment analysis showing women candidates for the president are receiving less positive coverage than their male counterparts. One reason for that discrepancy might be, as Vogue points out, that male candidates get coverage of their favorite books, their musical talents, or the long, contemplative runs they take, but women candidates can't seem to get the same sort of stories out about their hobbies, pets, and passions. Peter Beinart writes in The Atlantic of one bizarre double-bind women face: the more competent they seem, the less they're seen as inspiring, while Jill Filipovic writes in The New York Times about another: "[Women] are seen as too young and inexperienced right up until they are branded too old and tedious."

In less headdesk news, The Lily put together profiles of six of the more under-the-radar new congresswomen among the record number of freshman women in the U.S. Congress, including the 116th Congress's sole new Republican woman. Speaking of which, freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar was interviewed by film director Ava DuVernay in Interview, where she talked about her path to Congress and her discomfort with being pigeon-holed as a historic "first." Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was honored by the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum with this year's Profile in Courage Award for her work in passing the Affordable Care Act and in shepherding in the most diverse Congress in history. Roll Call wrote about Republican Representative Susan W. Brooks, who is also the NRCC's recruitment chair, and how she's working to prioritize women and people of color in her efforts. Roll Call also spoke to CAWP's Kelly Dittmar about the better working environment for congressional staffers being fostered by virtue of the fact that more women are in office: "The extent that women are calling out gender biases broadly in the institution, and are just challenging stereotypes and ways in which women's power may be questioned within the institution, that may be helpful to all the women in that institution," Dittmar said.


Toxic

After conservative media took comments by Rep. Ilhan Omar about post-9/11 profiling of Muslim-Americans out of context and created an enduring controversy out of them, including a front page New York Post story juxtaposing Omar's comments with the World Trade Center on fire, President Trump joined in with a pinned tweet displaying a video that similarly edited together footage of the freshman House member and the 9/11 attacks. Rep. Omar soon faced vitriolic and violent criticism online, and released a statement that said she had experienced a rapid increase in death threats in the immediate wake of Trump's tweet. The Washington Post detailed the controversy with an accompanying video describing how her comments were stripped of context. Charles M. Blow wrote in The New York Times about Donald Trump's proclivity for targeting minority women for his most demeaning and inflammatory criticism, from Maxine Waters and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Frederica Wilson and Ilhan Omar; Blow sees this focus as a strategic decision to combine and amplify the potencies of sexism and racism. This incident calls to mind the research of Rutgers political scientist  Mona Lena Krook, who chronicled the rise of violence, harassment, and intimidation against women in politics, as well as a recent article by Maggie Astor in The New York Times about the online vitriol faced by women candidates above and beyond that aimed at their male counterparts. Another Times piece from just this weekend breaks down the ways that women in general face regular harassment online and how internet cultures and social media platforms contribute to this harassment and fail to provide women security in their online lives. In 2018, Vermont State Representative Kiah Morris left office because of persistent violent online trolling, and digital harassment is reportedly a factor that deters women from seeking office in the first place; unchecked, these sorts of targeted online harassment campaigns will remain a significant obstacle to women's full political participation.


Fighting for the Most Vulnerable

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, along with Democratic colleagues Catherine Cortez Masto and John Tester, introduced a new bill, the Not Invisible Act of 2019, to help fight the epidemic of violence and trafficking faced by Native American women in the United States. Indigenous women are "being killed or trafficked at rates far higher than the rest of the U.S. population," and in some places the murder rate of indigenous women is 10 times higher than the national average. Read more at The New York Times.

Black women are three to four times more likely to die during childbirth than white women, and Black mothers are twice as likely to lose an infant to a premature death. To combat this startling epidemic, freshman Rep. Lauren Underwood and her House colleague Alma S. Adams co-founded the Black Maternal Health Caucus, which was quickly joined by other members including Ayanna Pressley and Elijah Cummings. Rep. Lauren Underwood is... 1. A woman 2. Black 3. A medical professional...and she's parlaying her background and experiences, her "identity" if you will, into a policy focus that addresses a crisis affecting American families. Representation matters. It isn't about platitudes. It's about policies.
CAWP Calendar

Center for American Women and Politics
Eagleton Institute of Politics
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