Getting new faces into politics

Today I came across two American Prospect articles that are timely companions to yesterday's blog post in which I yearned for new people to enter politics.

In the newest piece, Courtney Martin asks Are We Neglecting the Next Activist Generation? She reminds Democrats that the Obama campaign should not have a monopoly on youth mobilization. These efforts need to continue beyond 2008 and will require sustained effort and funding.

Then looking back to June, Ezra Klein wrote Beyond Hillary: By Invitation Only reporting on studies that investigated the roots of the gender gap in politics.

When women do run in primaries, are they more likely to lose? No, actually. There are few women running in the first place. And researchers Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox found something very interesting in their Citizen Political Ambition Study: women were far less likely than men to evince interest in running for office. Women were much more likely than men to cite family obligations, negative feelings toward the process of campaigning, and a belief that they weren't qualified. But the most powerful finding was that the women surveyed were one-third less likely to be recruited to run for office.

Klein's piece concludes:

Yet when women do receive this encouragement, they are just as likely to respond positively as men. "Potential candidates who receive the suggestion to run for office are more than four times as likely as those who receive no such support to think seriously about a candidacy," writes Lawless.

When it comes to convincing women to run for office, it turns out that among the most powerful things we can do is simply ... ask.

Now I am feeling motivated to read Lawless and Fox's book It Takes A Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office--after I get my new Mojo Mom book manuscript draft turned in. As much as I love to read, my writing milestones are looming large right now.

Start thinking about smart Moms you know who would be good leaders, and ask them to consider stepping up to the plate!

More "Stretch Marks on Sisterhood" follow-up and fallout

Phew. There has been a flurry of response to my Women's eNews commentary, Obama v. Clinton Puts Stretch Marks on Sisterhood. I feel that I need to address this topic one more time and then let it go for a while, if that is possible.

I feel fortunate to have talked to Deborah Siegel about the responses, because she and I came up with a consensus that it would be productive for younger women to learn the history of the women's movement, and remember to show appreciation to the women who came before us and fought hard to win our basic rights.

And for Boomer feminists, you really need to start seeing us and taking our points of view seriously.

And both sides need to think, act and write with empathy. Linda Hirshman wrote a response to younger women's commentaries selectively quoting us without really engaging us on the issues. But that paled in comparison to what the Mother Jones blog did by reporting on Hirshman's piece without (apparently) reading our original work.

In Mother Jones, Courtney Martin and I are told that we have a "false consciousness" get characterized as "young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty. Caricatures work both ways, missy."

Whoa. Seriously. You'd think this was left-wingers calling out right-wingers here. Writers such as Courtney and myself are working to help feminism stay relevant for younger women! In the 1970's I was the idealistic 10-year old sitting in the basement, reading my mother's back issues of Ms. Magazine. We want to work with you but such thoughtless, knee-jerk, stereotyping is the kind of divisive rhetoric that is getting in the way.

The Mother Jones blog post is called Throwing Clinton Under the Bus to Spite Mom and I want to challenge it in two additional ways. First of all, my own mother is voting for Obama and so is my Obamican father. So this is not a personal Mom-Daughter conflict for me, but I do believe that there is a genuine generational dynamic within feminism that needs our attention.

The ridiculous caricature that Mother Jones pulled off the shelf brings up another pet peeve of mine about the Boomers: they have a serious blind spot when it comes to seeing Gen X leaders and activists coming up behind them. We've made our mark in Silicon Valley (think Google) but seem to be struggling for visibility in the political arena.

On New Year's Eve I did stand-up comedy for the first time, addressing this issue for a largely Boomer audience. I ended with a group chant among the few Gen Xers in the room, "We're here, we're 40, get used to it!" For people who said "never trust anyone under 30" to think I am still a kid would be amusing if it wasn't getting in the way of having them take my political discourse seriously.

While Mother Jones wants to pigeonhole me as a girl gone wild, I am actually a 39-year old mother and entrepreneur with a Ph. D. from Stanford and 12 years of work experience. In 2008 I will be voting in my sixth presidential election -- and in all five contests so far, a Bush or Clinton has won every single one of them.

So it's not just idealistic new voters who are attracted to Obama's grassroots engagement and message of hope. There are many of us with more than a little gray around the temples who are ready to move beyond the era when the Bush and Clinton families take turns being President.

I am grateful for the good things that happened during the Clinton years of the 1990's but I truly believe that Washington is frozen by two decades of loyalty demands to one of these families, or the other.

Bill Clinton's campaign theme song was "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow." We should remember the following lines, "Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone...don't you look back."

Follow up #1 to "Stretch Marks on Sisterhood"

I started writing this as a comment on my last post, but I decided that it merited a new blog entry.

First of all, thanks for your comments! I have received three so far here on my blog, as well as a handful through Women's eNews. There are some thoughtfully probing questions that have come up, and I plan to write a follow up post if I can eke out the time this weekend. It was really challenging cutting Obama v. Clinton Puts Stretch Marks on Sisterhood down to meet the 1000 word limit. The good news is that we can keep the conversation going here on the MojoMom blog.

And to commenter Renee, Deborah Siegel's Mom, welcome to my blog, and wanted you to know that I really enjoy and closely follow Deborah's writing. So I encourage everyone to check out her book Sisterhood Interrupted, Girl With Pen blog, and the Washington Post op-ed that Deborah wrote with Courtney Martin, Come Together? Yes, We Can.

I also want to give a shout-out to Katie Orenstein of The Op-Ed Project who taught me the value of publishing widely disseminated op-eds in addition to blog posts. I've already had a great response to this one, including a call to be interviewed for an upcoming story in the Raleigh News & Observer.

It's an election year--everyone has an opinion about something bubbling in the collective psyche, so why not try it yourself by submitting an Op-Ed to your local paper?