“They are often the person who is primarily
responsible for health care in their family, the
person who is responsible for eldercare, for
care of parents, the person doing groundwork
on childcare issues,” she says. “They have a
strong voice.”
Brenda Lawrence, a Democratic congress-
woman from Michigan who is co-chair of the
caucus, runs through a litany of issues thatshe believes are being addressed only because
women are at the table: sexual harassment and
abuse, maternal mortality, raising the minimum
wage, training women in skilled trades and engi-
neering, and ensuring that clinical trials include
women and their specific medical needs.
“My role,” she says, “is teaching women how
to take on a position of power, a collective voice,
in raising those issues.”
It seems that each generation of women finds
ways to exercise its collective voice. Much like
the suffragists who gathered in 1913 before
Wilson’s inauguration, some 470,000 people
descended on Washington in 2017 to support
women’s rights after Donald Trump’s inau-
guration. Their signature pink hats may be
gathering dust, but for many women the polit-
ical awakening continues.
The suffragist legacy—the determination “to
do and dare anything”—lives on in other ways
too. Michelle Duster, a great-granddaughter of
Ida B. Wells, raised $200,000 in small donations
in 2018 to complete fundraising for a “people’s
monument” to Wells in Chicago.
“I never thought of myself as an activist,”
Duster says. “But so much time had passed that
I thought, This has to be done.” jRachel Hartigan is a National Geographic staff
writer. This is photographer Celeste Sloman’s first
feature for the magazine. Johanna Goodman is a
New York–based illustrator.WOMEN HAVE PUT ISSUES SUCH AS
SEXUAL ABUSE, MATERNAL
MORTALITY, AND THE MINIMUM WAGEON THE TABLE IN CONGRESS.
throw behind candidates. (EMILY stands for
Early Money Is Like Yeast; “it makes the dough
rise,” Malcolm says.) Eventually the organization
also began training candidates and staffers. Rut-
gers and the Campaign School at Yale provide
similar training that’s nonpartisan.
Such foundational work has made it possi-
ble for the arrival of first-time congresswomen
like “the Squad”—as the diverse quartet of
liberal Democrats Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar,
Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida
Tlaib are known—and enabled
Pelosi’s rise to become the most
powerful woman in American
politics. Clinton, also a Demo-
crat, would not have won nearly
66 million votes in 2016 without
such backing.
Republicans have some catch-
ing up to do. The party’s female
representation actually shrank
in 2018. In the House, where Republicans have
196 seats, there are 13 women, while Democrats
have 88 women. Among the 26 women senators,
nine are Republicans and 17 are Democrats.
“From the Republican perspective, we’re
about 20 years behind the Democrats in terms
of building the pipeline and infrastructure to
support wider female races,” says Ariel Hill-
Davis, a co-founder of Republican Women for
Progress, one of several groups recently cre-
ated to support female Republican candidates.
“There are more Gregs and Mikes in the Repub-
lican conference on the House side than there
are women.”
REPRESENTATION MATTERS. Shortly after the
19th Amendment was passed, when women
were just beginning to vote, Congress passed a
law providing federal funds for maternal and
child health care. Suffragists had led the way in
lobbying for the bill, the first of its kind.
The suffragists wanted to break free from the
subordinate role society had assigned them.
But Susan W. Brooks, a Republican congress-
woman from Indiana who was co-chair of the
bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Women’s
Issues in 2017-19, holds up the traditional tasks
that many women still fulfill as a reason for
political involvement.
THE FIGHT TO BE HEARD 123