New Haven Independent

The group’s founders (left to right, Nan Birdwhistell, Debra Hauser, Louise Endel, Carol Ross, Barbara Segaloff; and Nancy Alexander, Rachel Ranis, and Janna Wagner, who are not pictured) chose to establish a non-partisan group that seeks to tap the untapped electoral energy of women, all women, regardless of ideological views. The group’s inaugural event focused on activating new women voters, especially the vast reservoir of young, struggling, and unmarried women.

The event attracted more than 100 women, many already politically active, to Yale’s Joseph Slifka Center on Wednesday night. Chief speaker Page Gardner said the key to change the political landscape in the direction of issues important to women will be to find, register, vote, and activate the single, separated, divorced, and widowed women who number 49 million people, or 25 percent, of all voting-age Americans. They are the single largest group of non-voters in the nation.

Gardner’s Washington D.C.-based group Women’s Voices. Women Vote researches strategies to increase voting for unmarried women. “A marriage gap is defining the 21st century in America,” she said. “Unmarried women are growing faster than any group in the American electorate, and yet they don’t vote nearly at the level of their married sisters. And they should, because they have a lot of issues. Half live in households making under $30,000, 20 percent have no health insurance, and a third move every two years.” Their not being part of the voting process, she added, “diminishes our democracy.”

Connectedness, and belonging to a community, which is related to being married, is a factor correlated with voting, she said. Moving several times over a short number of years and rootlessness are correlated with non-voting. In 2004, Gardner said, 20 million unmarried women did not vote, with 15 being unregistered and five registering but not voting.

What to do about it? New Haven Democratic Town Chairwoman Susie Voigt said that in her experience the challenge isn’t registering women as much as getting them to the polls. “I mean we have to drive them, and if they have a kid on the way to school, we have to have a relationship with the person so they’ll leave the kid with someone they trust while they go in and stand on line.”

Through strategies such as vote-by-mail and advertising using young actresses, Gardner’s group has registered 200,000 unmarried women voters and is committed to getting up to a million by the 2008 presidential election. Gardner said Voigt was on the money. “The challenge that we see is this. The unmarried woman has so many obstacles: She is less likely to have a car, her kid is in day care, she has to take a bus, maybe two buses to the polling place, even after she’s discovered where it is, and that’s sometimes a challenge. Then as she stands in line she looks at her watch, and every five minutes is costing her extra child care. And as the line snakes along she has to make a decision, vote or pick up the kid.”

Voting by mail even if you’re in town would require a change, for example, in Connecticut law; that was discussed as a possible route. One of the few token males in the crowd, Andy Boone (who didn’t mind at all to be so characterized) suggested elections might be held on holidays.

Other challenges included younger unmarried women overcoming the feeling both of disconnectedness to the process, and of politics as nasty and brutish, and something to be skeptical about.

“They also feel,” Gardner (pictured here with Teresa Younger of the Connecticut General Assembly Permanent Commission on the Status of Women) told one questioner, “that perhaps one vote won’t make a difference. But when you tell them there are 20 million potential votes for pay equity, for opposition to the Iraq War, which, for example, this group was early to highlight, then they understand the power of the vote. Then the light goes on, and they get it immediately.”

And, perhaps because the lives of young unmarried women, struggling with kids, jobs, and moving frequently is so difficult, they want candidates they can trust and rely on. “These women want candidates who are engaged, work really hard, as they do, and do what they say. The trick is to get them into the booths.”

“And to get them young,” said Downtown Alderwoman Bitsie Clark.

“It’s true I didn’t run for office until I was 70,” said Clark, who is running for her third term, “but as a young woman in New York I heard Eleanor Roosevelt speak. She said that politics was a noble profession, and why leave it to government hacks to do it? That was inspiring. So it took me a while, but I have gotten around to it, and it’s so rewarding and fun, too!”

Bringing young women, perhaps through Facebook, appears to be critical. Will they vote for a candidate just because she’s a woman?

The short answer to that question seemed also to be no. While gender is important because a woman’s life “resonates” with women voters, agenda is ultimately what’s important. But can a woman candidate be evaluated strictly based on her agenda? One participant, Suzanne Boorsch, said the event’s title seemed to imply there might be a discussion of unadmitted attitudes or even prejudices people might not reveal but take with them into the voting booth. “I feel a little cheated,” she said to Segaloff and Endell, “that these factors were not discussed this evening. It’s like not addressing the subject.”

Segaloff reminded her that the group was non-partisan. A lot of people, she said, got new tools to get out the women’s vote. Still Boorsch (full disclosure: Boorsch is this reporter’s wife) was not mollified, not yet.

Debra Hauser (not pictured), another of the New Haven Forum’s organizers, however, tended to agree. “I think one reason women don’t run for office at the level they should is they are afraid of getting slammed. Like Hillary is getting slammed, like she was pilloried in ‘93 over health care. What kinds of standards are women held to that men aren’t?”

“We should really be asking ourselves as a country,” she said to Boorsch, “why England and India and Pakistan and Israel have elected women, and we go on and on and we have not elected a woman national leader.” Hauser, who’s a psychotherapist and hopes herself one day to run for elected office, said she thinks it has to do with the different systems. “In Europe individuals don’t run. Parties run, and the parties field a group of men and women. But here you’re out there alone to win, or to twist in the wind.”

The New Haven Women’s Forum’s next event, planned for the spring, is tentatively titled “How Women Can Save Mother Earth.” A web site is being developed; in the meantime, click here or here to email for more information.