N.J. women making political strides

EDITORIAL, thnt.com Online, August 19, 2007

When the campaigning starts in earnest this fall for seats in the state Legislature, it will have a different look. A record number of women — 56 — have been nominated for office by both major parties.

This is good news, because it indicates that women have a growing participation in — and access to — the political process, and it also presents voters with an unusual opportunity to increase the proportion of women in the Legislature.

Women now occupy only 23 of 120 seats in the lawmaking body — 19.5 percent — whereas they account for 57 percent of the population of the state and 52 percent of the voters, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Rutgers University.

While the ideal would be for the Legislature to reflect the profile of the state's population, there's a limit to how much fine-tuning can be achieved. So if New Jersey had a population that was 1 percent Inuit, it would be unreasonable to expect that there would always be one or two Inuit members in the Legislature.

But women are a majority in this state, and it is equally unreasonable to expect the Legislature to adequately reflect their interests with such a disproportionately low representation. A far more substantial female voice is needed in the debate over matters of health, reproductive rights, family rights and responsibilities, and gender discrimination.

Moreover, women, who do have distinctive roles in society as a function of their gender — as spouses and mothers, for example — should be heard more clearly in the formation of public policy on the overarching issues of our time, including taxation, environmental policy, juvenile crime, and "smart growth."

No doubt, the paucity of women in the Legislature, and in government office in general, is a hangover from the long male domination of most aspects of public life, but whose responsibility is it to correct this disparity?

Certainly, the political parties carry a heavy burden and should be actively recruiting women to participate in the political process at the local and county levels.

"Remember the ladies," Abigail Adams wrote when the nation was young, "and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors."

But women have been waiting a long time since then for parity in public and even in private life, and they needn't keep waiting.

For example, women who would like to increase their voice in public policy can take advantage of the guidance offered by the Citizens' Campaign — a program by the Center for Civic Responsibility whose goals include empowering citizens of both genders to take more active roles in civic life, including elective office.

Among the information available on the campaign's Web site — www.jointhecampaign.com — is a detailed instruction on how to run for a county committee seat, the most basic unit of political power in this state.

This and other information provided by the Citizens' Campaign shows that, while political institutions left on their own may turn with the speed of a cruise ship, individual citizens — more than half of them women — can take matters into their own hands.