By JoAnne Young
Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh was speaking on the floor of the Legislature this week when she digressed for a moment and said: I don’t like people touching me at work, and I certainly don’t like them touching me during a pandemic. So please stop.
She was referring to certain men at the Capitol, she explained later. It’s a power move on their part, about putting her in her place. She has been trying to create the needed boundaries and space, as women are often forced to do, and has not been successful. So she was hoping a public message might help. It didn’t. An hour later, she said, it happened again.
Putting her in her place. Second-class citizen.
She isn’t the only woman who has had that experience at the Capitol.
Sen. Sara Howard said this week she has had to firmly lay down the law about those boundaries of physical space and touching. It should be surprising to me that women in the workplace, even in power positions, still have to deal with these things. But it isn’t.
I have covered sessions of the Legislature for the Lincoln Journal Star for 14 years. Before that I covered school boards and other local boards. Women’s experiences in politics mirror their work and social experiences.
Right now, there are 14 women who are state lawmakers, contributing to the dialogue on big issues, sometimes life and death issues, certainly things that make a substantial difference in people’s lives. Fourteen are the most who have ever been elected/appointed at one time to sit in Nebraska's representative 49 chamber chairs, even though women are 50.3% of Nebraska’s nearly 2 million population.
Nevada is the first and only state where women more or less call the shots in the legislature, based on their 52% majority. It has made a difference in the female-interest agendas that have been introduced and passed.
By comparison, Nebraska’s legislature is 28% female.
That number could potentially go down after the November election. Three women are leaving due to term limits, and two of them will be replaced by men.
Given the world we find ourselves in today, Nebraska could be better off if roughly half of our state lawmakers and other elected officials were women. Our Lincoln City Council has three woman, four men, and a mayor who is female. The Omaha City Council is one woman, six men and a female mayor. Our state’s elected officials – governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, auditor – are all men.
Bright spots: Six women make up the eight-member state Board of Education. And six of nine members of the Omaha Board of Education are women while four of seven Lincoln Board of Education members are women. Education boards have traditionally high female numbers.
But six men and two women make up the University of Nebraska Board of Regents.
Women are capable leaders. I shouldn’t even have to say that. If the problem in all this is that women aren’t running for elected positions in high enough numbers, I would ask, why not?
Some women I have talked to have said the wear and tear of an election is just not worth it, for them or their families. There are plenty of jobs open to women now that offer satisfaction and more pay – certainly more than the $12,000 a year the Legislature pays.
And there are still these worrisome facts:
It took women 50 years longer to get the vote in this country than it took African-American men. (Those men technically got the vote in 1870, but then local barriers and violence inhibited that vote for nearly 100 years after that.)
And a black man was elected to the U.S. presidency for two terms. A woman has yet to achieve that office.
Lincoln Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks wore white to her job at the Capitol one day this week because August is women’s suffrage month.
And on one of her turns at the mic she made her own point about women and second-class citizenry. She's had friends, she said, question what would happen if the vote were up for debate or election or discussion today. After all, the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified.
"I really sort of wonder whether the people in this body would actually give women the vote at this point,” she said.
My grandmother wouldn't have dreamed it would take this long. I am doing everything I can to be sure my granddaughters don't have to dream. As only the 3rd woman to be elected to an 11 member board over a 50 year span (and the only one who wasn't appointed first to fill a vacancy), I am used to being the only woman in the room not making coffee. Thank you for shining a light here.
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