Female Candidates Put Some Cracks in the Glass Ceiling
THIS IS WHAT I KNOW--On many accounts, this was supposed to be the election where we broke the ultimate glass ceiling, the office of the presidency of the United States, the leader of the free world. I had written a column here late last month on this election as a Referendum on Feminism.
Many of us, women and men, were terribly disappointed, starting around the time when we realized we might be losing the Swing States. I’ve been actively engaged in elections since I was 13 years old – and consider myself to be a political junkie. I’ve won some, lost some but I don’t remember ever feeling as despondent as I have been since Tuesday. Many of us feel we have lost much more than the electoral vote, including the chance for the first woman president.
Still, California did see some offices captured by women. On the national front, State Attorney General Kamala Harris will replace Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in the Capitol. The Howard University and University of California, Hastings College of the Law alumna worked as a Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County from 1990-1998 before serving as Managing Attorney of the Career Criminal Unit in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office (1998-2000.) She was defeated incumbent Terence Hallinan to be elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2003 and was re-elected in 2007, serving from 2004 to 2011 before winning the CA Attorney General office in 2010, the first female, African-American, Indian-American and Asian-American Attorney General in the state. She was reelected to that seat in 2014. Harris defeated Loretta Sanchez on Election Day to become the first Indian-American and second African-American woman elected to serve in the U.S. Senate. Harris’s name is being mentioned in the media as a possible presidential candidate in 2020.
Closer to home, voters elected two women to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, Janice Hahn and Kathyrn Barger who will join current supervisors Sheila Kuehl, Hilda Solis and Mark Ridley-Thomas. Women will form the majority in the country’s largest local government agency. However, the 15-member LA City Council will only have one woman. A 2014 report concluded women held fewer than one-third of elected city, county and state posts.
The addition of Hahn and Barger to the Board is an exception to an election year that actually brought fewer female elected officials in the state Legislature. According to California Women Lead (November 8), the State Senate and Assembly lost two seats each that were occupied by women, bringing the total of female-occupied seats to 27 of 120. The Congressional Delegation also lost two seats occupied by women, bringing the total to seventeen.
(Beth Cone Kramer is a Los Angeles writer and a columnist for CityWatch.)
-cw
