Madeleine Kunin's Sensible Guide to Electing More Women

Madeleine Kunin, former Vermont governor and ambassador to Switzerland, says she travels the country with “missionary zeal,” offering tactics to elect more women to political office. She is well aware of the absence of women candidates, the result, according to a new Brookings Institution study, of a shocking lack of ambition. But Kunin says there are practical ways to remedy the situation. As a beginning step, “you can ask women to run,” she points out. “That is the easiest way.”

People are astonished to find out, she has learned, that the United States is behind Iraq and Afghanistan in the proportion of women in the national legislatures. Successful candidates need not only financial contributions but also emotional and practical support. A group in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, called WHEN (Women Helping Empower Neighborhoods) didn’t stop at recruitment. “They promised potential candidates, ‘we will bring your family home-cooked meals. We’ll carpool your kids,’” says Kunin. “They elected three women to the city council.”

Kunin remembers 1984, when she was first elected governor of Vermont, as a very exciting time. Only the fourth woman to be elected governor in any state in her own right, she thought the floodgates would open and looked for the “armada of women sailing in there behind me.” But she grew impatient with the nation’s lack of progress. Today, with only 16 percent women in political power in America and only 16 percent women in corporate power, she says, “We can’t expect change to happen by itself, gradually.” So she wrote her third book, Pearls, Politics, and Power, to speed up the process and inspire women to run for office.

Kunin knows that women will need more than boosters and inspiring role models.  “Women are less likely than men to see themselves as qualified to run for office, at any level,” she says. That’s why “they need to be asked to run.” Is their reluctance also because people have a negative perception of the political world? “Politics is a pretty dirty business,” she admits. “Women more than men may be repelled.”  And campaigning involves risks, she notes, of “losing privacy. You risk being attacked, and most of all you risk losing.” It’s not the worst thing, she says, but “women tend to take it more personally than men do.” Kunin recalls the admiration of friends again after she lost her first race for governor, just having dared to run.

The tactics and insights in her book come not only from her own experience. Kunin interviewed 100 women office-holders, many approached through her students at the University of Vermont, and found that they second her conviction that it is well worth it to take on the political world. “They agree that it’s tough, but they also agree that there are great rewards. You can sit at the table and get a hundred million dollars for breast-cancer research.”

Finally there’s the question that is behind almost all campaigns mounted to empower women—do women make a difference once they have clout? “On a simple justice level women should be there,” she says.  “And not all of them are different. But studies and anecdotal evidence have shown that women tend to move in a direction based on their experience.” More women are involved in education and health care for instance, “so when you get a group of women in any political body, you tend to get more emphasis on those issues. When there is a woman at the table, the conversation changes.” She also thinks that women may, more than men, seek power to help others rather than for its own sake.

Success in politics is often a question of timing, so women need to be prepared, says Kunin. She recently spoke to a group of women in New Jersey who had trained 100 women to be ready to run when an opening occurs. But she also thinks the political world could better accommodate women’s life patterns. “It would help if we could change the idea that once you get elected to office, you should be there forever,” she says. “Women could do different things at different stages of their lives. They could donate five years and those years could be important ones for their community.”