National Business Woman Magazine
Making the Numbers
Karyne Strickler needs to move a table. She’s lugging her garage sale find, a lightweight folding model, into the headquarters of her organization, Fifty plus One. Like the table, Strickler intends Fifty plus One’s message to be portable: she hopes to carry to as many women as possible the notion that women should serve in political offices that match their proportion of the general population, 51%. Hence the name, Fifty plus One.
Of the 11,230 people who served in the US Congress from its inception through 1992, only 134 were women, Strickler points out. “But that’s not because women do not win elections, when they run, they will in the same proportion as men.” The problem, she says, is that women don’t run in large numbers, and further, that many apparently don’t conceive of themselves as part of the political structure in the way most men do.
Fifty plus One, the organization that Strickler hopes will change that by propelling many pro-choice women into office, is a project of the progressive, California-based Tides Foundation, which matches major donors with projects they consider innovative and well managed, besides offering the projects some administrative and legal support. Currently Strickler and Fifty plus One’s full-time staff member, field director, Becky Dinwoodie, are working as unpaid volunteers as they attempt to get their fledgling organization off the ground.
“Any intelligent, articulate woman” can run for office Strickler says, “but women don’t see themselves in that way. That’s why Fifty plus One will lug a portable table -- and the message that women can and should hold political office -- around the country to housemeetings, fairs, and festivals, women’s conferences, and anywhere else there are women to listen.
It’s a change of attitude that’s needed, Strickler believes, plus serious training in the mechanics of running for elected. The need for women to view themselves differently is evidenced by what happens at the housemeetings of potential organization supporters. At each meeting, she goes around the room asking each person whether she or he has ever considered running for political office. “Almost invariably” she says “the men say yes and the women say no.” When confronted about this head on, furthermore, many women give evidence that something’s a bit awry in the way they see the original question. One lawyer she asked, Strickler says, “answered, ‘Oh heavens, no!’ But when I put it in terms of whether she’d like to make public policy, she said, ‘Well, now, that’s interesting’.”
