Women have shattered the glass ceiling in nearly every field, from medicine to law to entertainment. One arena where feminists often lament women continue to lag behind men is in politics.
As I wrote recently in The Weekly Standard, the fact that women haven’t made it to the White House “is not to say that women are not aggressive, or cannot compete in the political arena; it is simply a reminder, as if we need one, that men and women are different.” I know my colleagues at IWF agree, it’s more important to get the person with the right policies in the White House than the “right” gender.
But today The Washington Post (h/t The Daily Caller) reports that record numbers of GOP women are campaigning for House seats in November:
“So far this year, 239 women are candidates for the House and 31 for the Senate, according to data from the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. Among them, a record 107 Republican women have filed for a House seat, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee — surpassing a previous GOP high of 91 in 1994, and a sharp increase from the 65 who ran in 2008. And those numbers could still grow. In each year Rutgers has been keeping track, the final tally has exceeded the late April figure by more than 20 candidates.”
There will be myriad explanations for this increase – concerns over the growing size of government, especially the new health care overhaul, is my guess. But November is definitely going to be an historic election in more ways than one.