State Voices

And women are seeing what’s happening and they have to stand up and it’s happening a lot at the School Board level. You see these book [bans] and things like that and I think that the climate we’re in is really inspiring them to stand up and say, ‘Absolutely not. Absolutely not.’ And that’s what we’re seeing all over the place – all these women that want to run."

I think gerrymandering had a very big hand in curtailing women running for office because you’re putting all the Democrats in one seat and you’re going to be fighting the alpha males who are entitled to that seat by their birth, apparently, according to them. So you have a lot less ground to cover. You’re fighting with a lot more people for space. As opposed to now that the map’s opening up, you have more diverse districts and you have a stronger support system."

But, you know, I think that the support system is the women who do it. And the women that we have that are elected…even all the way up to leader McClinton, will always pick up a phone for another woman running for office. …It’s just the connection that people have in this very weird fraternity, sorority, whatever you want to call it. It is people supporting others."

And it’s not just having women in a role. It’s having women use their voice. I mean Barbara [Buckley] wielded real power. So did Maggie Carlton – you didn’t mess with Maggie. So it’s electing women who both stand for something and know how to use the power when it’s given to them."

It’s all about control. [The parties’ legislative caucuses] really don’t care whether they control with men or women."

I think one of the things that women face is being considered different and so if you have to have your own course or your own caucus [for women], then I think that hurts. So I would prefer that we do not do that – that we just have it for everybody cause probably the boys need it more than we do."

I did think from a female standpoint I was asked a lot of questions that men weren’t asked [as a political candidate]. Like who’s going to take care of your kids? And aren’t you worried about your safety when you knock on doors? And how does your family feel about this? How does your husband feel about this? And I tried to picture if my husband was running…I don’t know that he would ever be asked about worrying about his safety [while] knocking on doors or who’s going to take care of the kids. Those are questions that would never be asked."

You get someone [from movement] who goes into office. …They meet an institution that is so degrading, so kind of disgusting, so dysfunctional. For instance, I went into the least productive [state] legislature in the country, and it weighs on you because you’re just like there are simple solutions [to] so many of these things and the collaborative process doesn’t exist. The majority party won’t run anything. We’ve been gerrymandered in such a way that we can’t win back a majority. And what that does is it breeds hopelessness that there is no way to win. And when you are in that situation and you’re like, ‘I have great bills and they won’t run them.’ Or, ‘I have a community with needs and we can’t get them any resources.’ …You’re getting pressure from the outside that says, ‘You can’t do anything. You’re no different than everybody else.’ And you are getting pressure from the inside that says, ‘Why are you agitating us?’ This is how it is, and then you’re just like, ‘Why am I here?’ [Interview conducted in June 2022 before Democrats took the majority in the Pennsylvania House.]"

So it was…really… looking like an uphill climb [when I made the decision to run for office], but I think that what we were seeing was demographic changes in this region. We were seeing a class solidarity movement that was happening at that time. We were seeing a progressive movement that was burgeoning at that time. And I think that…we were at the confluence of all of those right here in my district, right here in the 34th [legislative] district. And I think that we were able to tap into an energy that was existing from the many kind of streams that were flowing into this confluence – whether it be racial justice, whether it be gender justice with the women’s movement, whether it be that fear [or] that frustration around that Republican surge that we had just seen [in 2016], or just western Pennsylvania changing in terms of the shifting kind of face and makeup of the labor movement, which was getting more service-industry-oriented which means that there were more women [and] people of color being centered in the labor movement at that time. So that was all kind of happening at the time that we were in."

The place where we actually need women candidates, particularly Black women candidates, [is] your school boards, your local borough councils, your county councils, things like that [which] are often unpaid. So [it’s] an unpaid job but we know that those school boards still are basically full-time, right? They are full-time duties and responsibilities and they also come with full-time needs of skills and qualifications. …I remember when we got a young Black woman elected to the school board, and that was huge. It was monumental for us. …She immediately found out they meet every Wednesday for this, they meet every Monday for this, and this session for that. And she is a mother [and] a full-time worker; she had three kids of her own, a husband who had a need for her to help to take care of things, right? …And they were like giving her no grace."

I completed two careers before I ran for office, before I was elected for office. So I think that is mindset that has nothing to do with the men. That has to do with women. The men’s part of it is they don’t ask us to run. The women’s part is we don’t think we can. We juggle three or four things and everything else in our lives. We don’t think we can juggle running for office and the other stuff, you know, so shame on us."

In particular [Pennsylvania] has a real dedication to the idea that if you are a person of color you are not able to run outside of communities of color. I think that is a pretty common perception [in] most places but I think it is fairly overwhelming here. …And so I think as you saw some of those great barriers break down in other places where the party stranglehold became less intense and they were recruiting more women. Generally, those men were still holding on to the [idea that] we can’t elect women of color. [It’s] just way too much of a gamble. …There [are]…these old-school assumptions that somebody that maybe looks like me or somebody that looks like [Representative] Joanna McClinton is just not going to be able to connect in the suburbs or is just not going to be able to connect with certain people."