State Voices

Those of us who are committed to doing this [work to support women] will do it, volunteer, you know, because we’re committed to doing it. But I do think if it could be resourced…we could really make a difference."

Money is the commodity that people use to judge [electability]. …Candidates always have to prove themselves…male and female. And when you go out there and you say you want to run then part of the way you prove yourself is to get endorsements and part of [doing that] is [showing] how much money [you raised]."

On the staff side, these are jobs where you’re working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. You can’t do that with two kids at home. You can’t necessarily do that. And you can’t travel from Chicago to Springfield every week for six months a year. So these [legislative staff positions] become jobs that are mostly held by younger women who don’t have children and then they end up getting married or they end up having children and then they leave the job and go do something else. …Our state Capitol doesn’t have a daycare. That’s crazy, right? …We didn’t have a lactation room until I came back from maternity leave and bitched about the fact that I had nowhere to pump. …It’s hard to build that bench [of women staffers]…if you don’t have the institutional support to help you do those kinds of things."

I would say there’s a support infrastructure to some degree [for women in Illinois politics]. And it’s in silos. …There is some support system [for women in politics in Illinois] but it’s not centralized. There’s no real centralized support system. That’s my view."

The reality is the people behind the scenes, the staff who are doing the work – the staff who are making the decisions as to where the money goes [and] who gets the contract – those are the people that have more influence."

[Term limits] also mean…when women do get to these high levels [of leadership], when someone like Barbara Buckley, who [was] the speaker of the Assembly, when someone like Maggie Carlton is chairing Ways and Means, these powerhouse women then term out and they are not there to mentor other young women."

There are these pioneer women who did things like fight for the abortion protection amendment in the 1990s and women like [Congresswoman] Dina Titus or [former state Senator] Helen Foley who at one point were the only women in a room who had made a concerted effort across the years to say, ‘I’m going to bring you with me.’ And it may not mean that tomorrow you are in elected office but let’s just keep opening this door, and I think we’re seeing the results of generations of women empowering each other to be in leadership."

I think in navigating the political space, I felt really strongly about bringing my whole self into the arena. …I like wearing red lipstick and hoop earrings, I just do. It’s who I am. And it was really important to me that I [did] not lose those symbols of who I am in the space. I wasn’t going to not talk in Spanish with my grandmother when I caught her [on the phone] and I was walking through the senate building. That’s just who I am and [I’m] modeling that for other women who may be interested in being in office. I hope it gave some sort of space for folks to feel like they didn’t have to change who they were to be in the public arena."

I know that the electorate – the broad electorate – just from talking to people, they [don’t] prefer, not just women who have small children, but in some cases, they don’t prefer men who have small children. We believe highly in traditional values and so anything that looks like we’re taking away from our family…and the time that [is] necessary to develop our children, that’s something that’s not necessarily…celebrated. We believe that our family is our first focus."

I think it’s extremely important [to have a support infrastructure for women in politics] because naturally we are emotional beings. And…we do have sensitivities that I don’t think our male counterparts deal with as much as we do or the way we feel it. Understanding how to operate in leadership and still have compassion and not lose yourself are things that I think we do need. …We need that support. I’m not opposed to that. I think that there’s strength in having support and seeking help and having assistance. And so I think it’s extremely important and I would love to see more and more of that. I just don’t want it to be biased. I don’t want to look like…we are so broken that we need all this help, right?"

I think that we do look at [creating opportunities for Republican women] from a perspective of the way the media is attacking us. If you are constantly being attacked for not having a female or not having a minority then it only makes sense strategy-wise to try to combat that attack."

We [as Republicans] tend to look at things from a holistic perspective or a collective perspective rather than factions. And so there aren’t any rules that assist or harm women from running for office. If you want to run, you have to qualify like everyone else. You have to campaign like everyone else and I’m seeing that. I think we have a woman running in just about every single race except for this U.S. Senate seat…statewide on down. So I see that we’re definitely growing in that direction. A lot of the women who came in during…the last midterms were Republican women. And so we’re definitely doing our part when it comes to that. …I’m so proud because it’s not because we were provided any specialized lane. It’s because we decided to jump in the lane where the men are and we just beat them."