Nearly 600 Republican women, 50 from Illinois, gathered here in October for the first Women Leaders Summit, and the issue at hand was not abortion or affirmative action but the deficit and the need for a balanced budget.
Women leaders from business, community organizations and state and local government made policy recommendations to members of the GOP congressional leadership on issues ranging from crime, education and the breakdown of the family to a call for a balanced budget, tax cuts and an improved economy.
“We’re trying to get a new mindset about women in this country,” said Rep. Barbara Vucanovich (R-Nev.), chair of the summit.
Vucanovich said there was a huge difference between this summit and the 4th UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in September.
“We don’t want people to think that women only care about women issues and have a women agenda,” she said. “We think every issue is a woman’s issue. We have women who deal with the everyday issues of making a living, making their payrolls, and women voters care about some other issues.”
Sponsored by the Republican women members of Congress and Republican Network to Elect Women, the summit is the first step in the establishment of a national council of women advisers to Congress, which will continue to seek policy advice from women leaders nationwide.
“To see the level of excitement and involvement in helping to determine policies that are going to be enacted by the Congress is really giving women renewed enthusiasm,” said Mary Jo Arndt, of Lombard, the national committeewoman for Illinois.
Fewer in the running: Fewer women are considering running for Congress in 1996, according to the National Women’s Political Caucus.
As of Oct. 17, 106 women said they may run for office in the U.S. House of Representatives and 14 in the U.S. Senate, a significant decline from 1992, the last presidential election year.
“It appears that there is a dropoff in the number of women running for major offices, even for Congress,” said Harriett Woods, former president of the National Women’s Political Caucus. “Part of this is fewer open seats, but the other part is more worrisome. There just seem to be fewer qualified women seizing the opportunities that do exist.”
In 1992, 22 women were elected to open seats left in Congress from redistricting or retiring members, while in the ’96 election there will be only 11 open seats of non-incumbents in the House and seven in the Senate.
Woods said that ” ’92 was a huge leap forward. In ’94 we plateaued. Women held their own in number but for first time didn’t increase. In ’96 I think there will be very modest gains, if at all. There seem to be fewer women running.”
While ’92 was “the year of the woman” and ’94 followed as the “year of the angry white male,” what will be in store for ’96?
“It will be a year of focus for women on trying to take advantage of the fewer opportunities we have,” Woods said. “It’s going to have to be a year for women to really focus on their priorities.”
Landmine action: Two groups, the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and an organization named Save the Children, sponsored a Mines Awareness Day on Capitol Hill last month, supporting national and international bans on the production and use of landmines.
The event followed so-far-unsuccessful efforts of the United Nations Review on Conventional Weapons in Vienna to end landmine use.
The UN estimates that as many as 110 million unexploded mines may be located in more than 60 countries, including Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia.
Approximately 90 percent of the victims of landmines are civilians, and 30 percent are women and children, according to the U.S. State Department.
