Correction: Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Karen R. Baker was elected in 2010 to finish the term of retiring Justice Annabelle Clinton Imber. This article incorrectly stated that Baker was appointed to fill the position.
A record number of Arkansas Republican women are seeking office this election year and, for the first time ever, next year the state Supreme Court will have a female majority.
Arkansas has a history of strides-making women in politics. The first woman to serve a full term as a U.S. senator was Hattie Caraway, who made her way from Jonesboro to Washington, D.C. Caraway was first appointed to fill the term of her husband, Thaddeus, who died while in office, but she later ran for election and won.
Some female politicians, candidates and organizers say the state has fallen behind in terms of the overall number of women serving in state and federal political offices. The Center for American Women and Politics ranked Arkansas 41st in the nation in terms of the proportion of female politicians.
No Arkansas women currently hold federal or constitutional offices, and the number of women serving in the 135-member General Assembly has dropped since a peak of 31 in 2009. There are currently 23 women total serving in both chambers.
Caroline Hupp, executive director of the Hattie Caraway Foundation, said having more women in office would lead to better policies. The foundation, which says it is dedicated to “progressive values and empowering women,” was started last fall to promote the political interests of young women and support female candidates.
“The goal is ultimately to have as many women as men serving in political office. I’m absolutely hopeful that we can make the changes we need to, because there’s no reason the Legislature should look like it does right now,” she said.
Hupp said the foundation is focusing on fundraising to create a stipend program so young Arkansas women can have an easier time pursuing often unpaid political internships.
Internships are often an entryway for future officeholders.
Roughly one-quarter (108) of the 413 people who filed as candidates with the secretary of state’s office this year are women. Filing were 29 Republicans, 20 Democrats, one Libertarian, and 58 nonpartisan judicial and prosecutorial candidates.
That’s an increase from the two most recent election cycles.
“It’s definitely encouraging, and hopefully it means we’re heading in the right direction again,” Hupp said.
Thirty-three women are running for seats in the state House this year, including 10 incumbents. Five women are running for the state Senate; four of those are incumbents.
Twenty-four of the 38 women running for the Legislature are Republicans, a fact applauded by the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national Republican organization that runs the “Right Women, Right Now” initiative to support female Republican candidates.
In addition to the women who filed for legislative offices, two filed for federal offices and seven others filed for state constitutional offices.
Sen. Joyce Elliott, a Little Rock Democrat, was first elected to the Arkansas Senate in 2000 and ran unsuccessfully for U.S. representative in 2012. Although she doesn’t face an opponent this year, she said it has not been easy in recent decades for women to be elected to state or federal offices.
“I get struck sometimes by how lonely it is, and how discouraging it is to get started,” Elliott said.
She said people told her repeatedly that running for the state Senate would be “hard.”
“They said everything except, ‘You just can’t do this,’” she said. “I think I was supposed to just get the message and withdraw. There seems to be a deference to men that doesn’t automatically come for women who are running for office.”
Elliott said some of the issues women face when running for office relate to age. When women are younger, she said, they’re expected to play a larger role in their children’s lives, especially if the children are young. She said few if any of the 23 women in the General Assembly have school-aged children while they’ve been in office.
Rep. Charlotte Douglas, R-Alma, is running unopposed for re-election this year. She retired from teaching when she decided to run for office in 2012.
“I have 12 grandchildren who were eager for me to retire” from teaching, she said. “But one of the most important factors I had in running for office was the support of my family. They got behind me.”
“I had seven mayors and four school districts in my district,” Douglas said about her first campaign. “We were at a meeting every night. I definitely think it would have been very difficult to campaign to that level if I had had small children at home. We still might have won, but the campaign would have been very different.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Elliott said many women are “aged out” of office.
“Think about the conversation going on right now about Hillary Clinton,” she said, referring to the potential 2016 presidential bid by the 66-year-old former secretary of state, and former U.S. and Arkansas first lady. Some have questioned whether Clinton would be too old to serve. “That same conversation doesn’t happen around older men who run for office. Her age has become a talking point, but why?”
The state Democratic and Republican parties have a strong structure of women’s committees at the county,state and regional levels. The focus of those committees has changed over the past 30-40 years from supporting male candidates to finding and cultivating female leaders in the parties, party organizers said.
Douglas said the landscape for women in politics has changed.
“I never felt like as a woman, I was given a backseat. Our party was looking for strong candidates, and I never got the impression that the party was … not looking at women as strong candidates,” she said. “I do think fewer women think about politics as a career. Women, I think in the past, haven’t been running because they haven’t been asked. More women need to jump in and see this as an opportunity and not wait for that invitation. I think we’re getting by that just a little bit.”
Former Democratic state Rep. Johnnie Roebuck worked in campaigns all her life, stuffing envelopes, making phonecalls, organizing and getting out the vote for several presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Roebuck said her experience of women in the Democratic Party standing back and waiting is similar to Douglas’ experience, and she also hopes that is changing.
“I didn’t think I would serve, because I was in the background. But if you’re running a campaign, you could be a candidate,” she said. “I think too many women wait to be asked to run for office, and that is something men just don’t do. That is something we need to work to change. ”
The first female candidate was elected to the Arkansas House in 1922, when there were no designated women’s restrooms in the building or nearby, and when women were still prohibited from entering certain areas of the Capitol. It took more than 40 years for the first female state senator to be elected in 1964, when Dorothy Allen won in a special election to replace her husband, Tom Allen, who had died in office.
Over the entire history of the General Assembly, about 116 women have served in the 135-member body - not enough to make up a full class of both chambers.
Roebuck, who is involved with the nonpartisan group Women Lead Arkansas, said more groups - including churches, chambers of commerce, city councils and county judges - need to train women to be leaders at all levels of community service.
“We’re just going to be there to support these women, whatever they need moving forward, regardless of their party affiliation,” she said. “I think the problem hasn’t been in standing up and saying you’re going to run for office, throwing your hat in the ring. The problem has been winning. I never felt I needed to campaign any differently than a man, and the women running now shouldn’t feel they have to either.”
Two female candidates running for Supreme Court associate justice seats won’t have to campaign this year, after drawing no opponents during the filing period. Justice Karen R. Baker, who was previously appointed to finish the term of a retiring justice, and Conway Court of Appeals Judge Rhonda Wood, running for the open Position 7 judgeship, will take their seats in January and tip the balance of the court.
When the two women are sworn in, there will be four women on the court, meaning the majority of the seven-member body will be female for the first time in Arkansas history.
Arkansas has lagged in female participation on the Supreme Court, with a handful of women being appointed to the court since 1975. The first female justice wasn’t elected by voters until 1997 when Justice Annabelle Imber Tuck won.
Some of the highest courts in 10 other states also currently have a female majority - the New York Court of Appeals, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the supreme courts of North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, California, Maryland, Wisconsin, Washington and New Jersey.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/17/2014