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A few weeks ago, the clerk of the South Carolina Senate called each of the 46 senators by name and asked them all to stand and raise their right hands. He needed to swear them into a new session. There were zero women running among the Republican supermajority.
Voters had not elected a single person to the House of Representatives in November.
More than a decade later, the Senate Republican caucus is once again an all-male club, determined to make decisions on issues that directly affect women, including abortion, in vitro fertilization, and Medicaid coverage for lactation specialists, to name a few. It will be. Only two women were elected to the full House in the November election, and both are Democrats. Neither party is likely to wield much power, given that Republicans control the progress of the bill going forward.
Women are not well represented on the other side of the state capitol. Only 10% of South Carolina House Republicans are women.
A similar post-election story is playing out across the Southeast, a region long defined by traditional culture and conservative politics. Republican women were defeated in all but one state in the region that held congressional elections last fall, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and South Carolina. Tennessee was the only exception. Tennessee voters added one pure Republican woman to Congress.
As ProPublica reported this time last year, most of the region’s legislatures were severely under-represented by women even before the election. In many parts of the Southeast, women make up less than one in five state legislators, and most states consistently rank last on virtually every measure of women’s health and well-being.
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In the United States, the number of women in Congress will increase again in 2024. One-third of state legislators nationwide are women, the highest number ever. In the November elections, women won 43 seats in all state legislatures in the country (7,386 seats). Although only four Democrats were elected, Democratic women still hold nearly twice as many seats overall.
However, the gains made by Republican women were not reflected in the Southeast. The losses were not large, with only one to three Republican women in each Congress. But if you have a small number to begin with, losing just one can make a big difference.
“It has a much more significant impact on the likelihood that certain opinions and lived experiences will be featured in debates and conversations,” said Kelly Dittmer, professor of political science and director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. said. The leading group tracking women’s political participation.
Dittmar didn’t see this trend in other regions. “There’s more than one story,” she said. “Rather, there are a lot of unique stories based around the state.”
More women were elected to office in South Dakota and New Hampshire, according to the center’s tally completed in mid-December. Wisconsin lost six Republican women and gained 11 Democratic women. Connecticut lost five Republican women, but the Democratic Party remained strong. Maine lost five Democrats but gained four Republicans. In California, women from both parties won seats.
Sabrina Schulman, chief political officer at Vote Run Read, which trains female candidates, said, “We’ve seen many gains in female representation across the country, but it’s still a tough battle in the Southeast.” Ta. He says that entrenched gender roles still influence voting decisions, and that traditionally-minded Republicans (both men and women) believe that men are stronger, more qualified, and more capable of leadership. There is a tendency to think that.
Dittmar added that President Donald Trump’s campaign emphasized masculinity, which had a trickle-down effect. Republican voters, including female candidates, seem to prefer candidates seen as more masculine, or at least less “anti-male,” she said.
Some Republican women who might have considered running for office were hesitant to campaign in today’s hyper-masculine politics. The Center for American Women’s Politics found an overall decline in the number of women candidates for state legislatures, but the biggest decline was among Republican women.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans have “largely rejected attempts to target support, recruitment, training, and funding for women candidates,” Dittmer said. “Conservatives are still overwhelmingly white and male, and the party is made up of people who don’t see a problem with the fact that there are so few women in Congress.
Three Republican incumbent women in the South Carolina Senate all lost their seats after fighting strict abortion bans on the floor along with two other women (one Democrat and one independent). National headlines spotlighted a bipartisan group called “Sister Senators.”
Senator Katrina Seeley was the most senior of the three and the only female chair of the Senate Standing Committee. When he was first elected to the Senate in 2012, he arrived in the state’s capital, Columbia, and became an all-male senator. After more than 10 years, she leaves it alone again.
But when she was first elected, women leaders had established themselves across state politics. Then-Governor Nikki Haley was a key ally. The chief justice of the state supreme court was a woman. Well, the Governor is now a man again. The same goes for the Senate President. and the Speaker of the House. And the judge. The state Supreme Court was understaffed when it upheld current abortion laws in 2023. Recently, a female judge was added.
“If men could take away the right to vote from women, they would do it,” Seeley said. “Look at South Carolina and what we’ve done. We don’t want women to have any say. That’s clear.”
How many of your state’s representatives are women? If you live in the Southeast, it might be only one in five.
In the South Carolina General Assembly, Seeley was widely known as a leading legislative advocate for children. She blamed her primary defeat not only on low turnout in the runoff, but also on the fact that Republican women in her home state often still adhere to traditional gender roles. .
“Republican women have always taken the position that we need to support men,” Seeley said. “Especially in the South, they allow themselves to be submissive to men.”
She wonders to what extent are people aware that men now exclusively make decisions about issues that affect women, especially reproductive health care? South Carolina currently has a six-week abortion ban, but conservative members of the House have proposed a bill that would ban abortions from the point of conception, essentially what Shealey and other female senators opposed. The bill has been pre-filed. This bill is proposed by 3 women and 29 men. If the bill moves to the Senate, not a single Republican would debate or vote on the restrictions.
