Saturday, November 29, 2008

Facts About Female Elections Past and Present.

A website that has been a major contributor to my blog is www.cawp.rutgers.edu
I spoke about it in my last blog as well; however I continue to find really good sources and articles that pertain to my blog topic of Women in Politics. I was searching through this website trying to find something to write about and under the facts tab are tons of facts about not only this year’s elections but elections that date back to 1996. Along with election results were fact sheets and historical summaries of women candidates that were running for office this year as well as many previous elections. I found one sheet that listed all of the women candidates running for Congressional and Statewide offices in 2007. The sheet showed what office they were running for, the state in which they were running, whether the seat was open, incumbent, or there was a challenger as well as the result of the election. I was actually very surprised to see that in over 100 elections that women were running in, they won over 90 percent of them. As well as fact sheets on elections there are also facts and reports that are made available by the CAWP that show voter turnout, gender gap, women’s vote watch in this year’s election as well as past years, as well as facts about Resources for and About Women of Color. I also noticed that the web site included links to other websites that offered campaign training for women. This site was called “Ready to Run” and is a bi-partisan national effort to recruit and train women to run for all levels of office. The amount of information on this web site that covered female politics is amazing, I only wish that I could have found this site earlier in the semester when I first started my blog project.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Website connected to Women's Politics.

A major source to most of the information found on my blog came from http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/
This web site is dedicated to awareness of not only female politics but women’s rights all over the nation. This is the official web site for the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), and is a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. CAWP has been analyzing and interpreting women’s participation in American politics for almost four decades and is nationally recognized as the leading source of scholarly research and current data about American women’s political participation. The Center for American Women and Politics mission is to promote greater knowledge and understanding about women’s participation in politics and government and to enhance women’s influence and leadership in public life.
I found the web site to be most helpful in keeping me up to date on all of the elections where a woman was running for state legislature, governor, congress, and even democratic nominee when Hillary Clinton was still a possibility. CAWP had links to all of these women’s home web sites where I found a lot of up to date info on their campaigns and main headlines as well as few stories. Also there are links at CAWP that allow you to watch the polls in races that women were running.
One article I found interesting was a story about president-elect Barack Obama who has a standard to meet or beat the record proportion of women appointed under President Bill Clinton which at one point had 9 of the 19 cabinet members that were women. Currently there have only been 33 women to ever serve in the Presidential Cabinet. “This is just one way that the Obama administration will reflect the nation’s diversity, including many strong women like those who have helped to shape his life and career.”