UMaine Program to Foster Next Generation of Women in Politics
Contact: Mary Cathcart at (207) 866-3054; Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — When your represent the ratio of women to men who have served in the U.S. Congress as a pie chart, it looks less like pie and more like a cheese wheel with a sliver missing.
Between 1796 and 2001, 206 women have served in Congress, compared with 11,433 men. In 2003, women held only 22.3 percent of state legislative seats, 14 percent of U.S. Senate seats and 13.6 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives.
MaineNEW Leadership, a new initiative at the University of Maine, aims to give women a bigger slice of the political pie. Starting in 2009, up to 40 college-age women from Maine will have the opportunity to participate in a weeklong intensive residential training program targeting then ext generation of leaders.
The program began in 1991 at the Center for American Women inP olitics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. UMaine is the newest partner in NEW Leadership’s 17-member national network.
“Maine has had so many strong women leaders, and we are thrilled to bring the NEW Leadership model to Maine’s future women leaders,” said Mary Cathcart, a former Maine legislator who now is a senior policy associate at UMaine’s Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center.
Cathcart and her colleagues Rebekah Smith, Eva McLaughlin and Glenn Beamer began working on Maine’s proposal last summer. Since then, U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe; state legislators such as Emily Cain, Carol Weston, Hannah Pingree, and Libby Mitchell; and campus leaders such as Ann Schonberger, Sharon Barker, Janet Waldron, and Amy Fried have pledged their support.
In June, Cathcart and Smith, a lawyer and policy fellow at the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center, traveled to Rutgers to see how the program works. The week was jam-packed with sessions on leadership development, networking, diversity training and the realities of holding public office. Students also took part in an action project, where they were divided into groups, researched a political issue, and presented testimony to a mock legislative panel. In Maine, the lineup will be similar, with one exception: after the young women travel to Augusta for a State House visit, they’ll stop in Skowhegan for a tour of Margaret Chase Smith’s home and the library named in her honor.
Cathcart and her colleagues are in the process of raising nearly $70,000 to ensure the NEW Leadership program is open to all Maine college women at no cost to the participants. Application materials will be available in early 2009.
It is Cathcart’s hope that the program will instill an earlier, and stronger, calling to serve in young women.
“Young men grow up thinking they want to be president,” Cathcart said. “Young women don’t grow up to think that way. Women leaders generally need to be asked several times before they’ll consider running for office. The idea behind the program is for college women to understand the importance of serving in office and of civic engagement, particularly in your community and your state.”