Women comprise 51% of the United States, make up half of the economy, and have more representation today than ever in Congress. Now three women—and dozens of others behind them—want to harness that power to amplify women’s voices, increase civic engagement and drive change.
Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards teamed up with Alicia Garza, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and Ai-jen Poo, the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, to launch Supermajority on Monday, a new women’s political action group.
“The animating principle behind this effort is that we need an abundance in the field of women’s organizing,” said Richards. “There’s so many groups, some who have signed on to the leadership committee, others who have raised their hands to say, we would love to have the folks involved, whether it’s in education issues, teacher pay, family separation, immigration.”
The organization bills itself as a “home for women’s activism,” with the intention of educating, training, and mobilizing a “multiracial, intergenerational community to fight for gender equity,” or a ‘Women’s New Deal.’ Relying on their nearly 75 years of organizing experience combined, the trio wants to bring women of all ages and walks of life together.
“I think there’s an exciting thing that I have seen happen, when women of various walks of life and backgrounds get to come together and sit in a room,” said Richards.
Over the next year, Supermajority intends to enlist 2 million women for this task—with the hope that they, in turn, will inspire millions more. By getting women trained and involved, they will be better positioned to ensure that women’s voices are heard when developing policy, at the ballot box, and in legislative agendas.
The issues they will focus on range from pay equity to affordable child care. But this will be no top-down approach: Richards, Garza, and Poo already spent the past year meeting women across the country and plan to continue traveling, spending the next few months finding out what issues are most important to them. Ultimately, this work will help inform the agenda they build.
“These are issues like affordable health care, affordable housing, fair wages, pay equity, affordable child care, and affordable elder care,” Garza said. “These are issues that don’t just impact women and issues that not just women care about. These are issues that impact the entire country and should be national imperatives.”
A second component of Supermajority is the Supermajority Education Fund, which will invest in research and education to understand and amplify the civic engagement and the role of women in communities across the country.
For now, the organization has no plans to endorse a candidate in the 2020 election: its goals will remain focused on developing and pushing a women-informed agenda for politicians to adopt.
