Women of Color Political Elites in the US: An Introduction, Personal Reflections, and a Call for Scholarly Engagement

KEYWORDS:

• Women of Color
• Intersectionality
• Political Behavior
• Political Elites

More women of color were sworn in to the 117th U.S. Congress than ever before. For instance, Cori Bush became the first Black woman elected from the state of Missouri, accomplishing this feat by taking down William Clay, whose family served in that seat for decades. Cori Bush’s victory, along with those of other women of color, is simultaneously something to celebrate and investigate. How can it be that in 2021, women of color elected officials are still achieving firsts? How have scholars assessed, theorized, and studied these women who are novel players in American government? Political Science, as a discipline, is merely decades out from viewing women of color via a single-axis lens of either race or gender. Thusly, scholars are still grappling with how to examine women of color by their own merits. This special issue seeks to do just that. The essays in this volume are chiefly concerned with studying the multiplicity of women of color political elites as distinct actors in American democracy. As guest co-editors of two issues on the subject, we wanted to curate a set of essays from both established and burgeoning thought leaders and empiricists on the complexities of seeking elected office and governing as women of color.

Political scientists have long recognized that women of color experience politics in a manner distinct from White women and men of color. Scholars such as Ange-Marie Hancock (2007) and Wendy Smooth (2006) have convincingly argued for the theoretical benefits of intersectionality research. In 2006, Smooth authored a piece in which she argued that intersectionality was “a mess worth making” and growing numbers followed suit by making a mess of traditional approaches to studying politics. For instance, Becki Scola wrote one of the first research articles with empirical data to show that the factors that account for the presence of women in state legislatures are really predictors of whether White women serve (Scola 2008). In 2014, Nadia Brown published the first book on Black women state lawmakers, and in the process introduced a novel framework, representational identity theory, for understanding these understudied actors. Just a year before, Christina Bejarano published a book arguing that Latina candidates are not doubly disadvantaged, but instead benefit from their racial and gender identities. In 2020, Reingold, Haynie, and Widner empirically demonstrated that when multiple identities are considered we learn something about politics that we otherwise would have missed. This is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list of research on the subject. We simply cite these studies as examples of a larger discourse of how scholars have begun to study women of color political elites.

From an even bigger picture perspective, let’s consider the creation of new journals centered on identity. Politics, Groups, and Identities was launched in 2013, and it is an outlet that has consistently published work on women of color and intersectionality research as well. The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics was launched in 2016 and has also been an outlet for such work. The creation of such outlets, those committed to studying identity politics and racial and ethnic politics, have been instrumental in publishing work on women of color political elites. These newer journals joined other more established journals such as the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy and Politics and Gender which published scholarship on women’s politics that were often intersectional in nature.

On the flip side, we as a discipline still have a lot to learn about women of color political elites. Indeed, the questions that Jewel Prestage Prestage (1977) asked in her foundational chapter in A Portrait of Marginality Prestage and Githens (1977) are still with scholars today. Even raising questions over whether a candidate’s race or gender matters more in elections points to the lack of recognition that these two things cannot be isolated for women of color. To do intersectional scholarship is to account for the overlapping systems of oppression or matrix of domination that animate the lives of women of color (Collins 2002; Crenshaw 1991). But it is necessary to decouple the study of women of color from intersectionality studies. While a vast majority of scholars use intersectionality as either a theoretical framework or analytical tool to examine the political experiences of women of color (Junn and Brown 2008; Simien 2007; Smooth 2006; Strolovitch and Wong 2017), the term intersectionality is not synonymous with women of color – or Black women in particular (Cooper 2016; Nash 2018). Although it is easy to do, scholars must be careful to not conflate intersectionality with studies of women of color. The conflation of the term with a particular set of bodies is incorrect and inaccurate despite its roots in Black feminism (Alexander-Floyd 2012; Nash 2008; Smooth 2016). Work that includes women of color with additive approaches but does not critically interrogate power relations and dynamics is not intersectionality. Intersectional research does not have to center women of color as all individuals hold various politically salient identities that shape their experience of politics and should be interrogated. In these special issues, we see the richness that comes from using a diverse array of intersectional approaches. When the guest co-editors began this process, we were deliberate on the kinds of pieces that we would solicit and how we wanted to articulate this project to the world. Doing so means that we were serious in our desire to advance scholarship on two fronts: 1) studies on women of color political elites as autonomous political actors and 2) intersectionality studies as a theoretical and/or methodological contribution to the field. Studies can simultaneously advance an intersectionality driven project as either a theory or a methodological approach and center on women of color as the unit of analysis or theoretical subject.

Here are some examples of the diversity manifest in this collection. For instance, we highlight the award-winning Race, Gender and Political Representation: Toward A More Intersectional Approach (Oxford University Press, (2020)) a book, written by Beth Reingold, Kerry Haynie, and Kirsten Widner, and reviewed by Guillermo Caballero. The book showcases the advantages as well as limitations of studying Black and Latina state legislators as raced/gendered lawmakers. We sought to pair the author of Race, Gender and Political Representation with a junior scholar as a part of dialogue on how to do intersectional analysis on women of color political elites. This deliberate pairing is an attempt to create generational conversations in political science among intersectional scholars. In their discussion, attention is paid to methodological tradeoffs made in assessing the complexities of identities that Black and Latina state legislators bring to bear on legislative decision making.

In another contribution, Stacey Greene, Yalidy Matos, and Kira Sanbonmatsu explore the political usefulness of identifying with the term “woman of color” when minority female candidates seek electoral office. Here, they are distinctly interested in examining if women of color as a term can be deployed to shore up voter support for minority women candidates. They show that Black, Afro-Latina, and non-Hispanic White women voters place varying importance on supporting women of color candidates. This essay also distills the limitations of language, group membership, and self-identification for women of color and their impact on electoral politics.

Whereas the Reingold et al. study is an example of intersectional methods informing how we study women of color, the Greene et al. study is an example of how studying women of color advances scholarly notices of gendered and racialized implications for political actors. We believe that is important to make room for these kinds of studies and take space in academic journals for the rigorous integration of the politics that inform, impact, and the influences of women of color political elites. While we highlighted a couple of the essays in the special issue within this introduction, all the essays tackle such important and timely questions.

Why we decided to co-guest edit these special issues

We think it is important to discuss why the three of us are co-guest editing a special issue on women of color political elites. The short answer is that we all care about expanding the scope of scholarly research to include subjects previously ignored or misrepresented in the discipline. Another answer is that we are part of a team conducting research on Black women political elites, so guest editing this special issue as a team flowed naturally out of our scholarly collaboration. But we are also aware that for at least two of us (Chris and Anna) it may come as a surprise to some that we are co-editing a special issue on women of color political elites. This surprise is due to our previous work including race without an emphasis on gender (Chris) and gender without an emphasis on race (Anna). In the following paragraphs we provide a brief overview of our intellectual journeys, with the goal of showing two things. First, within Political Science women of color themselves are performing the lions’ share of research on women of color (Smooth 2016). Second, in reflecting on our own evolution as scholars, we invite others to join in this endeavor, in light of, not in spite of, previous absences or silences.

I, Christopher Clark, have been guilty of isolating race and gender in my own work. As an undergraduate I majored in Political Science, and I also earned a certificate in Women’s Studies. One of the required courses was a capstone wherein I used Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought to analyze the careers of three Black congresswomen: Eleanor Holmes Norton, Shirley Chisholm, and Barbara Jordan. In my first year of graduate school, I wrote a seminar paper in which I analyzed feeling thermometer scores for Shirley Chisholm as dependent variables in an effort to see which groups of people held favorable views of her. But as I moved forward in my graduate school career and started thinking about a dissertation, my research focused more on Black Americans as a whole and thus I no longer centered women of color in my work. In the years to follow, my published work was on race, but from a single-axis perspective. This approach ultimately yielded a major university press book, Gaining Voice: The Causes and Consequences of Black Representation in the American States, Clark (2019) and tenure at a top 20 department, things for which I am grateful. Upon being granted tenure, I have reflected on my journey and two things are worth mentioning. First, in my last year in graduate school, I had the privilege to meet Jewel Prestage, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in the Political Science. She was visiting the University of Iowa, the place where we both earned our doctorate. Her advice to me was to study questions that are of importance, and as I look at our world today it is clear that understanding the experience of women of color is of the utmost importance. I also feel compelled to study women of color because it takes me back to my undergraduate days, when I had eyes opened to the realities of patriarchy and misogyny and to the male privilege I experience every day. My collaboration with Nadia E. Brown and Anna Mahoney gives me the opportunity to do go back to my intellectual roots, and I am honored to work with them and learn from them.

As a graduate student, Anna was lucky to be taught by scholars who have dedicated their careers to studying gender and race in politics. Having earned my master’s degree at the University of Alabama where I was taught by participants of the Civil Rights Movement, I knew I wanted to learn about the role of identity in politics, and I was drawn to an institution for my Ph.D., Rutgers University, that took that seriously. I am grateful that these special issues offer me a chance to consider my own intellectual journey, including how I have lived up to my own commitments and when I have not. When I began my dissertation research at Rutgers, I was interested in why women legislators who are different from each other work together. Obviously, many categories of identity were at play in these dynamics including party and race. Through my research, I learned that Black legislators opened the door for women to organize caucuses by legitimizing identity as politically salient to how the legislature was organized. This insight led me to develop hypotheses related to how the racial makeup of legislatures influenced the development of women’s caucuses. This project would turn into my book, Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures: The Creation of Women’s Caucuses, Mahoney (2018) wherein I looked at four case studies where these groups were attempted. Out of these four caucus attempts, only one was initiated by a Black women legislator. Other groups were cognizant of the importance of racial diversity among their leadership, but as a scholar I failed to interrogate how race may constrain or inspire Black women legislators’ strategic choices to organize. While I considered the role of race and tested some hypotheses in this direction, I would certainly deploy a more robust approach as the scholar I am today. Thankfully, in my partnership with Nadia and Chris, I am able to center Black women in caucus development which I think will illuminate richly the dynamics of organizing within institutions.

Part of my evolution as a scholar is due to my partnerships with scholars like Chris and Nadia. I learn not only from their research (although it is extensive and impressive) but also by how they experience the discipline of Political Science. I am daily reminded by their interactions and my own how institutions – be they governments or universities – are structured by race and gender and in turn shape us as individuals. These reminders inform the research we do together and continue to influence my development of research questions and approaches. Being a part of these special issues widens that net for me and enables me to learn from even more scholars’ work.

Nadia’s academic journey to studying Black women in politics is a bit different from her co- editors. As a Black girl, I was always intrigued by the political work that I witnessed Black women undertake in my community and noticed that these women were often times not the formal leaders of organizations, churches, or civic associations. Outside of exclusive Black women’s spaces such as sororities, the majority of politically active Black women with whom I came in contact were not in leadership positions. This insight led me to question the role of Black women as workers in political and other civic spaces but again not as formal leaders within these organizations and why institutions often shut them out. As a child, I was a nascent Black feminist but did not have the language nor baseline knowledge to communicate my great dissatisfaction with Black girls’ and women’s secondary marginalization in my community (and within my own family). Thankfully, I attended Howard University – a historically Black university – where I began to develop an analytical lens of Black feminism questioning foundational texts in Black politics and the strategic inclusion or absence of Black women in scholarship. It was here where I developed a deep appreciation for theory that helped me to make sense of the world around me and Black women’s prescribed roles in society. I had the good fortune of being admitted into the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute which changed the entire career trajectory. Under the tutelage of Professor Paula McClain, I was able to empirically study Black women’s policy preferences as an attempt to measure their racialized and gendered consciousness. In sum, I tried to measure what made Black women tick politically.

I wanted to answer some of the burning questions of my youth around Black women’s political engagement through empirical analysis. In graduate school at Rutgers University, I was able to develop a skill set that enabled me to ask more sophisticated questions about Black women’s political leadership. I was delighted to embark upon a dissertation project that centered Black women’s politics that was advised by an-all feminist dissertation committee (and one that was primarily comprised of women of color). But the dissertation project was not the study that I truly wanted to write – it was a comparative analysis of Black women, Black men, White men, and White women state legislators to help show the differences that Black women bring to deliberative policy making processes. Thankfully, I had the opportunity to write the story that I ultimately wanted to tell – that a young Nadia would be proud of as it sought to directly speak to her questions about Black women’s political leadership – in Sisters in the Statehouse Brown (2014) where I was able to solely feature Black women state legislators in their own right without having to compare them to other groups in order to showcase political decision making. This intracategorical approach to an intersectional analysis of Black women’s politics has become the hallmark of my career. This current scholarly endeavor with Chris and Anna is an outpouring of my desire to learn more about Black women political leaders. These special issues are a more comprehensive and inclusive take on the inner workings of women of color political elites – an extension of my first research question.

Where we go from here

Political Science in 2021 is at a crossroads. For years, scholars, mostly women of color themselves, have directed political scientists, especially empiricists, to take seriously that single-axes approaches provide limited insight and may not be as revealing as intersectional approaches, and in some instances can be misleading by masking important dynamics within the data. Will we as a discipline listen to their calls for rethinking how scholarship is approached? Will more scholars join that subset of political scientists who continue to do the hard work of recognizing the many forms of identity that inform a person’s political life and behavior? We have told the stories of our intellectual journeys to illustrate research’s imperfections and aspirations. Political Science needs more scholars willing to question their own approaches and engage new perspectives. In particular, thoughtful engagement with existing literature and the scholars who have come before coupled with an open mind and a willingness to improve are critical for researchers joining this conversation. We hope our own research collaboration will be fruitful. But most importantly, we seek to advance not only the literature about Black women in politics but also demonstrate ways of working together within diverse teams. We are different across race, gender, methodological training, academic rank, and are constantly working to leverage those differences and bridge our divides. We know, like our own trajectories, it will not be perfect, but we are grateful to get into the mess together – as we believe that intersectionality is a “mess worth making” (Smooth 2006).

We are also deeply grateful to Lead Editor Becki Scola for inviting us to undertake this project. The Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy is committed to advancing scholarly understandings of women of color in American politics. Our hope is that these special issues contribute to the growing body of research on this subject.

The need is great. Rather than seeing women of color political elites as either raced or gendered political actors or assessing research done of this group as a catchall intersectional study, we make clear to scholars the limitations in how we teach this information to students, assess it in siloed cannons that have often been exclusionary to women of color, or fundamentally ignore this group because they do not neatly comport into single-axis categories of analysis (Simien and Hancock 2011). Furthermore, we offer these special issues as an opportunity for scholars to pay particular attention to institutional contexts that animate how women of color respond to shifts in oppression, privilege, and marginalization. Intersectional studies simultaneously account for the dynamisms of social identities and structural or institutional barriers that can create twin opportunities for both exclusion and inclusion for women of color political elites. The complexity of intersectional analysis and theory building as well as the opportunity to learn more about the experiences of ethno-racial minority women political elites in the United States offers an array of research possibilities.

Our own personal journeys to this work are an example of how we as scholars as well as the discipline have often been shortsighted. We are heartened that we are not alone in this endeavor to advance a body of both intersectional scholarship and research on women of color as political actors. In fact, there is a growing body of scholars who are making this case in a variety of ways (i.e., Alexander-Floyd 2021; Bejarano 2013; Fraga et al. 2006; Hardy-Fanta et al. 2016; Jordan-Zachery 2007; Masuoka and Junn 2013). We implore other scholars to take up this cause and continue to grow the canon of scholarship on women of color and intersectional studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nadia E. Brown

Nadia E. Brown (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is a Professor of Government, chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and affiliate in the African American Studies program at Georgetown University. She specializes in Black women’s politics and holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Brown’s research interests lie broadly in identity politics, legislative studies, and Black women’s studies. While trained as a political scientist, her scholarship on intersectionality seeks to push beyond disciplinary constraints to think more holistically about the politics of identity.

Christopher J. Clark

Christopher J. Clark is Associate Professor of Political Science at UNC Chapel Hill. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2010 and earned a B.A. from Saint Louis University in 2005. He studies minority representation in the US with a particular focus on state politics. He is the author of Gaining Voice (Oxford University Press, 2019), and he has published articles in outlets such as State Politics and Policy Quarterly, Politics and Gender, Political Research Quarterly, and Political Behavior.

Anna Mahoney

Mahoney Anna is an Administrative Associate Professor of Women’s Political Leadership and Director of Research at Newcomb Institute at Tulane University. Anna’s research is centered on representation and gendered institutions, which is explored in her book, Women Take Their Place in State Legislatures: The Creation of Women’s Caucuses (Temple University Press, 2018). She has published articles in Politics & Gender, Representation, Political Research Quarterly and Legislative Studies Quarterly.