Rural districts are the new frontier for women running for office

[WhiteTara]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rural-districts-new-frontier-women-running-office-151657942.html

At the moment when Esther Roberts decided to run for elected office, she was standing far from her home in Somers, Wisc., amid a sea of pink hats at the March for Women in Washington, D.C., in January 2017. And a few weeks later, when she decided exactly what elected office she was going to run for, she was back home on her computer looking at photos of the seven white men who were the trustees of her local village board.

“As soon as I saw that, I knew I’d made my choice,” says Roberts, who works as a housing inspector in Kenosha when she isn’t out asking for votes. “Right now, my 9-year-old-daughter isn’t represented on that board; half of my village isn’t represented on that board; I’m not represented on that board.”
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Roberts is typical of the thousands of women who have entered the political arena in the past 18 months in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. But she is also representative of something more — the subset of that group who are running in rural areas, often for local seats, encouraged and assisted by nonprofits that see particular value in increasing the number of women in office in farm country.

“Women from rural areas are woefully underrepresented in government at all levels,” says Liz Johnson, a co-founder of VoteRunLead and head of that group’s Rural Women’s Initiative. For instance, she says, 51 percent of Minnesota’s 87 county commissions have no women on them, and all but one of those are in rural areas, she says.

[niyad]

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