What female leadership tells the people
Nov. 6, 2018, was the day that more than 100 women were elected to Congress.
While Republicans kept the Senate majority, the Democrats achieved control over the House.
This is a day people will cherish as a step forward for a country that values every person despite their gender, sex, religion or ethnicity.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest woman to be elected to the House at just 29 years old.
Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are the first Muslim women to be elected to Congress.
Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland are the first Native American women to be elected to Congress.
Ayanna Pressley is the first African-American woman elected to congress from Massachusetts.
And Marsha Blackburn is the first woman senator in Tennessee.
The women who ran for Congress, whether they won or not, did not just make history: they showed everyone that women do not need to fit a mold to win.
They can come from all different backgrounds and still be qualified to be a leader for the American people.
This matters because of the representation that these women provide for the public.
Many women underestimate their qualifications and feel that they are not good enough to run for a seat in Congress, or they feel like they do not have a chance against highly qualified, older men.
The more women who are elected, the more young girls will be inspired to follow their dreams and know that their voice matters.
This tells young women that they can have it all.
We, as women, do not have to fit a mold to deserve the right to be listened to. Our voices matter.
What we feel matters.
We deserve to be represented in our country while not feeling like we always have to claw and scream for our voices to be heard.
Women being more represented in Congress than ever before proves that more people who believe in the power of women are voting. It says that women are no longer looked down upon when it comes to politics.
The number of women who won is amazing, because women are finally going to have a more influential voice in Congress.
However, even though there are more women in congress than there have been in the past, there is still progress to be made. The representation of women in Congress does not equal the population of women in the United States.
In the 2010 Census, 50.8 percent of people in the country were female while 49.2 percent were male. Yet, women make up 20 percent of the 535 members of congress, while men makeup 80 percent.
We the people get to elect who represents our voices. Therefore, it is important that we make these decisions wisely. These women we elected are moms, nurses, flight attendants, MMA fighters, bartenders.
These women are the women we see every day walking past us. The ones we talk to and don’t think much about.
These are the women who will change the world for the better, who listen to our voices and who make a difference.
These are the women who show young girls their voice matters and that people deserve to be listen to. They show men and boys that women are powerful, and they deserve the respect to be treated as equals.
We look around today and all of us see how society has progressed, but there’s still more progress to be made.
Let the success of the women in the 2018 election remind us to work hard everyday and ensure that everyone feels they have representation in the country.
Congressmen and congresswomen are the people we elect to represent all of us.
Let’s continue to elect more women, more people who are LGBTQ+, more people who are of different religions and more people who are of different ethnicities.
America is one of the greatest melting pots in human history. Every person in this country deserves to know that they are important, and that there is someone who cares about them to be their voice when they feel they do not have one.
