The first female majority on the Sacramento City Council in 30 years is worth celebrating
I’ve been working lately on holding two things that can be true at once. Even, and perhaps especially, seemingly opposing truths.
I can enjoy time with my family and friends this December, and still feel exhausted by social interactions and the demands of the holiday season.
And I can be excited that the city of Sacramento now has a female-majority council, and simultaneously furious that it has taken my entire lifetime to get back to that point.
Because the last time this happened was in 1989: The year the Berlin Wall fell, protests erupted in Tiananmen Square, the first Bush was president, “Seinfeld” premiered — and I had just been born.
For that matter, so had new District 3 Councilwoman Karina Talamantes. New District 5 Councilwoman Caity Maple wasn’t even alive yet and wouldn’t be for another two years.
What I’m trying to say is: It’s been a minute, and the world has changed.
Talamantes and Maple, along with new District 1 Councilwoman Lisa Kaplan, join current Councilwomen Mai Vang and Katie Valenzuela on the dais, creating Sacramento’s first female majority in more than three decades, and only its second ever since the city’s incorporation in 1850. The increased number of women on the council also represents a stark change from 1989-92, when the female majority on the Sacramento City Council included Mayor Anne Rudin, Heather Fargo, Kim Mueller, Lyla Ferris and Lynn Robie; or the recent years when former Councilwoman Angelique Ashby was the only female city representative.
Kaplan, Maple and Talamantes are all intelligent, vibrant, thoughtful elected officials who consider themselves public servants of Sacramento and wish to be good stewards of the community.
The cynical may call it naivete, but in my decade-plus of reporting on various city councils around Northern California, I have never held such hope for thoughtful, sincere policymaking as I do now with the election of these new councilwomen.
“Just in my personal opinion, women tend to be a little bit more collaborative,” Maple told me. “So I’m really excited to see a future where we’re collaborating on projects, and not just as a city but as a region.”
They’ll need that commitment to collaboration, as they’ll inherit a city council that has traditionally clashed with the county of Sacramento, most publicly on issues of homelessness.
“Homelessness is the number one issue,” Talamantes said. “We’ll have a new senator, a new Assembly member. … We have a new supervisor, a new council — and I’m hopeful that we can meet and go on a retreat if need be. But we need to come up with a regional solution for all of us.”
Kaplan, in particular, brings her years of education experience to the job and has worked with current county Supervisor Patrick Kennedy of District 2, District 3 Supervisor Rich Desmond, and incoming District 5 Supervisor Pat Hume in various school board settings.
“Relationships can make things happen. And then the ‘D’ and the ‘R’ go away,” Kaplan said. “The voting public … they want to see us doing things. They don’t want to see fights.”
Yet a fight is what they’ll have regardless — not necessarily in the council chambers but outside them — as women in positions of power are subject to alarming rates of harassment, misogyny and even assault.
Just last month, a man was arrested for threatening to kill Councilwomen Valenzuela, Vang, and Talamantes and councilwoman-turned-state Sen. Ashby. In April, before the midterm election, Talamantes was in a Zoom-based candidate forum that was hacked with pornography and sexist and racist messages.
The Threats and Harassment Dataset is a new national database developed by Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative and The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. They found that women who are public officials were targeted at a higher frequency than others, accounting for nearly 43% of recorded incidents between January 2020 and September 2022.
Studies by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue have comparable findings, suggesting increasing rates of violence, harassment and threats toward women in politics, especially women of color.
“Anytime people try to scare or intimidate me, it makes me want to push that much harder to do the work that I think is important,” Maple said. “I think that we need to stand up and not allow people to silence us and not allow people to instill fear in us, because that means that they win.”
Women make up approximately 51% of the population, and yet we are still relegated to celebrating these tiny milestones as though they are huge accomplishments. Even women gaining the right to vote is not so far out of living memory; my great-grandmother was a child in 1919 when the 19th Amendment was ratified, and our lives crossed by more than two decades.
In 2023, there will be more female governors than ever before (nine), including the nation’s first out, lesbian governors: Tina Kotek of Oregon and Maura Healey of Massachusetts. In another gain for representation, 2022 also marked the first year openly LGBTQ+ candidates ran in all 50 states.
In cities with a population of more than 10,000, women make up about 31% of officeholders, according to a study by the Center for American Women and Politics. In California, that number is closer to 39%. In West Sacramento, all five council members are women.
At the same time, those numbers mainly represent white women, and there is a dearth of women of color in politics. There has been no Black woman in the U.S. Senate since Kamala Harris resigned to take the vice presidency, and only two Black women have ever served in the Senate.
The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg once said that she was sometimes asked, “When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court?” and she replied, “When there are nine. … There’s been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
The quote has become something of a rallying cry for women who are still waiting for empowerment and representation.
And of course, no woman has ever held the top job, despite Hillary Clinton’s winning the popular vote in 2016.
These gradual gains, carefully woven together over decades like a piece of lace handed down from mother to daughter, are still too fragile. They are a reminder that progress is not inevitable.
I wish I could celebrate these wins without feeling the weight of their lateness. I wish I could express my joy at the election of Maple, Talamantes and Kaplan without the heavy knowledge that they will be targeted and harassed solely on their basis of their sex.
Gender does not define a person’s politics — I wish it were that easy — but it is relevant to Sacramento’s push toward parity, however incremental it may be.
In 2022, it’s still something to celebrate, and yet I look forward to the day when it’s common enough that we wouldn’t think to celebrate.
This story was originally published December 15, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
