Gillibrand's Bipartisan Partisan Pitch to Women

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When House Republicans made defunding Planned Parenthood a central talking point in passing their budget cuts, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand seized the moment.

“You may not balance the budget on the backs of women. Period,” she said on the floor of the Senate in April. “The election last November was not about a mandate for these social issues.”

A month later, she laid into Congressional Republicans at a May event in New York, where she was honored by NARAL Pro-Choice New York for her defense of abortion rights. She blasted them for advocating cuts to women’s health programs under the banner of opposition to abortion.

“It had nothing to do with abortion!” she shouted. “They like to blur the issue and confuse the issue so they use the abortion as the way to defund prenatal care, precancer screenings, breast exams.”

“They also, while they were at it, defunded early childhood education, nutrition for women and infants,” she continued. “Everything that women care about in this country has been placed on the chopping block. Everything.”

Fiery feminist leader is just the latest role for Gillibrand, who’s preparing for her campaign for her first full term in the U.S. Senate. No longer the upstate NRA darling who was appointed to the seat, nor the advocate of 9/11 First Responders who drew unabashed praise from New Yorkers, including Jon Stewart. Now she’s making a play for a bigger power base: Women voters nationwide.

After the budget battles created this opening, Gillibrand has been leading a coordinated defense on two fronts. There are her policy positions, which start with unreconstructed feminist priorities — parity in health care and in the workplace along with abortion rights — but she’s grounding that in a broad call for more participation from women sounds more like Oprah than Hillary.

It’s a savvy play to fill the vacuum for a generation of women who don’t see themselves in feminist lobbying groups that have defined Democratic women’s issues for decades.

“There is a group of women looking for their charge, said Kiki McLean, a Hillary Clinton campaign alum and fan of Gillibrand’s. “And I think that’s a real leadership role opportunity for her.”

Her Style

Even as Gillibrand has become a leading voice for feminists, she brings a different tone — and different optics — to the conversation.

Part of that is generational: Gillibrand graduated college in 1988, well after the defeat of the ERA the last time around. At 45, she’s less “The Feminine Mystique” and more “Working Girl.”

Another part is biographical. A mother to two young boys — her youngest was a year old when she was appointed to the Senate — Gillibrand did not wait until her children were grown to launch her political career, like the women a generation before.

“I have a lot in common with most women. I have kids, I’m a working mom. We have to juggle my schedules every day, like every working parent all across this country,” Gillibrand said in her Washington office recently. “So I think that commonality and that understanding of some of the real challenges in our society, I think makes a difference.”

It gives her arguments like including child care in the debate about jobs a certain authentic resonance, while underscoring her authority on policy.

“When she talks about being a working mom, I think it plays in two directions,” said Janet Jakobsen, the director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College. “It enables her to confirm certain people’s expectations of femininity, and at the same time, she then talks about that as a women’s issue that is crucially important for women all across the United States.”

Another thing is her style. Even when ticking off the nuances of different policy alternatives, her voice never veers far from bubbly. She is likable, approachable, and relatable.

“One of the things that I think is unique to the way Senator Gillibrand is approaching this is her call to action for others to take this up. Not to be the lone champion,” summed up Kiki McLean. “She wants women to invest themselves in this process.”

This isn’t about me, it’s about you, goes the argument. Power player, with femininity intact.

And as her political organization shows, Gillibrand sees an opportunity.

“I want to try to help get more women engaged so that their voices can be better heard in electoral politics,” Gillibrand explained last month. “I believe that enough women aren’t off the sidelines fight for the things they care about. And it’s not just about reproductive health and about women’s rights. It’s about every issue women care about.”

She readily admits there’s room to lead here, where the momentum of Democratic women’s groups has sputtered.

“We have to take responsibility as a generation to do something about this, because the women’s movement is stalled. They are not moving forward,” Gillibrand said on MSNBC in May. “We are literally fighting the same battles as our mothers and our grandmothers. And if we don’t wake up and we don’t start engaging, we will not like what we find.”

Gillibrand’s website aimed to women — www.offthesidelines.org — a national effort that’s paid for and raises money for her Senate reelection campaign. With a soft blue background, it features videos of women — Gillibrand and others — talking about what motivated them to get more involved in their communities.

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