By Melissa Corkhill
22nd December 2016
In America, 4,500 women have signed up to run for office since the US election, says Marisa Bate.
There’s something exceptionally powerful about seeing a woman’s emotion in the House of Commons – the place that normally looks like a debating club for the political elite, where the most privileged get to make schoolboy jokes at the expense of the lives of ordinary people. It is a place we mostly see as a point-scoring exercise.
Which is why, when a woman brings her story of loss or abuse, or the abuse of other women, into the chamber, the story feels even more raw, even more poignant, because she’s dared to bring it to the platform of banter and in-jokes. She’s dared to expose the experience of being a woman in the political equivalent of the locker room.
The presence of women in the House of Commons not only reflects our society more accurately, but it alters the style of debate; it’s alters what is debated; it changes how democracy conducts itself and how we tell the story of our times. But it mostly (although not exclusively) relies on women to have the courage to bring these stories to a place where they have historically not been welcome.
Know someone who should run? #AskHerToStand
Read Marisa Bate’s full report here.
