On Jan. 14 Minnesota made history. St. Paul became the first city with an all-female city council. Not only this, but six out of seven council members are minorities, meaning St. Paul is taking a big step forward.
Junior Paige Descarpentrie said seeing women in power is something very influential.
“I think it’s important because it’s never happened before and I think it’s important because it’s just important to have women in forms of power,” Descarpentrie said.
Park mom and community member Courtney Richardson said her hope is that this motivates a new wave of women, not just in politics but in other areas of life as well.
“I hope that it inspires a lot of young people, women, people of color, people from different backgrounds that aren’t necessarily, you know, completely correlated to a natural City Council role. Like many haven’t imagined themselves as having a policymaking or governing role,” said Richardson. “I hope that it opens up new pools of talented individuals who would see themselves as being future leaders in that space that maybe wouldn’t have otherwise imagined it.”
Junior Evie Bot said the public may have mixed emotions about an all female city council.
“I think a lot of the public is going to react very, very positively and then some people might react kind of negatively,” Bot said.
Richardson said that representation means a lot, especially reflecting communities.
“My thoughts are that representation matters. And I think that for women everywhere to see themselves reflected in politics and positions of policymaking is very important,” Richardson said. “Historically they’ve been underrepresented or unrepresented for the first couple 100 years of our country’s history. I think one thing that has not been captured as much in the headlines on this is that there’s a lot of dimensions of diversity on the committee, they’re all women but six out of seven of them are people of color. They are young, I think all seven of them. They have a tremendous amount of diversity in their professional experiences, you’ve got former educators, there’s a civil engineer, they come from a lot of different backgrounds.”
Descarpentrie said that in the future, women will have more of an impact in government.
“Eventually, there’ll be more female representation in all forms of government, it’ll be all female,” Descarpentrie said. “I think it’s gonna bring a lot of different experiences (and) views.”
Richardson said that while the headlines are catchy, other things matter as well.
“And while, the headline is really catchy, about all women and that’s certainly extremely important,” Richardson said. “There’s other layers of important representation that the seven women represent that I think are equally important.”
Bot said that the impact will hopefully impact Park by having more people join Youth In Government (YIG).
“I think it probably won’t have that much of an impact on YIG,” Bot said “But if it gets more females wanting to go into the government, that would be cool.”
Richardson said she feels as if this accomplishment has been widely honored.
“I think the sense that I have is that it’s broadly been celebrated and it’s a sign of progress. I had read that St. Paul, I think really demographically started to sort of change in the 80s and it took until early 2000s before they had a change of anyone who wasn’t sort of from one particular demographic,” said Richardson. “I think it took a while for St. Paul has representation in their leadership that matches their changing community and so my sense is that broadly, it has been celebrated.”
