This week's Weekend Reading highlights Abigail Adams, Margaret Atwood, youth voting rights, insights on global governance, bipartisan bridge-building, and reforms advancing gender-balanced leadership across sectors.
As I flipped to this week’s page of our Visionary Women 2025 Planner (a favorite project I help create each year!), I noticed two birthdays that felt especially meaningful: Former First Lady Abigail Adams and award-winning author and poet Margaret Atwood. Born in the same November week, centuries apart, both women used the written word to challenge assumptions, call out injustice, and expand what was possible for women in public life.
What struck me is how both women used their writing to name truths about women’s power that their eras refused to acknowledge. By putting into words what others would not, or dared not, they expanded the boundaries of possibility for every woman who followed.
Abigail Adams, writing from a small farmhouse in Weymouth, Massachusetts, while caring for children and managing a household alone, looked out at a revolution designed without women, and dared to write the words so many were thinking: “Remember the ladies.” She had no vote, no title, no official standing, but she understood systems. She understood that liberty written only for men would be liberty only for men. And her letter, quietly revolutionary in its own way, still echoes through time to today.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year, her insight feels especially timely. That founding document still opens with the line, “All men are created equal” — a reminder of how far we have come and how far we still have to go. If I had my way, I’d cross out “men” and write “people” instead, to reflect the nation we are still striving to become.
Margaret Atwood, born 171 years later, used a different kind of warning: fiction that doesn’t feel fictional at all. When asked how she dreamed up her terrors of The Handmaid’s Tale, she always answers the same way: “I didn’t make anything up.” Every abuse of power in that story — every restriction on women’s bodies, rights, movements, and futures — had a real-world precedent. She simply held up a mirror.
What unites these two women, beyond their birthdays, is a clarity about something we often talk about at RepresentWomen: systems shape outcomes. Abigail saw it in the laws being drafted around her that didn’t include her in them. Atwood saw history repeating itself, again and again, without any collective effort to stop it before it reached another boiling point. Through their writing, they made clear that without structural change, courage alone is not enough to enact durable change in our plight for equality.
Reading their words this week, I felt a deep sense of gratitude and responsibility. So much for what we advocate for today, from gender-balanced leadership to electoral systems that reflect real communities, grows from the seeds women like Adams and Atwood planted. Their letters and stories remind us that transformation begins with someone imagining something better, and then doing the hard work of making it real. Culture shifts, laws shift, and systems shift only when someone dares first to say: this is not enough.
And that is, in many ways, the work we continue together. Carrying the torch, yes, but also redesigning the pathway so that future generations won’t have to work quite so hard simply to be heard.
Birthday celebrations for notable women this week include: Abigail Adams (First Lady, political thinker, and early advocate for women’s rights), Margaret Atwood (novelist, poet, and feminist visionary), Gretchen Whitmer (Governor of Michigan), Zadie Smith (novelist and essayist), Claire McCaskill (former U.S. Senator), Maria Shriver (journalist and former First Lady of California), Kimberly Teehee (Cherokee Nation Delegate to Congress), Joy Harjo (former U.S. Poet Laureate), Catherine Cortez Masto (U.S. Senator), Mandara Meyers (Executive Director of The States Project), and Donna Brazile (political strategist and former DNC Chair).
Milestones this week include: The publication of Remember the Ladies in 1776, in which Abigail Adams urged the Founders to include women in the new nation’s laws; the 1985 release of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a work that continues to shape global conversations about gender and democracy; the election of Jeannette Rankin in 1916 as the first woman to serve in the U.S. Congress; and the founding of the National Women’s History Project in 1980, which helped establish March as Women’s History Month.
2026 Planner Request: If you’d like to receive a copy of The Visionary Women’s 2026 Planner, please fill out the form below so we can add you to the mailing list for next month’s shipment. And if there’s a woman you’d like us to honor in the 2026 edition — you, a friend, a mentor, or a community leader — you can share that in the form as well.
RepresentWomen is delighted to send these planners as a gift to you annually, free of charge, and we’re happy to accommodate up to five copies per person (additional copies available upon request).
CAWP: How Democratic Women Keep Leading in“Flipping Seats” in Virginia and Beyond
Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. Source: Virginia Mercury.
Women candidates in Virginia state elections had a remarkable 2025. Not only did Abigail Spanberger flip the governor’s mansion to replace a man, but women overwhelmingly led a charge for Democrats in state legislative races. The Center for American Women in Politics reports:
Women were overwhelmingly responsible for seats that flipped from Republican to Democrat in Virginia state legislative elections in 2025, according to an analysis from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. This echoes a similar phenomenon in the 2017 state legislative races in Virginia — one year before women candidates led the change in party control of Congress in 2018.
- This year, women were responsible for 10 of 13 (76.9%) Democratic pick-ups in Virginia’s 2025 House of Delegates elections, expanding the Democratic majority by 13 seats.
- In 2017, women were responsible for 11 of 15 (73.3%) total flipped seats in that cycle, narrowing the Republican majority in the House to two seats.
- One year later, in 2018, women won 21 of the 39 (53.8%) U.S. House seats that flipped from Republican to Democrat. As a result, Democrats took back the House majority from Republicans.
- Women also won 4 of the 7 (57.1%) gubernatorial elections in 2018 that flipped state executive offices from Republican to Democrat.
"The similarities in the national political environments of 2017-2018 and today raise the question of whether Virginia's election will again be a harbinger for Democratic women's energy and electability in 2026," said CAWP Director of Research Kelly Dittmar. "It's too early to know, but some of the early signs are there."
For additional context, see the post Women Candidates Are Key to Building Democratic Power on the CAWP blog. For more analysis on Virginia elections and their potential impact on the subsequent legislative sessions, see Policy and Electoral Implications of Democratic Women Candidates’ Wins in Virginia 2025 Elections from Professor Rosalyn Cooperman of the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.
Women Now Have More Representation in Virginia Government. Now What?
Female supporters cheer on the results at the Democratic election night watch party in Virginia. Source: VPM.
This week, the Virginia Mercury wrote about what comes next for women as they rise into power in Virginia, including highlighting that this year’s governor election was only the 11th time that both major parties in a state nominated women in a governor’s election. Here’s an excerpt:
A majority of people report that the gender of a government leader is irrelevant, according to Pew Research Center. However, of people who do acknowledge gender differences, 39% said a woman would be better at working out compromises and 37% said a woman would be better at maintaining a respectful tone in politics.
Women tend to have a relational style of politics that is less combative and antagonistic than their male counterparts, according to Mann.
“This is true for both Republican and Democratic senators and congresswomen and governors,” Mann said. “They tend to, not always, certainly not always, govern in a more cooperative fashion.”...
When women have more presence in local, state and federal government, they bring new perspectives to policy making, according to [CAWP’s Kelly] Dittmar. Women will hold 40% of seats in Virginia’s 140-seat state legislature in 2026, making it more representative than Congress.
Women also often bring other marginalized voices into political conversations, Dittmar said.
“It does actually make a difference that young girls see women in positions of leadership,” Dittmar said. “But not even just young girls — boys, men and women see a woman in this high-level executive decision-making position and hopefully see her doing it well.”
Democratic “Hell Cats” Recall Republican “Mama Grizzlies” for Building Momentum
New Jersey’s Rebecca Bennett is one of the “Hell Cats.” Source: Inside NJ.
One promising strategy for candidates seeking to build collective momentum is to create a team that defines a certain approach to politics. Back in 2010, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin led a wave of success for “Mama Grizzlies.” “The Squad” emerged in 2018 to unite progressive women in Congress. Now we’re hearing stories about “The Hell Cats”, four veterans making waves as they run for Congress. JoAnna Mendoza, Cait Conley, Maura Sullivan, and Rebecca Bennett recently released this joint video. Here’s more from Newsweek:
A new generation of Democratic women is making its presence felt on Capitol Hill. Calling themselves “The Hell Cats,” the group of first-term lawmakers and congressional candidates is positioning itself as the next wave of progressive voices — determined to help Democrats reclaim control of the House in 2026.
Four female veterans — Maura Sullivan, Rebecca Bennett, Cait Conley and JoAnna Mendoza — have launched coordinated campaigns for Congress under the shared banner. “We’ve served our country in uniform. Now we are stepping up to serve again,” Conley said in a post on X. “We are The Hell Cats — four female veterans that are going to flip the House in 2026.”..
Their name pays tribute to history’s first all-female Marine unit, formed during World War I. The original “Hell Cats” were the first women to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps, enlisted in 1918 as part of the Marine Reserve (F). About 305 women were recruited for clerical and administrative roles so more men could be deployed to the front. Nicknamed the “Lady Hell Cats,” they received the same pay as men of equal rank — a groundbreaking achievement at the time. Although their service ended soon after the war, the program marked a milestone for women’s integration into the military.
Close the Gap Explains Success for Women in California and Eyes Ohio and Florida
Susannah Delano, flanked by Aimee Allison and Carla Marinucci. Source: Youtube.
Women have reached parity in several states. In California, Close the Gap has been a leader in a successful campaign to increase the number of women in the state legislature. Here’s an introduction to an important interview in State Affairs with its executive director, Susannah Delano, on its tactics and plans.
In the last election, California elected a record number of women to the statehouse. For the first time, women lawmakers make up a majority of the Senate and are just one seat away from equal representation in the Assembly. But the road to gender equality has been uneven, and has been largely achieved through the work of Close the Gap, a Sacramento organization dedicated to recruiting progressive women to run for office. When Susannah Delano joined the organization as executive director in 2018, women made up just one in five lawmakers — a 20-year low for women’s representation at the Capitol.
Today, half of the Democratic female lawmakers serving in the Legislature were recruited by Close the Gap — 25 in total, including Sen. Monique Limón, who was sworn in Monday as the next Senate leader.
Close the Gap’s strategy has been so successful that it is bringing it to new races. Last week, the organization announced it was expanding its recruiting model to state legislative races in Florida and Ohio, as well as working locally in California to recruit more women to run for county boards of supervisors.
State Affairs recently talked with Delano about Close the Gap, women’s representation and why so many gender gaps still exist in California’s elected offices.
Susannah, in her interview, addresses structural and process issues helpfully. Two examples are here:
“In terms of other states, we looked for which states our model could have the biggest impact. We looked at all 17 states that have term limits, because our model is really pegged to running women in open seats, as well as some partisan flips. Florida and Ohio are where we landed, because we think that we can make a great impact there. And that has to do with structural advantages, like term limits, like a large number of open seats coming up in 2028 and 2030. Both the Ohio and Florida state legislatures are very over-represented when it comes to conservative white men.”
“[On the challenges for women running for governor in California:] One is just the cost involved in California in any statewide race, and obviously gubernatorial is the most expensive. What we see in our sector with women in politics is that every tier up you go, as it gets more and more expensive, as there's that many more voters, the challenges, the barriers, the disadvantages that women candidates already face get exponentially harder the higher you go. So in some ways the California governor ceiling is a little harder to crack than in a state like New Mexico where the bar to raise and the need for exposure in the media markets is not as intense as they are here… You take Toni Atkins and Eleni Kounalakis, who have been toiling away doing incredibly meaningful work at the state level, for over a decade in Tony Atkins’ case, and people are just not as familiar. So it takes more to pierce into that public consciousness.
“The Three G.O.P. Women Who Broke Trump’s Grip on Congress”
Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Source: CNN.
New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle profiles the three Republican women House members who forced the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Cottle’s column begins:
Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.
This is why, watching President Trump’s fight to keep a lid on the Epstein files, I have been struck, delighted even, that among the vanishingly few Republican lawmakers with the courage to defy him have been three fire-breathing congresswomen: Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
Love ’em or hate ’em, these House troublemakers bucked their party leadership, stared down their president and made possible Tuesday’s vote to compel the administration to come clean about the web of degeneracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. In the end, all but one Republican joined every Democrat to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This victory speaks to the value of having women’s voices and strength inside the Republican echo chamber, a place that can still be tough for women to navigate.
Report: At Big Companies, Board Diversity Disclosure Falls by Over 30%
Trainees of the local chapter of Women Corporate Directors in Minnesota. Source: Twin Cities Business
The fallout for women from Donald Trump’s narrow presidential win is being felt across many dimensions. This Corporate Board news release on changes in corporate accountability for reporting on and showing commitment to equality is a good example.
Public reporting on board director race and ethnicity has seen a big drop across corporate America: From 2024 to 2025, the share of companies disclosing such information declined by 40% in the Russell 3000 and 32% in the S&P 500. That's according to a new report by The Conference Board.
"Driving the sharp reversal in standardized reporting is the 2024 court decision striking down Nasdaq's board diversity disclosure rule, as well as a broader shift away from public DEI commitments amid mounting legal and political challenges. This pullback raises questions about the durability of recent gains in board diversity," said Andrew Jones, Principal Researcher at The Conference Board and coauthor of the report.
When it comes to gender diversity, the report finds that women's representation on boards has reached record levels—but momentum is slowing. From 2022 to 2025, the share of newly appointed women directors declined by 9% in the Russell 3000 and 7% in the S&P 500.
Chile Presidential Runoff Includes Former Woman Cabinet Minister Jeannette Jara
Chilean presidential candidate Jeannette Jara. Source: Jacobin.
Jeannette Jara, former labor minister under Chile’s incumbent president Javier Boric, finished first in the initial round of voting in Chile’s presidential election, but faces an uphill battle in this time of anti-incumbent fervor. Here’s more from the Buenos Aires Herald:
Chile’s presidential elections are heading to a runoff after no candidate reached an absolute majority in Sunday’s contest. Left-wing candidate Jeannette Jara and far-right José Antonio Kast came in first and second and will face off on December 14. Jara, the left-wing unity candidate backed by President Javier Boric, gathered almost 27% of the vote, with Kast raking in nearly 24%. Either of them will also require over 50% in December to win.
Jara served as Boric’s labor minister until April and was the candidate of the progressive electorate, although she also had some center-leaning proposals. This is Kast’s third time running for president, after he lost to President Boric in 2021. He carried out a campaign focused on security and measures against illegal immigration. Leader of Chile’s Republican Party, Kast is also a known supporter of dictator Augusto Pinochet.
The race is set to be a confrontation of extremes, with Kast favored to become Chile’s next president. While Jara was the only progressive or left-leaning candidate, the three right-wing candidates got a combined 50.3% in Sunday’s election. Analysts expect all these votes to go to Kast, making him the favorite for the runoff.
The United Nations Summarizes How Women Fall Short of Equality
Source: United Nations
For those who believe we have reached equality for women, think again. The United Nations lifts up gender equality as one of its 17 Sustainable Development Goals and shares these sobering statistics.
- In 2024, legal barriers to gender equality persist: 61 countries out of 131 surveyed (47%) still restrict women from doing the same jobs as men, 38 countries (29%) set 18 as the minimum marriage age with no exceptions, and 63 countries (48%) define rape based on lack of consent.
- Nearly one in five young women aged 20–24 (19%) were married or in a union before turning 18. Although child marriage has declined globally, mainly due to progress in Southern Asia, it remains highest in sub-Saharan Africa (31%), where the number of child brides is projected to rise by 2030.
- Globally, over 230 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation, with 4 million girls undergoing the harmful practice each year. Eliminating female genital mutilation by 2030 will require accelerating progress to 27 times the pace of the past decade.
- In nearly 80 per cent of countries with data, fewer than half of women have ownership or secure rights to agricultural land, which are vital for empowering rural women and strengthening agrifood systems.
- As of 1 January 2025, women held 27.2 per cent of the seats in national parliaments; this is up 4.9 percentage points from 2015 but only 0.3 points from 2024.
Women’s Representation in Oceania Parliaments: One Third of the Global Average
Pacific parliamentary member. Source: Parliamentarians for Global Action.
UN Women has a new detailed report on the status of women in Pacific Island nations, highlighting that these nations have the highest level of legislative representation inequality in the world. Here’s an excerpt:
Women’s representation in Pacific parliaments remains world’s lowest, but some countries are making substantial progress: Over the past five years, substantial progress has been made in the Pacific on women’s representation in politics. In the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau, where the share of national parliament seats held by women was previously low, representation has increased by more than 10 percentage points in recent years – the two countries are now ahead of most others in the region in this regard. These shifts reflect a growing commitment to inclusive leadership and can pave the way for more inclusive representation in future elections.
The Marshall Islands and Samoa stand out for having women serving as Head of State and Head of Government. Similarly, in New Caledonia and French Polynesia, women’s participation in political life has almost reached parity (in the latter, women held 49 per cent of parliament seats in 2023). However, at 7.93 per cent on average, the share of parliament seats held by women in the Pacific remains the lowest in the world.
There are differences across countries and territories: in the Federated States of Micronesia, for instance, women make up 38 per cent of Cabinet members and 21 per cent of parliament members. In contrast, in Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, none of the current Cabinet members are women. Across all countries, younger women are substantially less likely to be represented in parliaments or chambers: per the latest available data, no members of parliament are women under age 40, and only two per cent are women ages 41–50.
In local governments, women’s presence is more widespread. Holding 23 per cent of elected seats in deliberative bodies, allows more women to contribute to shaping local policies, although the Pacific (excluding Australia and New Zealand) is, again, the world’s region that sees the lowest representation. Promoting women’s participation in politics, both at the local and national level, could promote more inclusive governance systems, and the implementation of solutions that are better reflective of women’s and men’s needs.
That's all for this week, my friends,
Cynthia
Executive Director, RepresentWomen
P.S. — Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of joining my dear friend Yael Bromberg at American University’s Washington College of Law, where she invited me to speak with her class on election law. Serendipitously, it was also the launch day of her new book on youth voting rights — a powerful and timely contribution to the field — which she wrote about in The Nation this week. It was energizing to see future legal leaders engaging so thoughtfully with the structural reforms we champion. Their questions, curiosity, and commitment reminded me why systems-level reforms matter so deeply for the next generation.
Honored to stand with my friend Yael Bromberg as she released her new book, “Youth Voting Rights.” After spending the afternoon with her brilliant students at the Washington College of Law, the evening felt like a beautiful reminder of why this work matters.
A powerful new resource: “Youth Voting Rights,” edited by Jonathan Becker and Yael Bromberg, explores the structural barriers and opportunities shaping young Americans’ access to the ballot. An important read for anyone invested in strengthening our democracy.
A fantastic night with RepresentWomen's Development Manager, Alissa Bombardier Shaw, at the Future Caucus Rising Stars Awards — honoring young legislators whose commitment to building bridges reflects the kind of leadership our democracy needs.