Conservative Women to Fund Candidates

Stealing a page--or the entire book--from the successful strategy of their “liberal, pro-abortion” foes, a group of conservative California Republican women Thursday announced the formation of an organization to promote and support like-minded women for elected office.

The group is called ShE LIST: Shaping Elections: Life Issues Support Team. Its primary spokeswoman is Susan Carpenter-McMillan of San Marino, an official of the Right to Life Pro-Family Media Coalition.

Carpenter-McMillan said the organization was born, in part, out of frustration over “media hype” of the elections in 1992 as the Year of the Woman, which was focused primarily on abortion-rights supporters such as Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.

“Conservative, pro-family women felt very excluded from the process,” Carpenter-McMillan said.

“We want to, in the next two years, gather membership and start funding pro-family conservative women to run for different offices here in California.

“We’re going to get them out to run. We need to get them early money. We need to back them completely so that when you say the year of the woman, those of you in the media, you don’t just mean the year of the liberal woman,” she said.

ShE LIST is patterned after EMILY’s List, launched in 1982 to support moderate-to-liberal woman candidates, mostly Democrats but also some Republicans. The rationale was that women had particular difficulty raising money to get a campaign off the ground.

Too often, the complaint was, traditional contributors declined to support women out of a belief they had little chance of winning. Without early seed money, the women felt they had no opportunity to demonstrate that their campaigns should be taken seriously.

EMILY stands for “early money is like yeast.” In 1992, EMILY’s List participants contributed more than $6 million to U.S. Senate and House candidates, including Boxer and Feinstein.

Carpenter-McMillan said Thursday: “We’ve patterned everything after EMILY’s List. I take my hat off to EMILY’s list. They’ve done a marvelous job.”

Operating just in California, ShE LIST will pick one or two candidates to back in 1994. A major criterion is a stand opposing abortion, although Carpenter-McMillan said “we have a myriad of issues that we’re concerned with.”

Carpenter-McMillan introduced 1992 Republican Assembly nominee Jo Ellen Allen from Orange County as a founding board member of ShE LIST and a “prototype” of the candidates the group would endorse. Allen lost to incumbent Democrat Tom Umberg in the 69th Assembly District.

Though Carpenter-McMillan said the media overlooked conservative Republican women candidates, Allen noted that there have not been many of them because “most of our women have made their families their priorities, not their careers.”

“It does make it a little more difficult, and this is one reason why we’re interested in supporting women at entry-level positions, whether it’s the school board or the city council or the local library board,” Allen said.

Carpenter-McMillan added: “All of us were home raising our children and we saw the system falling apart around us and we saw liberal women kind of taking over and we said, ‘Wait a minute. We’ve got to get involved.’ ”