COLOMBIA, SC – The only three Republican women in the South Carolina Senate stood up to their party and stopped a total ban on abortion passing your state last year. In return, they lost their jobs.
Voters removed Senators Sandy Senn, Penry Gustafson and Katrina Shealy from office during the low-turnout primaries in June and, in doing so, completely vacated the five-member Republican “Sister Senators” wing, an all-female contingent that included two Democrats and was united in their opposition to the abortion ban.
For Republicans, the departure of Senn, Gustafson and Shealy likely means there will be no women in the state Senate’s majority party when the next session begins in 2025. It could also mean that women will not hold power for decades in the fiercely conservative state. where they have long struggled to enter the Legislature.
How scarce has political influence historically been for women in South Carolina? Small portraits of every woman who has served in the 170-seat General Assembly in the 250 years it has met fit on a framed poster outside the governor’s office.
O sudden departure of Republican women presents a potential power issue because the Senate distributes influence and responsibility to the majority party based on seniority. Half of the GOP-dominated state’s members were elected in 2012 or earlier, so it will likely be the 2040s before any Republican women elected in the future could rise to leadership or committee chairs.
“Women, someone else will have to step up. Someone else will have to come and fix things,” Senn said in his farewell speech on June 26.
Barring a woman winning a November race in a district dominated by the other party, there will be just two women in South Carolina’s 46-member Senate when the 126th session begins in January. No other state in the country would have fewer women in the upper house, according to Center for American Women in Politics. Women represent 55% of the state’s registered voters.
That gap should be alarming to anyone in South Carolina, said Sen. Tameika Isaac Devine, who sat down this year in a special election and became the sixth member of the Sister Senators. Next year, Devine and her fellow Democratic senator Margie Bright Matthews will likely be the only women in the chamber.
“No matter how much empathy men may have, they didn’t have children. They didn’t do hysterectomies. They haven’t had some of the health issues or community issues that we deal with every day,” Devine said.
Instead of an Outright Abortion Ban, South Carolina Ended a One-Time Ban cardiac activity is detectednormally six weeks of pregnancy.
After that, the three senator sisters – followed by two Democrats – won international acclaim. Cover stories and TV appearances culminated in him receiving the John F. Kennedy Award Profile in Courage Award for people who risk their careers for the greater good.
But this attention had another advantage. Strict abortion opponents put up billboards and sent out mailers in their districts calling the three Republicans “baby killers.”
“When you’re on CNN and MSNBC and you’re on the front page of the New York Times and the front page of the Washington Post, you’re repeatedly poking your finger in the eyes of a lot of conservative folks,” said Republican Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey.
Massey said abortion was not the only issue facing the Republican senator sisters. “Their opponents did a good job of painting them as soft and out of touch,” he said.
Voters in Lexington County, a conservative suburb west of Columbia, said they could not trust Shealy after electing her three times.
“She lost me on the abortion vote,” said Alexis Monts. “And I don’t think I need to just elect a woman to be equally represented.”
Historically, it has been worse in the South Carolina Senate for women. There were no women there from 2009 to 2013, when Shealy was first elected. Her goals were to protect veterans, women, families, children and other vulnerable groups.
In his 12 years in the Senate, Shealy made big impacts. Forty-eight of his bills were passed, including those that require a review of all suspected child deaths, prohibit subminimum wages for people with disabilities, and require the state to develop a plan to deal with the rise in cases of insanity. No senator has passed more legislation in recent years.
“We help children, we help families and we help people with disabilities. We help women and veterans,” Shealy said after her second-round loss. “And what worries me so much is who will do this now?”
Shealy also made small differences. The women’s bathrooms in the Senate building were gray and drab when she arrived. She brought her own art and trinkets and stocked them with lotions and other items.
It has all been an effort to drag change into a General Assembly where women have often been minimized and forgotten. On Shealy’s first day in 2013, the session opened with “Gentlemen of the Senate, please rise.”
Embarrassed, the leadership changed to “gentlemen and ladies of the Senate”. Shealy said this was also derogatory because it suggested there were different levels of membership.
Shealy often looked at the walls of the Senate chambers and saw no woman honored with a portrait.
“You can tell how difficult it is by some of the comments made by some people in the lobby. Things like ‘Women are not prepared to serve,’ that ‘God doesn’t want us here,’” Shealy said during last year’s abortion debate. “Well, God is very smart. If God didn’t want us here, I’m sure we wouldn’t be here.”
A group called SC Women in Leadership is in its sixth year of encouraging women to run for public office. They train Democrats and Republicans to become better candidates in local and state races and support them when they are elected. But they said getting more women in office will take time. Shealy did not win his first race. Neither did fellow Republican Gustafson.
Each of the Republican senator sisters said the Republican Party is tougher on women because of conservative thoughts on gender roles. A man encounters problems. A woman complains. A man is strong and decisive. A woman is bossy and aggressive.
“Sometimes it can be tiring. I felt like I was always being judged in a way that my Democratic friends weren’t,” Gustafson said after his primary defeat.
When giving his farewell speech, Shealy brought out the $36,000 lantern trophy that the Profile in Courage group gives to winners. Her four original senator sisters — just Matthews, will return next session — walked over to help her as she struggled a bit to get it out of the case.
“Here it is. And it’s beautiful. And I’m proud of it. I’m proud of losing this Senate race just to get this, because I stood up for the right thing. I stood up for women. I stood up for children. I stood up for South Carolina.” And all these sister senators with me, we have no shame,” Shealy said.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
