Women as We the People, and their lack of representation, is
the focus of a new blog posting by author and political scientist Bryan W.
Brickner.
“The state of the Union,” opened Brickner, “is the
under-representation of women in the US House.”
In
“Represent the Women of We the People,” posted on the Bryan William Brickner
blog, the author notes women
won suffrage (political franchise) with the Nineteenth Amendment, yet never
received their right to representation according to their census numbers.
“Women are more than 50 percent
of We the People,” clarified Brickner, “and yet they are represented in the
current House with 79 Representatives, or 18 percent of the representation;
that is a 32 percent under-representation of women as a group.”
The
US Constitution mandates one Representative for every “thirty Thousand”
citizens (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3). Congress first changed the ratio,
without amending the Constitution, on 9 April 1792, to 33,000. Today the usurped
representation ratio is one Representative for 710,000 citizens.
“The
founders,” Brickner emphasized, “placed the representation ratio ‘thirty
Thousand’ in our Constitution – and they put it there for us – for We the
People.”
Brickner has a 1997 political
science doctorate from Purdue University and is the author of several political
theory books, to include The Promise Keepers (1999), Article the first of the
Bill of Rights (2006), and The Book of the Is (2013). The Bryan William Brickner Blog is an ongoing resource for the political science of constitutions
and the biological science of cannabinoids.