| Chapter 2: | The Second Wave and Emily's List |
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other PACs, or from the parties in order to run a viable competitive campaign (Ornstein, Mann, and Malbin 2008). Acquiring these other types of donations posed problems, as the high rate of incumbency and the persistent gap in women's elected status dictated that most female candidates were challengers (Burrell 1994).
A challenger typically receives far less money from PACs and interest groups than an incumbent. The roots of this discrepancy lie in the access strategy used by PACs—that is, PACs give money to legislators to gain access in the hopes that access will lead to influence (Magee 2002). Although scholars have not been able to prove influence—that is, they have not been able to find a direct correlation between interest-group money and roll-call votes—they have found that the access PACs gain through campaign contributions influences committee outcomes and the wording of legislation. (Magee 2002; Smith 1995).
This access strategy might have been beneficial to PACs, but it had negative consequences for most female candidates. Since female candidates typically ran as challengers, they were denied funding by access-oriented PACs and therefore rarely received enough money to run a viable campaign. Consequently, although women's PACs formed to benefit women, in the 1970s and early 1980s, they had limited success in meeting their main goal: electing women to public office.
Those women who managed to make it into public office were often viewed as “token” members. However, that began to change in the mid-1970s. Gertzog (1995) found that the women who ran for public office after 1970 tended to be “experienced, highly motivated, career public servants who carefully calculate the personal and political benefits of running for higher office, assess the probability of their winning, and determine the personal and political costs of defeat …” (4). By the late 1970s, women were