(Washington, DC – July 10, 2026) Fifty-five years ago today, more than 300 women gathered in Washington, D.C. with a shared conviction: that our democracy would never be complete until women held equal power within it. Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, and so many others whose voices built this organization did not wait for permission. They built the infrastructure themselves. Out of the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment came a promise: Recruit. Train. Elect. That promise became the National Women’s Political Caucus, and it has guided this organization for five and a half decades.
As the 16th woman to lead the NWPC, I am honored to carry forward an organization that has spent 55 years insisting women belong in the room where decisions get made. We have trained thousands of women to run for office and helped elect them at every level of government, from school boards to statehouses to Vice President.
With that said, it would be a disservice to our founders to mark this milestone as though the fight is over. It isn’t. We are living through a moment where women’s political representation, hard-won over generations, is being challenged. Where the basic premise that women deserve an equal voice in shaping the laws that govern their own bodies and futures is treated as a debate rather than a human right.
That is precisely the fight the NWPC was founded to wage. Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm did not organize because the path was easy or the outcome guaranteed. They organized because they understood that political power is built, seat by seat, candidate by candidate, election by election. That remains our work today.
This 55th anniversary is not a finish line. It is a reaffirmation. We recommit to recruiting the women who will run when others tell them to wait their turn. We recommit to training them to lead once they win. And we recommit to electing pro-choice, progressive women who will fight for the rights and freedoms our founders knew were never guaranteed.
Fifty-five years in, our motto hasn’t changed, and neither has our resolve. Recruit. Train. Elect. The work continues, and so does the NWPC.
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The National Women’s Political Caucus, founded in 1971, is the oldest national, multi-partisan, grassroots organization dedicated to identifying, recruiting, training, electing, and supporting pro-choice women candidates for elected and appointed office.
