Phil Ammann
Congressional candidate Susannah Randolph knows the challenges facing a woman with political ambition. She learned it more than 30 years ago, while in fifth grade.
Randolph writes about her first encounter with the glass ceiling in a new fundraising email to supporters.
“Our class project was to come up with a candidate for president, a platform, and then act as the candidate in a mock press conference,” she writes. “I told my group ‘We are going to run a woman.’”
After creating a female candidate with a platform of women’s rights – as well as overcoming the objections of her classmates – Randolph’s dream of electing a strong woman, unfortunately, did not come true.
Since then, Randolph carried the memory throughout her life in politics; the feeling of defeat and dismissal of any woman determined enough to seek election a higher office.
Nowhere is that lesson more evident than in the name of her daughter – Hillary Eleanor – after the two women who helped inspire her to public service: Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt.
“Even before our doomed fifth-grade mock election,” Randolph writes, “I was asked to play Eleanor Roosevelt in a school play. I had to research her and the more I read about her, the more excited I got that women could play such an important role in the course of history.
“Learning about Eleanor was the first time I saw myself in a life of public service.”
Randolph was in college when Clinton came on the scene, proving that a woman can be an integral part of public policy development and international affairs.
When she found out she was having a girl in 2011, Randolph says she decided her daughter would share a name with the person that would finally “break through the ultimate glass ceiling.”
The world would not be just for “HIM,” but also for “HER” – as in the initials H.E.R.
Randolph, who is seeking the seat vacated by Orlando Democrat Alan Grayson, says she is not running for Congress for her own sake, but for the interests of health care and equal pay for all women, especially young Hillary Eleanor.
And with such idealistic optimism, Randolph can prove that things have indeed changed since 1984.
