It’s Time For Paid Family Leave

During the recent Women’s March in Hartford, Susan Eastwood, a board member of the nonprofit Permanent Commission on the Status of Women in CT, wandered among attendees and asked them about paid family leave. First, she asked women pushing strollers—ostensibly, women in their child-bearing years. They told her compelling stories about not having enough money to take time off from work. But the older women were particularly passionate. They are caring for elderly parents, for adult children with significant medical needs, or they’re batting their own health issues.

First Women Marched, Now They’re Running

Amy Schneider, 31, of Stratford, came to Hartford last Saturday toting a colorful sign she made that said “Fight Like a Girl.”

At Bushnell Park, she joined some 10,000 people at the second annual Women’s March to chant, mingle, and remind themselves that the fight isn’t over. In fact, it’s just begun. The day after Donald J. Trump took office in January 2017, millions of women and men headed to D.C., New York, and places like Hartford to protest. This year all around the country women and men gathered again to march, and to mark a year’s worth of unprecedented political action, with hundreds of women who’d never considered entering political office running and winning, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. In Connecticut last summer, Yale’s Women’s Campaign School had 500 applicants for 80 slots in its five-day summer session.