 "Photo: Meg Loucks")
 "Photo: Meg Loucks")
When UT Law School graduate Caryn Schenewerk envisions the empowered voter of 2004, she sees high heels, cocktails and an impeccable bikini line. She is working to ensure that single female voters will turn out, stilettos and all, to vote in the upcoming presidential election. Last March, she founded Running in Heels, a 3,000-member nationwide Political Action Committee dedicated to registering single women to vote. Running in Heels uses unorthodox tactics (everything from glitzy thongs to Cosmopolitans) to target Democratic female voters.
Running in Heels has organized cocktail parties, yoga classes, and singles mixers to get out the vote, hoping to "reach women where they already are." At one event, attendees collected certificates for free wax jobs - not for their cars, but for their bikini lines. The group also sells panties that say "Kiss Bush Goodbye" and boxers that encourage their male supporters to "Rise Up Against Bush."
Doesn't sound like your stereotypical feminist organization?
"Feminism isn't about 'do you wear Birkenstocks or high heels?' do you burn your bras?' or do you wear hundred-dollar bras?'" Schenewerk said. Instead, Running in Heels "encourages women to work for their interests by exercising their right to vote, getting them involved in politics."
Schenewerk's organization click-tapped those high heels right up Congress Avenue to the state Capitol Thursday, in a demonstration they called the "Code Pink March." Around 60 demonstrators, many of them swathed in pink and some toting their babies, marched to celebrate Women's Equality Day. The demonstration's name pokes fun at terrorist alert levels, said Ana Roland, a volunteer for the organization's Austin chapter.
"The suffragettes sacrificed a lot to get us the right to vote, and we need to exercise that," said marcher Alison Schmidt. The march culminated in speeches by local female leaders, including Travis County Court at Law Judge Nancy Hohengarten . Most of the women spoke against President George W. Bush and in favor of political empowerment for women.
Running in Heels is raising money to support registration drives in swing states Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Ohio. The group hopes to mobilize a powerful, disenchanted sector: single women. Census data shows that 22 million unmarried women failed to vote in the last presidential election. According to the Office of Institutional Research at the University, 25,952 women are currently enrolled at the University, but there is no available data on their voter turnout or marital status.
Many unmarried women fail to vote because they feel alienated from politics, Schenewerk said.
"They feel it doesn't apply to people like them," she said. "Politics is inaccessible because it is dominated by older men, who don't have [single women's] issues in mind."
Unmarried women tend to vote Democrat by a 2-1 margin, according to Running in Heel's Web site. To mobilize Democratic women, the Web site lists health, education, and environmental concerns and criticizes Bush for his handling of these issues.
Women's issues go beyond the abortion debate, Schenewerk said.
"They're national security issues, health-care issues, job security. Women have to think about all of this, plus reproductive rights," she said. "And right now, if you look at polling, women are concerned about health and education more than anything else."
Of course, not all unmarried women identify with the cocktail-wielding, college-educated image that Running in Heels puts forth.
"We're going after your kind of high-heeled, 'Sex and the City' group," Schenewerk said. "Let's do the best we can do, without trying to pretend that we know what's important to a single mother with two jobs."
Running in Heels does not specifically target minorities or low-income women, she said. Nor are only women involved.
In fact, her younger brother Bret, a government junior at the University, is helping organize Running in Heels efforts in Austin. Bret said the Texas branch of Running in Heels does try to appeal to women across the socioeconomic board.
"We went to the roller derby," Bret said, "and you don't see a lot of high-class people there ... we're more middle-class in Austin."
Bret inspired the Running in Heels offshoot Boys Against Bush, which claims about 10 members here in Texas. He also owns a pair of the boxers.
"I'm very concerned about a lot of the women's issues," Bret says. "I will help my sister in any way."
Neither Bret nor Caryn Schenewerk could make it to the Code Pink March, though Schenewerk maintains that she can in fact run in high heels.
"Yes I can," she says. "I could probably do at least a 100-, 200-hundred yard dash."
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