Actress Jamie Lee Curtis urged Americans to elect more female candidates to office and argued that a wave of women is the only way to bring change to the country.
Curtis, 61, explained that she is a donor to Fund Her, a nonprofit working to elect more women to the California legislature. She claimed that female officials could bring a different mindset into office and urged people to vote with gender parity in mind, instead of just picking a candidate based on the issues.
“I understand that there are people who disagree with trying to achieve gender parity; I know that they believe that voters should just pick a candidate based on their qualifications, and the issues to which you connect and about which you care,” Curtis wrote in an op-ed for NBC News. “My belief, however, is that women, as a gender, see things a little differently.”
She claimed that women care more about the future because many are mothers and want to pass on a better society, writing, “Mothers care about the environment that their children are growing up in, about the education that their children are going to get, about the reproductive right of women, and about violence and gun control.”
Curtis added, “These are all areas that affect children, and in turn, affect their mothers. It makes sense to me that more women in power are going to work harder to enact legislation that is more focused on these areas.”
The actress claimed America is opposed to new ways of thinking and argued that only women can break that cycle.
She wrote, “We here in America are Luddites when it comes to many things, whether it’s the environment, technology, or women in a leadership position. But nothing changes unless something changes.”
She explained she believes many men are opposed to female leaders, writing, “Unfortunately, right now, we live in a misogynist society and a lot of men hate women. They just do. I think that seeing a strong woman articulate her points, argue for her position, and even get angry about the disparities she faces — whatever they are — will cause some men to have a problem, even if women won’t.”
Curtis noted that California is ranked 18th in the nation for gender parity in office, with just one in three elected officials being women. “Whatever California does, the world does,” she wrote.
Curtis, who starred in the films Freaky Friday and Halloween, has been a critic of President Trump. She blamed the president for a false alarm missile scare in Hawaii and was forced to delete a tweet after criticizing Trump in the wake of the successful raid to kill ISIS leader Baghdadi after she wrote, “He may have died a coward [Trump] but ALL living things suffer when they are blown up.”
