Today in female representation

Knock Down The House follows four grassroots female candidates through their mission-driven campaigns to unseat incumbents during the 2018 midterm elections. The documentary, which won Festival Favorite at Sundance this January, will be released by Netflix on May 1. New Yorkers will be able to see it in an advance screening (including a Q&A with director Rachel Lears) at IFC Center on April 23.

Audrey Gelman takes us into the NY Times photo archives to tell the story of the women who brought power and voice to representative democracy long before AOC was a glimmer of hope for New Yorkers.

Time and again, women candidates have been met with derision or dismissed as “long shots” — in many cases, both. Take Elizabeth Holtzman: In 1972, the then-31-year-old stunned the whole of Washington when she upset a powerful 50-year male incumbent in the Democratic primary, becoming the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. (Sound familiar?)

And, of course, you can’t talk about women in politics without talking about Shirley Chisholm, a once-in-a-generation force for change who represented her Brooklyn district from 1969 to 1983. As she put it, “My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn’t always discuss for reasons of political expediency.” Despite her fearlessness — or, more aptly, because of it — opponents dismissed her, she said, as just a “little schoolteacher.” (She had been an educator before taking office.)