West Virginia Senate joins House in passing bill to kill Women's Commission
Given about $40,000 a year in 1977 and charged with improving “the broad status of women in society,” the West Virginia Women’s Commission was called by some a “program to fail” at the time.
Forty years later, both the House and Senate in the West Virginia Legislature, which with days to go in the Legislative session still has not approved a budget, both have voted to terminate the state agency, now a division of the Department of Health and Human Resources that gets about $150,000 a year.
House Bill 2646, terminating the West Virginia Women’s Commission, is sponsored by Delegate Kayla Kessinger, R-Fayette. Kessinger and other Republican women have led the charge, and the votes in the House and Senate, both Republican-led bodies, have been mostly party line.
With 18 women, the 134-member Legislature has its lowest number of women since 1984. Of the 18 women, 16 are Republicans.
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