Barbara Mikulski

Hillary

As a little girl in 1930s Baltimore, Barbara Mikulski was not blessed with athletic abilities. So, the Washington Post recounted, “tired of skinning her knees trying to jump rope ‘double dutch,’ Barbara coaxed her little cousins and friends into taking part in plays and shows in her parents’ garage, shows in which she served as a playwright, producer, and director.” Though nobody could have guessed it at the time—least of all Barbara—those leadership skills would take her from her working-class neighborhood to the floor of the United States Senate.

The daughter of parents who owned a neighborhood grocery store, Barbara still remembers delivering groceries in a little red wagon, instructed by her father to never accept a tip. Her parents’ greeting to their customers—“Good morning. Can I help you?”—introduced her early on to the concept of service. So did the nuns at the Catholic school she attended, who taught her about the Christopher Movement, which is built on the belief that “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” Those teachings shaped Barbara’s view of the world, and instilled a passion for social justice. “I even thought about being a Catholic nun,” she said decades later, “but that vow of obedience kind of slowed me down a little bit.”

Instead, she became a social worker, helping at-risk young people in Baltimore with her characteristic “tough love” approach. When she learned about a plan to build a sixteen-lane highway through several Baltimore neighborhoods without compensating homeowners, primarily immigrants and black Americans, she decided to do something about it. The fierce and unapologetic Barbara helped found the Southeast Council Against the Road, a name she coined for its appropriately “militant” acronym: SCAR. They took on City Hall and won, saving Baltimore’s Fells Point and Inner Harbor neighborhoods. Barbara was elected to the city council later that year.

Barbara got her start in politics at a time when women were expected to be neither seen nor heard. But three years after winning her city council seat, she announced that she planned to challenge Charles Mathias, the state’s beloved Republican senator. To some people, running against a seemingly undefeatable member of the political establishment seemed like a foolish decision. Barbara was told over and over again: “No woman can win in an ethnic, hard-hat neighborhood. No woman can win who isn’t part of the political machine.” To her, that was even more reason to run: She had nothing to lose, so why not try? She didn’t win, but she built name recognition and a following.

In 1976 she ran for Congress. This time, she won. The old boys’ network never saw her coming. But the voters of Maryland not only saw her—they elected her. “I got started in public life because of volunteers and activists who, on their own time and on their own dime, volunteered themselves to not only help me get elected but to be involved in their communities, to be civically engaged, to make their community and their country a better place,” she’d later say.

Ten years later, she again set her sights on the U.S. Senate. It was a brutal race, one that forced Barbara to hone her gift for deflecting criticism when her brash, take-no-prisoners style that might have been applauded in a male candidate was described by her opponents and the media as a liability. She was called “shrill,” “abrasive,” and an “anti-male feminist.” If the criticism hurt, Barbara didn’t let on, and she made no apologies. “Nobody would ever use the term mellow to describe me,” she agreed. “I’m not caffeine-free, that’s for sure.”

“When I beat the political bosses, when running for political office as a woman was considered a novelty, they said: ‘You don’t look the part.’ But I said, ‘This is what the part looks like, and this is what the part is going to be like.’ ”

—BARBARA MIKULSKI

Barbara wasn’t interested in changing her personality, though over time she did decide to change her appearance. (Even though, Chelsea and I agree, she shouldn’t have had to!) “A stocky, 4-foot-11, rough-edged East Baltimore politician once described as having ‘the heft of a stevedore and a voice to match,’ ” was how the Washington Post characterized her. But once she made up her mind to run for the Senate, Barbara decided the time had come to change her image. She approached the challenge the same way she approached everything else: with a fighting spirit and a twinkle in her eye. She exercised vigorously, logging miles on a stationary bike, and joked on the campaign trail about her efforts to lose weight. When she later met President Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned for her opponent, she introduced herself, saying, “I’m the one you said would go the way of the Edsel, the hula hoop and the asparagus diet. Mr. President, I’m on the asparagus diet.” She could play the game when she chose to, but she did it with a healthy dose of self-awareness, acknowledging that “a lot of Americans, black or white or female, are always told that they don’t look the part. It’s one of the oldest code words.”

With a little help from an up-and-coming organization called EMILY’s List and a whole lot of Mikulski moxie, Barbara won that election, and became the first Democratic woman elected to the United States Senate in her own right without having first served in a relative’s seat. From the very beginning, she worked on what she called “the macro issues and the macaroni-and-cheese issues.” The big picture was important to her, but so was making sure people’s day-to-day needs were met. Over her five terms in the Senate, she fought to improve public schools and take better care of seniors and veterans. She championed civil rights and women’s rights, universal health care, and funding for science and research. As the first woman to chair the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, she put her tenacity to work on behalf of the people of Maryland and the people of America. Even after tough legislative losses, she never gave up. When Republicans blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act in 2012, she declared: “I say to the women out there in America, let’s keep this fight going. Put on your lipstick, square your shoulders, suit up, and let’s fight for a new American revolution where women are paid equal pay for equal work, and let’s end wage discrimination in this century once and for all.”

“I might be short, but I won’t be overlooked.”

—BARBARA MIKULSKI

Of Barbara’s many accomplishments, I am personally grateful for a fight she waged within the Capitol in 1993. She’d noticed that on weekends male members of Congress would wear casual clothes to the office, but women were still required to wear skirts and pantyhose. That didn’t sit well with Barbara, so she and Republican senator Nancy Kassebaum—the only other woman in the Senate—showed up one Saturday wearing pants and told all the women staffers to do the same. “I walk in that day and you would have thought I was walking on the moon,” she recounted later. She won that fight, making her a founding member of the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuit!

Barbara’s was one of the first calls I got when I was elected senator for New York. The conversation went something like this: “Congratulations. I followed it. That was a hard-fought race. Now you need to figure out how to be a Senator since you’ve been elected to serve as one.” With her help, that’s what I did. As the dean of the Senate women, she had immense expertise and was happy to share it. She’s always known that it isn’t enough to be “the first” if you’re also “the only.” She has dedicated her life to kicking down the door for other women at every level of politics. In the midst of chatter over whether the nominee—presumably a man—would put a woman on the ticket as his running mate in 1984, she commented, “We are being pursued like some kind of new fad, like a new kind of Lite Beer or something.… It can feel a little humiliating.” (Some things never seem to change, even when there are multiple women running for president!) When she arrived in Congress in 1977, there were eighteen women in Congress. Today there are more than one hundred.

Barbara was the one who officially nominated me at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, saying, “Our Founding Fathers gave us a great start. But it was the Founding Mothers who said, ‘Do not forget the ladies, for we will foment our own revolution.’ ” That’s a promise Barbara has spent her life working to keep.