Which senator’s wife is that?
—Unnamed Capitol Hill reporter
Even before Kyrsten Sinema, the first female senator from Arizona, was sworn in, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota felt she needed to deal with her new colleague’s shoulders.
Women had recently rebelled against the prohibition of bare arms on the House floor, which prevented female members from wearing sleeveless dresses even in the sweltering heat of a Washington, DC, summer. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) finally lifted the ban in 2017. On the Senate side of the Rotunda, however, strict dress codes remained intact: no shorts or skirts above the knee; jackets and ties for men; and for women, while the no-pants rule had long ago been shed, they still had to keep their shoulders covered. Sinema, a triathlete who favored sleeveless shifts on the campaign, needed to be allowed to wear what she wanted in Washington, Klobuchar reasoned, and as the most senior senator on the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees the rules for the Senate floor, it would be up to her to appeal to the largely male leadership of the Senate to make it happen.
“This is now professional attire, and this is a modern discussion,” she explained to the committee that January. Another senator asked why she couldn’t just don a sweater, but Klobuchar framed the ban as impinging on all women’s rights to dress as they liked. Some of the male senators seemed uncomfortable with the conversation; one placed a folder over his face, and another grumbled, “The world is crumbling around us, and we are talking about sleeveless dresses!”
Klobuchar, whose will can be formidable, prevailed. Sinema showed up for her swearing-in wearing stilettos, a bejeweled tank top, and a formfitting skirt splattered with a giant pink rose, but she donned a gray fur stole on the floor, perhaps out of respect for Klobuchar, who had quietly counseled her to ease into the sleeveless look. Bounding through the Capitol with her Marilyn Monroe–shaded hair, which had replaced her sensible campaign bob, the openly bisexual Sinema, with her hand on the Constitution, took the ceremonial oath, administered, with some visible discomfort, by conservative Republican vice president Mike Pence. (Officially, senators are permitted now to “self-enforce” their own dress code, while staff members must follow the dress code rules, according to a spokesman for the majority leader’s office.)
Although it may seem trivial, the restrictions around what women wear on the Hill—and the fact that they have been enforced by what are effectively morality officers—have rankled women almost since they arrived in Congress. From cluck-clucking about lace and pastel-colored dresses early on to the fight to wear pants, to the argument for exposed arms, women have often pushed for more fashion autonomy. Men are also required to dress for business, and former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), whose affinity for a hotel-room iron was rivaled only by his love for a nine iron, was known to issue occasional starchy reproaches, using his “I will turn this car around!” voice to chastise members for wearing jeans or improper footwear on the floor. After then-Speaker Paul Ryan capitulated on the matter of sleeves, House women still maintained a fairly conservative manner of dress, although they often acknowledge political and other causes through “color days,” which would be familiar to anyone who participated in spirit weeks in high school.
Now, the diversity of the freshman class has ushered in a new era of style. Deb Haaland, one of the two first Native American women in Congress, elected in 2018, mixes turquoise and silver with classic suits. Ilhan Omar, whose first impact on Congress was to change the rules around religious headwear, brings an endless array of chic headscarves. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alternates between her signature red lipstick and oversized pink suit or simple black pants, when on the Hill, and her social-media look of owl-eye glasses adorning a makeup-free face, giving her the vague air of a teenager about to curl up with Go Ask Alice. Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS) keeps a fetching collection of lapel pins in her office, which she rotates through; the Frida Kahlo one is especially impressive. Several women choose to wear their member pins on necklace chains, rather than pierce their clothes with their round little badges of power, and hand their necklaces off to the staff during TV standup hits so they will not get tangled in the mics.
Sinema, whose spokeswoman has explained that her politically careful boss “does not want to be known as the first female anything, only for what she does for the people of Arizona,” would continue to bust sartorial boundaries as soon as she joined the Senate. As a result, one reporter confessed to me that during the first week of the new Senate he asked colleagues, “Which senator’s wife is that?”
The right of women on the Hill to dress as they wish and to gain access to basic amenities like convenient bathrooms and the use of the members’ gym and swimming pools, as well as to more significant achievements like substantive committee assignments and, ultimately, a shot at the Speaker’s gavel, was the result of painstaking battles fought for centuries. Indeed, these battles began even before all American women had the right to vote.
Jeannette Rankin became the first female member of Congress in 1917, three years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. A suffragist leader from Montana—just one of less than a dozen states where women had already won the vote—Rankin fought a grassroots campaign that would foreshadow those of the current era: unsupported by institutional forces, fueled by female voters, and centered on women’s, children’s, and workers’ rights as well as international pacifism. The national media, which had largely ignored or mocked her campaign, reacted to her victory with near obsession, chronicling both her policy positions and her cooking skills.
In 2018, Ocasio-Cortez shredded cheese for an Instant Pot recipe during an Instagram livestream; a century before, the Baltimore Sun, in the first paragraph of an article detailing Rankin’s historic move into Congress, noted that she, “aside from achieving a political victory, holds the honor of making the best lemon pie in Montana.”
And then, of course, there is clothing! While (mostly male) members of the media would fixate on Ocasio-Cortez’s outfits, so, too, did the Washington Post with Rankin, as in this headline: congresswoman rankin real girl; likes nice gowns and tidy hair. According to the historian of the House of Representatives, Matthew Wasniewski, “People were desperate to know, ‘Did she wear a hat? Did she wear French heels?’ ” Yes to the French heels.
Over the years, as female senators and representatives have gained in number, they have often focused on legislation intended to attain greater economic and political security for women and families. Rankin designed that template early on. One of her first acts was to call for and become appointed to a committee to study a constitutional amendment on women’s suffrage, and she soon became its ranking member, unheard of for a freshman. She opened the first House floor debate on suffrage in congressional history, against the backdrop of World War I. “How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen?” she asked, addressing critics who thought suffrage ought to remain a state issue, according to the Congressional Record. “How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?” (The House passed the measure on that day, January 10, 1918, but it died in the Senate.)
Like the women of the 116th Congress, Rankin challenged foreign policy norms. A dedicated pacifist, she voted with other skeptical members against entering the war in 1917. But during a second stint in the House, in 1941, she was the only member to cast a vote against a US declaration of war against Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor, becoming the only member of Congress to vote against participation in both world wars. “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else,” she said, before taking refuge in a phone booth to hide from the press and enraged fellow members.
The late John Dingell (D-MI), who became the longest-serving member of the House and whose wife, Debbie, now serves in his seat, was a House page when he witnessed this moment. “Well, she sputtered. It was kind of an incoherent speech, and they just weren’t going to hear her,” he told Wasniewski during an oral history interview in 2012. According to congressional records, the powerful Speaker of the House at the time, Sam Rayburn (D-TX), refused to recognize her at all.
Thus ended Rankin’s electoral career; knowing the vast majority of Montanans did not support her, she did not bother to run for reelection. She spent the rest of her life as a globe-trotting peace activist and, according to several accounts, never regretted her votes. “Never for one second,” she said, “could I face the idea that I would send young men to be killed for no other reason than to save my seat in Congress.”
The congresswomen who came right after Rankin were a homogeneous bunch—wealthy, white, well educated, Protestant—and products of the Progressive Era. The majority had a preexisting familial connection to Congress, largely as widows who won their husbands’ seats after they died; of the twenty women who entered Congress between 1917 and 1934, eight were widowed into office and four had other family links that helped propel them to Washington. It is worth noting that one of them eventually succeeded her bootlegging jailed spouse, because America! Even those, like Rankin, who did not fill their husbands’ seats were beneficiaries of men’s wealth or political connections, without which women could not climb what was already a politically arduous hill. Rep. Mary Norton, who represented New Jersey for thirteen terms in the early twentieth century, was a protégé of a local Democratic political boss who wanted to gain some credibility with the newly enfranchised women in his home state, and an interesting pick, given that she was a proud nonsuffragist herself. But she had been leader of a nursery school—perhaps perfect experience for a career in politics—and her prodigious fundraising skills got her noticed by local politicians, who would help pave her path through the party system.
Norton, too, was focused on bills that would benefit families; most notably, she pushed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to the House floor for a vote, providing for a forty-hour workweek, outlawing child labor, and setting a federal minimum wage (then, twenty-five cents an hour). It was the last and only significant New Deal reform to pass in President Franklin Roosevelt’s second term.
Norton is also famous for a retort she once made. To this day, women and men are acknowledged when they come to the floor for debate as “the gentleman from Georgia,” and “the gentlewoman from Oregon.” When recognized during a debate on the floor as a “gentlelady,” Norton said: “I am no lady, I’m a member of Congress, and I’ll proceed on that basis.”
During the 1920s and 1930s, more and more women began to pepper the House and make their mark, though never in great enough numbers to form a real coalition. Some of them may have been mere seat fillers for dead husbands, but they nevertheless came armed with political acumen, having been informal advisors to their husbands’ campaigns or, in some instances, actual campaign or congressional aides. Many also had relevant professional experience, and they made significant contributions, especially when viewed in the context of contemporary women. At the same time, their gender continued to impair their progress; often assigned to second-tier committees, they struggled to gain seniority and grab gavels on the key policy-making panels.
While this cohort helped the next generation of women lay tentacles into this Byzantine operation, one dominated by seniority, patronage, and patriarchy in its purest expression, the most significant era for women in Congress before the current one came two generations later, as part of the overall tumult in the 1960s–1970s. Like now, the ’60s and ’70s ushered in some high-profile women who generally fit two modes: agitators and incrementalists.
Rep. Patsy Takemoto Mink started as an incrementalist when she became the first nonwhite woman in Congress in 1965, relying on a grassroots campaign of volunteers and door knocking. In her home state of Hawaii, Mink was judged for her “deviation from the expected middle-class female norms,” her daughter, Wendy Mink, told me. “The undertone of the comments was, ‘Shouldn’t she be a good mother taking care of her child before running for office?’ ” When Patsy Mink arrived in DC, she relied on a deep knowledge of education issues, initially, to ward off more general sexism. “Until her authoritative knowledge of an issue was established, there was a way that male colleagues would just sort of tolerate her interventions,” Wendy Mink said. “Securing legitimacy was an important thing.”
Women began to clash most strongly with men on the Hill when they identified and took ownership of legislative issues that the men had declined previously even to consider, such as an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution (never to be ratified), or the exclusion of women from opportunities such as vocational education. This type of battle defined Mink’s legacy, and left her deepest scars. In 1972, Congress passed the Title IX law, prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs and activities that received federal aid. As the law rolled out, it became increasingly controversial; male lawmakers began to fear that women’s sports programs would get financial favor over men’s. Mink became the guardian of Title IX. “I recall the almost monthly relentless attacks on the definition on Title Nine that various male members of the House and Senate kept trying to raise,” Wendy Mink recalled. “My mother kept having to mobilize and beat those initiatives down.”
Patsy Mink, who was once rejected from multiple medical schools because she was a woman, also later helped pass the Women’s Educational Equity Act in 1974, which took on discrimination in educational programs, with a goal of equity for girls and women, especially in the areas of math and science. (It also gave money to lobby for the removal of the stereotypes of male doctors and female homemakers from textbooks.) Some of the women of the 116th Congress have picked up Mink’s mantle decades later in their fight on behalf of equity for LGBTQ students and athletes. Most Americans may never have heard of Mink, but we can burn a candle of thanks in her name for the path she paved a generation ago for the glorious 2019 US women’s soccer team—though even now its players are fighting for equal pay.
In the ’70s, the high priestess of agitators was Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman, whose photo now hangs in the offices of many of the women of the 116th Congress. A community activist and respected educator, Chisholm won her seat representing Brooklyn in 1968, following a campaign that centered squarely on gender. Her primary opponent, a civil rights leader, ran unabashedly on the suggestion that a man would be better suited to represent the area, with a campaign slogan stating that “a man’s voice” was needed in Washington. Her campaign motto was “Unbought and unbossed,” which would later be engraved on her vault in Forest Lawn cemetery in Buffalo, the city she eventually moved to in her retirement.
Like most of the women who were victorious in 2018, Chisholm gave her shoes a workout, campaigning door-to-door to grab every vote; also like today’s class of female lawmakers, she was a master at building political coalitions, bringing together young voters and multiracial constituencies to circumvent the male-dominated political machine. “When she gets to Congress,” Barbara Winslow, a professor emeritus at Brooklyn College and founder of the Shirley Chisholm Project, explained to me, “she is a celebrity so like AOC you can’t believe it. They were both snazzy dressers who liked to dance and both have rapier wits.”
With a desire to expand her reach and influence as a political outsider, Chisholm ran for president in 1972, which alienated many of the black men in the House who felt she was overstepping. “Her huge defeat demoralized her,” Winslow said, but it also made her shift from political activism to more savvy legislating. A cofounder of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Women’s Caucus, she had a unique perspective on what we now call “intersectionality.” “To date, neither the black movement nor women’s liberation succinctly addresses itself to the dilemma confronting the black who is female,” Chisholm said during a 1974 speech at the University of Missouri. “And as a consequence of ignoring or being unable to handle the problems facing black women, black women themselves are now becoming socially and politically active.”
But men, she believed, had held back her political career the most. “When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men,” she told a reporter on her way out of office. After she left, in 1983, “Shirley Chisholm had just been erased,” Winslow said. “No one had heard of her in her old neighborhood. She was a working-class woman of color out of the public eye.”
In the years leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of her ascent to the House, however, scholars and Chisholm fans revived her place in the political canon. Some of the new women referred to her during their campaigns and on their victory nights, as she was, all told, the mother of resistance politics. Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-IL), the first black woman to be elected in her district, referred to herself as “unbought and unbossed” in her victory speech. In Chisholm’s honor, House Democrats even enshrined a contemporary collage, made by staff, in their caucus room, featuring several photos of her and the image of a chair in reference to her famous line “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”
Chisholm paved an indelible path, and that road bent back toward her legacy in 2018. “I feel a soul tie to Shirley Chisholm,” Ayanna Pressley, the first black woman from Massachusetts to win a seat and the current tenant of Chisholm’s old office, told me. “Not only was she a ‘first,’ she was disruptive, she was brave, and she a was trailblazer. Her commitment to fighting injustice and lifting up the voices of the left out and left behind is an inspiration, and an example I hope to follow. The vibe of her office fills me with the courage to boldly lead, boldly legislate, and to never forget those who sent me here.”
Surprisingly, Chisholm and the other women of the 1970s faced perhaps a far more insidious resistance to their presence on the Hill than their forebears. For the most part, the first generation of women in Congress had been not only of a certain social class, they also tended to be familiar to other members from their years as congressional wives and informal advisors, and were seen in some ways more as extensions of late husbands’ values and agendas than as their own people with political agency. But, as Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, put it, “They were not running in the midst of a feminist movement.”
In the ’70s, on the other hand, the chin-out feminism of members like Bella Abzug and Pat Schroeder seemed to rankle the men of the House, and they made sure to let the women know every chance they had.
Abzug (D-NY) embodied both the feminist and antiwar movements in one colorful, outspoken congresswoman. Noting once that “women have been trained to talk softly and carry a lipstick,” Abzug was a lawyer who didn’t run for office until she was fifty years old. Her gender became central to her campaign, perhaps more than any female candidate who preceded her. Her campaign slogan was “This woman’s place is in the House . . . the House of Representatives.” She showed up in Washington with a wide-brimmed hat (which she began wearing as a young lawyer because she believed, for some odd reason, that wearing a hat was the only way a man would take a woman seriously) and battled unsuccessfully for the right to wear it on the House floor. Besides her patently feminist campaign, Abzug’s platform centered on opposition to the Vietnam War, financial and legal enfranchisement of poor and working-class New Yorkers, government accountability, and needling her party’s establishment, with which she often battled over committee assignments, legislative agendas, and whether or not positions were sufficiently liberal.
As a member of Congress, Abzug, who was monitored by the CIA for more than twenty years, turned her distrust into significant legislation. She coauthored the Freedom of Information Act and the Right to Privacy Act, but is best known for authoring the “Sunshine Law,” which required governing bodies to meet publicly, perhaps the most enduring government accountability move of that era. Government accountability would remain a major topic of interest to female lawmakers in the decades to follow.
While Chisholm is a current heroine, Abzug is rarely spoken of, even though her battles presaged many of the battles of the current class of women. Despite her accomplishments, her insolent New York edge, her political-purity litmus tests for colleagues, and her general aggressiveness often alienated the very people she was seeking to entice. According to a New York Times account, she even once punched one of her own campaign workers in the kidney. “Democratic women who wanted Republican women to participate in their bills were very wary of her,” Wasniewski told me. “It wasn’t until she left the House that many of the women who helped organize the Women’s Caucus in 1977 felt there was bipartisan momentum for it.”
Although there had been working mothers in Congress before Pat Schroeder of Colorado, she (enthusiastically cheered on by her husband and with her kids in tow) ran for the House in 1972 in a relatively conservative congressional district. She, too, ran on a platform of ending the war and empowering women, and she, too, ran a grassroots campaign focused on the social issues of the era and those close to her Denver constituents. Because she had trouble raising money, her main campaign materials were cheap black-and-white commercials and posters depicting her opposition to the Olympics in Colorado and the war in Vietnam (that one featured gravestones and a bird flying out over the top) and a poster supporting migrant workers. She became the first woman from her state elected to Congress, and held her seat for eleven subsequent terms.
Judging by her numerous accounts, Schroeder seemed to suffer more rank sexism than perhaps any of her progenitors. There was that story about the male member of Congress who offered her his face as her seat in the cloakroom. And while her most often reported slight was delivered by a colleague in an elevator, who told her, “This is about Chivas Regal, thousand-dollar bills, Lear jets, and beautiful women. Why are you here?” Schroeder endured insults and affronts throughout her long career. Men and women both, including Abzug, would question how the mother of young kids could possibly do the job, and that thought also occurred to Schroeder from time to time, particularly when her children’s pet rabbit once escaped on a plane home from Washington in search of an airline-issue salad.
Schroeder’s experiences were instructive particularly when compared with the last great member of the dead husbands’ club, Lindy Boggs (D-LA), who won the seat after her husband, House majority leader Hale Boggs, was lost when his plane disappeared during a campaign trip to Alaska in 1972. Boggs, the first woman from Louisiana elected (as opposed to appointed) to the House, represented a bridge of sorts between the two generations. Over her nine terms, she used the relationships she formed during her husband’s many years in Congress to gain plum committee assignments and legislative help. She played a key role in the creation of the House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families and the Congressional Women’s Caucus, and claimed that she had never experienced discrimination as a woman in the House.
When Schroeder, on the other hand, managed to win a seat on the prestigious House Armed Services Committee, the chair, Rep. Edward Hébert, a Dixiecrat from Louisiana, was so offended by the appointment that he forced Schroeder and Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA), an African American member from Oakland, to literally share a chair during a committee organizational meeting. (In a 2012 interview, Dellums recalled: “You know, even though we wanted to scream, we said, ‘No.’ We just let our silence and our behavior handle it. And they didn’t know what to do, because we didn’t scream. So the next time, the two seats were there. We made our point, and we moved on.”) Hébert didn’t treat every congresswoman like that. “Lindy Boggs comes in as a widow a couple of months later, and he tells the press Lindy is going to be a great member of the House,” Wasniewski recalled. Indeed, according to House records, Hébert once blurted, “She’s the only widow I know who is really qualified—damn qualified—to take over” her dead husband’s spot.
Lindy Boggs concerned herself less with the Equal Rights Amendment or fighting sex discrimination and more with fixing the financial systems that kept women from getting loans, owning homes, or amassing credit and wealth. Her style was on full display when the House Banking and Currency Committee wrote the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. That bill included a clause barring “discrimination on the basis of race and age” and “status as veterans” in obtaining credit. Boggs wanted “sex” and “marital status” added to the list, so she quietly wrote the words into the bill by hand, then walked to the photocopying machine and doled out the copies of the edited bill to fellow members of the committee with a honey-dripped remark: “Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I’m sure it was just an oversight that we didn’t have ‘sex’ or ’marital status’ included. I’ve taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee’s approval.” Today, Boggs is one of only two women (the other is former representative Gabrielle Giffords) to have a room in the Capitol named in her honor, and congresswomen flock to it like a holy site when they first arrive on the Hill.
Before 2018, the next significant wave of women to enter Congress occurred in 1992 in the wake of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas; twenty-four new women were elected to the House, many more than in any preceding decade, bringing the total to forty-seven, and women took an additional three seats in the Senate, joining incumbents Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who had won a special election. Rep. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) won a special election in June of the following year.
In many ways, 1992 shared some of the same dynamics as 2018—minority women gained in number both at the federal level and in statehouses, and the rights of women in the workplace was a central theme. But numerical gains did not equal power; in Congress, seniority has historically been destiny. Women have increasingly gained prominence through leading committees and simply hanging on, which is often the greatest career asset in Washington.
Longevity multiplies the novelty factor; the 116th Congress has both. “I was in Pelosi’s office talking about the budget the other day, and I looked up and it was Pelosi, [Rep. Nita] Lowey, [Rep. Lucille] Roybal-Allard, and me,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), who was first elected in 1990, told me. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is all women making major decisions about strategy on how to move us forward.’ ” Women with a combined eleven decades in Congress.
Of course, getting to Congress has been only part of the battle. Day-to-day life on the Hill has historically posed a challenge and the material culture there, particularly its amenities, has long served as a metaphor for the marginalization of women. For decades, the House gym, built in the 1920s to improve the health of the often-corpulent and largely inactive members, was festooned with a sign that read members only, but it effectively meant “men only.” When that gym was remodeled into a state-of-the-art fitness facility in the 1960s, complete with a pool, a tiny “Ladies Health Facility” was added to the Rayburn House Office Building, featuring a Ping-Pong table, exercise “machines” that looked like they had come straight from a midcentury fat camp, and bonnet hair dryers. One afternoon in 1967, Rep. Catherine May (R-WA), Rep. Charlotte Reid (R-IL), and Rep. Patsy Mink wandered over to the House gym and proclaimed their desire to take a calisthenics class. The women, who were looking more to make a statement than to get in a workout, were denied entry to the gym; they promptly took a photo of the members only sign as an official register of complaint and slipped off.
Their outrage was not so much about a lack of aerobics as a lack of access. Like the golf course, the gym is where friendships were formed and deals were cut, and women were left out of the action. Their gym gambit did not get traction right off the bat; when asked by reporters about this in 1979, Herb Botts, who managed the basement facility, said: “When the building was planned, they didn’t envision twenty women members. The ladies understand.”
So women got access to the men’s pool during specified hours but not the men’s gym proper; they were stuck with their own inadequate facility until 1985. In an interview with the House historian’s office, Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-CT), who served from 1983 to 2007, recalled the Great Gym Rebellion, when a group of congresswomen from both parties made the second attempt to make the men’s gym officially coed. “[Senator] Barbara Boxer came to me, and she said, ‘The [women’s] gym equipment is terrible,’ ” Johnson recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, I’ve never been there.’ So, we went over and looked. And it was those old-fashioned rowing machines—wooden rowing machines—and wooden bars on the wall.” Noting that no one wanted to use that stuff, Johnson said, “She and I, and we got a couple of other Democrats and a couple of other Republicans, and we took the congressman from Springfield, who was chairman of the gym resources or whatever they called them. And he was quite elderly. And we toured him around, and we said, ‘Now, we want machines like you have,’ because they had all these exercise machines. So, we were talking about what we wanted and what we had, and so on and so forth. And the bell rings to go to vote. The second bell rings, so then we really do have to go. And so we go to vote, and then, on the floor, Barbara and I come up to him and say, ‘Well, what do you think?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why you want machines. You know, those machines only build muscles.’ ”
Even in 2008, female senators were not permitted at all in the Senate pool, an artifact of the proclivity of certain male senators (reportedly Democrats Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Chris Dodd of Connecticut) for sometimes swimming in the nude. The men only sign at the pool was finally replaced after some unamused female senators complained with a placard warning senators to swim clothed, even as—remember—bare arms remained officially prohibited on the House and Senate floors.
Only after Republicans took over the House in 2011 did women finally get a bathroom off the House floor (men had had one since the chamber first opened in 1857). A few years later, female senators got the restroom near the Senate floor expanded, with additional stalls and some storage space after years of cramming into a tiny one. In recognition of the increased number of parents in Congress, many members-only restrooms now have changing tables and there are places around the Capitol to express milk. In the 116th Congress, the chair of the Committee on House Administration, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), had tampons added to the women’s bathroom off the House floor, and allowed members to use their official budgets for the first time ever to pay for menstrual products for their offices.
Along with this evolution of physical and external change, the culture around how members talk about policy has shifted dramatically. “The very first bill we were debating when I came here was a Ted Kennedy bill about the family medical leave policy,” recalled Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who was among the tiny wave of new female senators elected in 1992. “I went out to speak on the floor. I talked about a friend of mine who I had known whose fifteen-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia, who worked for a major company in my state, and who was literally told, ‘If you take time off to be with him, we can’t guarantee your job will be here.’ And she just went through this horrible stress of, you know, will I lose my job? And I actually had a male senator, come to me afterwards and say, ‘We don’t tell personal stories on the floor.’ But now it’s standard. You listen to the debate now. And it’s much more human and real, and it makes people understand why we’re doing things we’re doing. I mean, when I got here, the standard thing was graphs and charts and, you know, economic analysis—and fine. But policy is important to people. And if they don’t get the connection between what we’re talking about and what’s happening in their life, it’s very hard to get things passed.” (That same male senator later thanked her, she said, for helping him to rethink how to talk about policy in public.)
No discussion of the role of women—and the evolving power dynamics—in Congress would be complete, of course, without considering Nancy Pelosi, perhaps the House’s most durable member. She has survived contests of wills for power and legislation, been written off by many after the disastrous-for-Democrats 2010 election, fended off numerous challenges to her leadership in the minority, where she often outwitted a splintered Republican majority, and finally rose again to manage the historic class of 2019.
The daughter of a politically powerful former congressman and mayor of Baltimore, Pelosi learned at her parents’ elbows how to raise money, call in favors, pressure supporters to step it up at election time, and, perhaps most important of all, how to count votes. After marrying her husband, Paul, a wealthy real estate investor, in 1963 and moving to San Francisco, Pelosi raised five children, but she remained involved in politics, holding fundraisers—for which she cooked and her children served—in her elegant home while still driving carpool and sewing her kids’ clothes. She kept close ties to party leaders in Maryland and her new state of California, where she eventually became chair of the state Democratic Party. Her attempts to rise to chair of the Democratic National Committee were thwarted at least in part by sexism; a labor leader siding with another candidate called her “an airhead.” Upon withdrawing, Pelosi said: “It is clear to me [that] many of you did not think the right message would go out if a woman was elected chairman of this party.”
In 1983, when Rep. Phil Burton (D-CA) died, his wife, Sala, won an election to complete his term. But in 1987, she became ill with cancer and suggested from her deathbed that Pelosi take her place in the district that encompassed much of San Francisco. Pelosi had the financial advantage over her many opponents in a nasty primary fight, as well as the grassroots volunteers networking learned in Baltimore, and it all added up to a win by fewer than four thousand votes, delivered in part by Republican voters and a defeat for her more liberal challenger; she outran the Republican in a runoff by more than 60 percent. (Therein lies the first myth of Pelosi: she has never been the most liberal person in the United States or even San Francisco.) Her proclivity for outorganizing and outhustling everyone around her was on display as well, underscoring the value of one of her favorite aphorisms, “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.”
Pelosi picked a hometown issue early on, announcing in her first House floor speech in 1987 that she had come to Congress to fight AIDS, and she went on to increase funding for AIDS research and secure the ability for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt to be displayed on the National Mall. In 2013, when Lindy Boggs died, Pelosi went to the floor to honor her mentor. “When we would have our heated discussions on the floor,” Pelosi recalled, “she would call us back and say: ‘Darling, Hale used to always say: ‘Don’t fight every fight as if it’s your last fight. We are all friends. We are a resource to each other to do good things for our country.’ No wonder a room was named for her.”
The trailblazers of the 116th Congress recognize the debt they owe to the women who came before them: Boggs and Pelosi, yes, but especially Shirley Chisholm. The first—and for a long time only—piece of art in Ilhan Omar’s office was a rendering of Chisholm. Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA), a millennial lawmaker from Southern California, had been assigned Chisholm’s office in the lottery used to determine freshman offices, but she turned it over to Ayanna Pressley, knowing its significance to her. Along with her official congressional swearing-in, Bella Abzug took a “people’s oath” on the House steps, administered by Chisholm, signifying her fealty to the people who elected her. Decades later, Pressley and Rashida Tlaib took a similar oath in their home cities. Abzug, like Tlaib, was among the first freshmen to call for the impeachment of a president (in Abzug’s case, Richard Nixon; in Tlaib’s case, Donald Trump). Abzug and Chisholm also cowrote the Child Development Act. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s and other new members’ blistering cross-examinations of officials over drug pricing, child separation policies, police misconduct, and corporate malfeasance would not have been possible without the unbought and unbossed women of the 1970s.
But quite soon after the January 2019 swearing-in, gender unity was overshadowed by political conflicts that mirror the broader internal battle facing the Democratic Party. A new group of women was eager to push forward a politically progressive policy agenda focused on health care, wages, and climate change, often framed through the lens of multiracial liberalism that the group believes defines the next generation of the party. The lawmakers’ policy ideas, and often their perspectives as young members who won by appealing to new voters, have at times put them at odds with Pelosi and the older, whiter party leadership of the House, and they have often chafed at being made to feel like a thorn in the side of their fellow House Democrats.
Indeed, once the members of the 116th Congress were seated, there was almost instant conflict between members who expected their exciting but still junior colleagues to sit down and listen, and the large, opinionated, diverse, and self-confident group of new members whose campaigns, life stories, and paths to power diverged dramatically from those of their predecessors.
Here, the new class of women, the largest ever in the history of Congress, would have a chance to demonstrate to what degree, if at all, a growing gender parity would impact the institution and policy. Pat Schroeder, now seventy-nine, lives in Florida and remains active in politics. She recently told me that while she agrees that the dead husbands’ club is defunct, she does not think congressional women have yet achieved safety in numbers. “I was so excited to see the new women who have been in military service and intelligence service and all sorts of careers that women really were not into back then,” she said. “But for all the great job they are doing, I think, ‘Oh my God, it’s 2019, and we are not even a full twenty-five percent of the House.’ You need critical mass in an institution to change it. The question is always, What is a critical mass? I don’t think anyone thinks it’s twenty-three percent.”