Women in Congress, Then and Now

Nathan Connolly: Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joanne Freeman: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: And, I’m Brian Balogh. If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. Along with Ed Ayers and Nathan Connolly, each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

Joanne Freeman: When the 116th Congress was sworn in this past January, a historic number of women took office. Today, 131 women serve in the House and Senate making Congress the most female and most diverse it’s ever been.

Speaker 4: We did it!

Rashida Tlaib: So, I think it’s official that I am Congresswoman-Elect Rashida Tlaib.

Deb Haaland: Tonight, New Mexico, you are sending one of the very first Native American women to Congress.

Alexandria O.: Despite the fact that we were running against a 10-term incumbent, despite the fact that it was your first time running for office, despite the fact that we didn’t have the money, despite the fact that I’m working class, despite all those things, we won.

Joanne Freeman: But, women in politics continue to face an uphill battle. Even after their election, congresswomen such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have faced criticism for their choice of clothing and language. One radio commentator in Atlanta even suggested Lucy McBath should, “Go back to the kitchen.” Today, on the show, we look at women in Congress. How much progress we’ve made, and how much work lies ahead.

Joanne Freeman: Debbie Walsh has been studying the role of women in American politics for over 20 years at Rutgers University. I spoke to her to better understand the long history that led up to November’s breakthrough election. So, what was it like for her to watch a record number of congresswomen being sworn in this year?

Debbie Walsh: I had a mixed reaction. One was very positive, which was, obviously, seeing the largest freshmen class of women in Congress in history. To see 36 new women elected in one cycle, unprecedented. At the same time, being cautious, which is a little bit of what we do here, which is to put a little bit of a reality check on all of the progress. While we did see this tremendous growth, we are constantly being reminded and reminding others of the fact that women are still less than a quarter of all of the members of Congress. While there is much celebration about all of the new women, we’re still at less than 25%.

Debbie Walsh: Also, that this story really was pretty much exclusively on the Democratic side. Of all of those newly elected women that we saw, only one new Republican woman was elected this time. We are now down to 13 Republican women in Congress. We haven’t seen numbers that low since Bill Clinton was in the White House. So, we’re not going to get to gender parity if only one party is electing women. It makes me celebrate on one front, and mindful of the continuing work that needs to be done on the other.

Joanne Freeman: Let’s look back a little bit in time here. Who were the first women to enter Congress, and how was it that they ended up getting there?

Debbie Walsh: Well, Jeannette Rankin was the first woman, a Republican woman, who came into Congress, and she actually got there before there was national suffrage. Many of the Western states granted women the right to vote earlier than the national right to vote was granted. She served for one term then was out, and then came back again. She has the distinction of having been the lone vote in Congress to vote against the U.S. entering each of the World Wars. So, she voted against. She was a pacifist, and she voted against the U.S. going into World War I, and against going into World War II.

Debbie Walsh: In general, early on, we saw some women who got elected to office, but an awful lot of them in the early days were women who came in to fill a vacancy. Often times, it was their husband who was in office who died, and then the party would need to put somebody in there to be a placeholder. Then, they would serve out that term. It was an easy way of doing it. It made sense. This woman probably knew much of what her husband was working on in Congress. It wasn’t a jarring thing for the public. It was, this is the best person to carry on the former member’s legacy until an election could be held.

Debbie Walsh: Some of those women actually then went on to have long and illustrious careers in Congress themselves. One of the most famous of those is Margaret Chase Smith, who filled her husband’s seat in the House, and then went on to run herself multiple times for re-election. Then, was elected to the U.S. Senate from the state of Maine. She was the person who made the famous speech on the floor of the Senate condemning Senator Joe McCarthy, and she put her hat in the ring for the presidency, as a presidential candidate on the Republican side.

Debbie Walsh: You also have women like Lindy Boggs, Cardiss Collins, Lois Capps, women who came in a little more recently, but who then went on to have their own strong and important careers in Congress. Really, starting in the 70s, we started to see more and more women running on their own and getting elected. We saw the first women of color coming in, Patsy Mink, Shirley Chisholm. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who just retired, was the first Latina to be elected to Congress. So, it has been a slow and evolutionary process, but it has shifted from women being a complete novelty, women largely being there as placeholders for their husbands, to women getting elected in their own right, to now the point where they are well over a third of the Democratic caucus on the House side. So, it has been a process of evolutionary change.

Joanne Freeman: What would you say were some of the foremost, ground-level, working challenges that those early women in Congress would have faced?

Debbie Walsh: Well, I think it’s everything from being completely marginalized from leadership and on the floor, to literally things as mundane as not having a bathroom that you could use. It was a very male institution. To be the first women in those spaces would have been really a challenge, really difficult, not being taken seriously. Women were not chairs of committees. I think the first woman to chair a committee was done almost as an insulting joke, but there was a House beauty shop, and that was what the woman got to chair.

Debbie Walsh: These women were not taken as seriously as their male colleagues by any stretch of the imagination. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to walk into a place like the U.S. Congress and to be one of four or five or three women in the whole entire institution.

Joanne Freeman: Right, just the strength of character that that would have taken is remarkable to think about.

Debbie Walsh: Absolutely. Honestly, when you think about it, what would it take for you to think that at a period where women had only fought for and earned the right to vote maybe five years ago and to have the strength and the sense of self to say, “I should actually be in Congress.” It’s quite extraordinary to think about.

Joanne Freeman: Exactly. Obviously, there are other kinds of diversity that bring other perspectives, but what’s your sense of how introducing those voices really is going to change the broader conversation?

Debbie Walsh: We have found that women are more likely than their male counterparts to have their policy agenda priorities reflect the interests of women, families, and children. It doesn’t mean that all the women on both sides of the aisle, again, are agreeing on the same approach, but that those issues matter and come to the forefront for those elected officials. That’s different. We’ve also found that women are more likely to believe that government should be operating more transparently in the open and that women are more likely than their male counterparts to believe that they have a responsibility to represent voices of folks that normally aren’t at the table. So, not just women, but also people of color, low-income people, people who don’t necessarily have the same kind of voice and the same kind of access. They tend to be more inclusive.

Debbie Walsh: We also have seen that women seem to be more able to … and, the women say this about themselves … a little more able to work across the aisle, which, I think, these days, is significant and important because we see such gridlock and such partisan rancor, that to have more people who can figure out ways to reach across the aisle would really make a difference.

Joanne Freeman: Oh, absolutely, right? It’s about personal engagement. It’s about being able to converse. It’s about good faith.

Debbie Walsh: It’s about knowing a little bit about each other, the human stories. What’s going on with your kids? What’s happening with your older parents? All those kinds of things that make them human to each other, so that you can’t demonize each other, you don’t write each other off, you have those personal relationships. It makes a big difference.

Debbie Walsh: The women in the Senate for years now have been coming together across party lines to have dinner together. This started with Barbara Mikulski, who was the first Democratic woman elected to the United States Senate in her own right, and she would organize these dinners. They have continued today, even though she’s no longer serving. Again, these are women who really span the ideological spectrum, but the fact that they have built some kind of personal relationship is hugely important in politics. It allows you to have some conversations and to find some middle ground.

Debbie Walsh: A fun example of this is that the men and the women in Congress do have these baseball teams/softball teams, and the men play each other, the Democrats versus the Republicans, as a fundraiser. The women in the House, the way they operate, is the women play together, Democrats and Republicans, on the same team, and they play the women in the press corps.

Joanne Freeman: Wow!

Debbie Walsh: They, even in that small way, have figured out some ways to work together. Again, it seems why is that such a big deal, but those personal relationships really matter in politics.

Joanne Freeman: Are there ways that you think social media shaped what women could or couldn’t do in this campaign? This is generally fascinating to me to think about the ways in which social media changed the way the politicians engage with the public.

Debbie Walsh: I think that one of the things that we saw in 2018 is the kind of authenticity that these women showed. They talked about their strengths, but they also were willing to talk about some of their vulnerabilities, and, in fact, I think turned their vulnerabilities into strengths. We saw candidates this time around talking about their own personal Me Too stories. We saw women talking about the fact that they had grown up in families and homes where there was an abuser. They grew up in homes where they had a parent who was a substance abuser addicted to drugs. We saw folks talking about their military experience. We saw them talking about the fact that they were gay.

Debbie Walsh: They talked about all the aspects of their lives and turned it into strength. I do think social media is a piece of that, that we are all used to now people being much more transparent about their lives. I think there’s some of that expectation now that we all have that you will be your real self. I think with that authenticity, women can be much more real and much more relatable. It was not that long ago that a woman who had young children would be encouraged by her political consultant to not really talk about your young kids or to show them in a brochure, or on your website. Because, in fact, people would ask you, “Well, who’s going to take care of your kids if you get elected?” Not a question that young male candidates would be confronted with.

Joanne Freeman: Right. In the research that you’ve done and the data that you’ve collected, what does it tell you about the ways in which women politic differently from men?

Debbie Walsh: Well, one of the things that we have asked women and men who serve in state legislators over the years in surveys is, when you first ran for office, did somebody suggest this to you or did you run on your own? You’ll be shocked, but the men basically wake up one morning, look in the mirror, and say, “I’d be a great state legislator,” and they just run whereas women need to be recruited. There is that sense of entitlement that, frankly, we should all feel. We are all entitled to be elected officials, but women have not been raised that way.

Debbie Walsh: I think that’s changing. I think that’s one of the changes we saw in 2018. A lot of the women who ran did not run because somebody asked them. They ran, frankly, in spite of their party. There are a number of examples of women who are now in Congress who they were not their party’s choice. In fact, a couple of them, Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated incumbent members of their own party for those seats. They were not waiting to be asked. They were not waiting their turn. They stepped up, and they ran.

Joanne Freeman: Debbie Walsh is the Director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.