The Secret History of Women in the Senate

[elleng]

Last edited Thu Jan 8, 2015, 01:43 PM - Edit history (1)

Kay Hagan just wanted to swim. It was late 2008, and the Democrat was newly arrived on Capitol Hill as North Carolina’s junior senator-elect. But Hagan was told that the Senate pool was males-only. Why? Because some of the male senators liked to swim naked.

It took an intervention by Senator Chuck Schumer, head of the Rules Committee, to put a stop to the practice, but even then “it was a fight,” remembers pollster Celinda Lake, who heard about the incident when the pool revolt was the talk among Washington women.

The pool wasn’t the only Senate facility apparently stuck in the Dark Ages. . .

EDIT: One early aide reflects that Mikulski treated her male colleagues in a way they were not accustomed to being treated by women—as equals. These were men used to women who deferred to them, and “the fear of having her get in their face gave her a lot of advantages that other people didn’t have,” the aide recalled.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/senate-women-secret-history-113908.html#ixzz3O4aEA4wb

[merrily]

1. The Senate was one of several government equivalents of an "Old Boy's Club?"

[niyad]

2. from the article:

In the entire history of the United States Senate, a mere *******44****** women have served. Ever. Those few who have were elected to a club they were never meant to join, and their history in the chamber is marked by sexism both spectacular and small. For decades in the 20th century after women first joined, many male senators were hardly more than corrupt frat boys with floor privileges, reeking of alcohol and making little secret of their sexual dalliances with constituents, employees and any other hapless subordinate female they could grab. But perhaps more striking is what I found after interviewing dozens of women senators, former senators and their aides over the past several months: Even today, the women of the Senate are confronted with a kind of floating, often subtle, but corrosive sexism, a sense of not belonging that is both pervasive and so counter to the narrative of real, if stubbornly slow, progress that many are reluctant to acknowledge this persistent secret.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/senate-women-secret-history-113908.html#ixzz3OFXgEA00