Women in the Senate, Wow!

It’s about time the stuffy male-dominated exclusive men’s club of the United States Senate finally crumbled under the weight of a record number of women elected to this political body.

This year, this past election, the number of women serving rose to 20.  That is a record, the most ever in U.S. history.  And although the number may not be as big as we women would like it to be, the women elected to the Senate will have a significant and likely historical impact in our nation’s government.

Most outstanding, most controversial and the most contentious is Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts, who defeated Scott Brown, the Tea Party dimwit who fancied himself Ted Kennedy’s successor.  Although Brown put on an act sufficient to convince Republicans he was a fairly moderate guy, when he got to the Senate he showed his true stripes, and my, but they were skunk stinky!

So there is tremendous satisfaction knowing that Warren defeated him roundly, particularly in the wake of his obstreperous and bigoted staff, who took the opportunity during the campaign to put on war paint and make adolescent war whoops in order to demean her personally as well as her Native American heritage.

Much to Brown and the GOP’s chagrin, Warren won.  Not only that, she has nabbed one of the most highly sought-after committee appointments, the one that has the Republicans and their fellow henchmen in crime, Wall Street, writhing in fury on the Senate floor — she has been appointed to serve on the Senate Banking Committee.

That’s fantastic for the woman who was denied the directorship of Congress’ TARP oversight panel because at one time that position would not have made it through the Senate, due to the GOP blocking her every step of the way.

In other words, women members of the Senate such as Warren now wield considerable power.  That’s a far cry from the first woman elected to the Senate, Rebecca Latimer Felton, from Georgia, who served on the basis of appointment exactly one day — from Nov. 21 to Nov. 22 in 1922.

Felton was in for just a day because she was primarily a bridge to electing a man, in this case, Walter F. George, to fill the gap when Sen. Thomas E. Watson died prematurely.  It was just as well because despite Felton’s support for women’s suffrage, she was on record as a white supremacist.  She advocated lynching of black men specifically. She was fanatically fearful of black men raping white women and suggested white Southerners should “lynch a thousand black men a week if it becomes necessary to protect a woman’s dearest possession.”

Why Felton was such a bigot is unknown; at 87 years old when she served for a mere 24 hours in the Senate, it made her stance on prison reform, women’s rights and modernizing education all the more perplexing.

Many, many women senators have served with distinction since Felton, and the names are a who’s who of prominent, talented, and remarkable women.  Among them was Margaret Chase Smith, from Maine, who was the first woman to serve in both the U.S. Congress and Senate.  She was a moderate Republican who was highly praised for her speech in 1950, “Declaration of Conscience,” in which she criticized McCarthyism.  She served from 1949 to 1973, the first women to serve so long until Sen. Barbara Mikulski from Maryland, who was recently reelected in 2011 for a fifth term (each term for a senator is six years).

Maurine Brown Neuberger, from Oregon, served from 1960 to 1967, along with her husband, Richard L. Neuberger.  They were the Senate’s first husband-and-wife legislative couple.  She was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1950 to 1955, and won a special election to fill her husband’s Senate seat after he died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1960.

Neuberger was one of the first Senate women to achieve her position by actual election and not appointment, which was more typical for decades.  She focused her time on consumer, environmental and health issues.  She sponsored bills requiring warning labels on cigarettes and in 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.

Then there’s Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, the first First Lady of the United States (as well as First Lady of Arkansas, when her husband, Bill Clinton, was governor there) who served as senator from New York.  She was elected in 2000, and was reelected by a wide margin in 2006, she was so popular and respected.  She later ran for president in 2008, and although she very narrowly lost to current second-term President Barack Obama, he appointed her secretary of state, one of the most powerful positions in a presidential cabinet and fourth in line to the presidency.

Clinton has chosen to retire from public life for now, but the rumor mill is already rumbling that she will make another run for president in 2016.  Considering she was wildly popular when she campaigned for president in 2008, and that she is tremendously admired the world over in her role as the 67th secretary of state for the U.S., she has not let on one iota what her future plans are.  Smart lady; best to let everyone speculate because if eventually she does decide to campaign for president again, the chances are pretty darn strong she would win — at nearly 70 years old!  (Take that, Luke Russert!)

Look at the roster of current Senate women — the aforementioned Barbara Mikulski from Maryland; Dianne Feinstein from California; Barbara Boxer, also from California; Patty Murray, Washington; Kay Bailey Hutchison, Texas, retiring; Olympia Snowe, Maine, retiring; Susan Collins, Maine; Mary Landrieu, Louisiana; Maria Cantwell, Washington; Debbie Stabenow, Michigan; Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota; Claire McCaskill, Missouri (take that, Todd Akin!)  Jeanne Shaheen, New Hampshire; Kay Hagen, North Carolina; Kirsten Gillibrand, New York; Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire; and these senator-elects, Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin, Deb Fischer, Nebraska, Heidi Heitkamp, North Dakota, Mazie Hirono, Hawaii, and Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts.

Wow!  I’m impressed!  What a difference from when women first got to vote in 1919!

The nation is in good hands, thanks to them all!

Jodeane Albright, award-winning blogger for the Idaho State Journal, is also the Journal’s community editor.