Women in Congress

An Introduction

Researching the Topic of Women in Congress

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (left) and Representative Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut were leading women within their respective political parties. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (left) and Representative Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut were leading women within their respective political parties. Image Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration

The literature on women’s history, which has grown into one of the most dynamic fields in the historical profession, has largely been created since the 1970s.21 The editors consulted several useful general texts on women’s history, including Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill and Wand, 1992); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); and Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 2nd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994).

Though the field has flourished in recent years, it still is marked by significant historiographical gaps, including the underrepresentation of congressional women in the secondary literature. A few of the most famous women in Congress—Margaret Chase Smith, Clare Boothe Luce, Coya Knutson, and Ruth Hanna McCormick—have been the subjects of thorough biographical treatments. Most others have not, including prominent legislative figures such as Mary Norton, Edith Nourse Rogers, Florence Kahn, Katharine St. George, Martha Griffiths, Julia Butler Hansen, Edith Green, Leonor Sullivan, Patsy Mink, and Nancy Kassebaum. One aim of these profiles is to generate interest in future studies of these Congresswomen and in studies of other, lesser-known but significant individuals, including Alice Robertson, Ruth Pratt, Kathryn O’Loughlin McCarthy, Marguerite Stitt Church, Vera Buchanan, and Florence Dwyer.

Several sources were indispensable in researching and writing Women in Congress. Any inquiry into a Member’s congressional career should begin with the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov. Maintained by the House Office of History and Preservation and the Senate Historical Office, this publication is easily searchable and contains basic biographical information about Members, pertinent bibliographic references, and information about manuscript collections. It is updated daily with the latest available information.

In the early phase of research, the editors also consulted standard reference sources such as the American National Biography, the Dictionary of American Biography, and Current Biography. Various editions of The Almanac of American Politics (Washington, D.C.: National Journal, Inc.) and Politics in America (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press) also were starting points in the research on many former and current women Members in the post-1977 period. For biographical sketches of women in Congress from 1917 to 1973, the editors used Hope Chamberlin’s A Minority of Members: Women in the U.S. Congress (New York: Praeger, 1973). However, this book lacks footnotes. Karen Foerstel’s Biographical Dictionary of Congressional Women (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), though spare, includes endnotes and contains information through the 1998 elections. Marcy Kaptur’s Women of Congress: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1996) is a useful study with extended profiles of roughly a dozen prominent House and Senate women. An invaluable study of changing patterns among Congresswomen is Irwin Gertzog’s Congressional Women: Their Recruitment, Integration, and Behavior (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).

Much of the information for this publication was researched using primary sources, particularly, published official congressional records and scholarly compilations of congressional statistics. These include:

A campaign poster for Bella Abzug of New York. Abzug, who served three terms from 1971to 1977, was one of the institution’s most colorful individuals A campaign poster for Bella Abzug of New York. Abzug, who served three terms from 1971 to 1977, was one of the institution’s most colorful individuals. Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress
  • Congressional election results for the biennial elections from 1920 forward are available in the Clerk’s “Congressional Elections,” published by the Government Printing Office (GPO) or in PDF format at http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/electionInfo/index.html. Michael J. Dubin et al., United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Publishing, Inc., 1998) contains results for both general and special elections. For information on district boundaries and reapportionment, the editors relied on Kenneth C. Martis, The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789–1989 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989).
  • Committee assignments and information about jurisdiction may be found in two indispensable scholarly compilations: David T. Canon, Garrison Nelson, and Charles Stewart III, Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1789–1946, 4 volumes (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002) and Garrison Nelson, Committees in the U.S. Congress, 1947–1992, 2 volumes (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1994). In addition, the editors consulted the Congressional Directory, a GPO publication that dates back into the 19th century. The directory is available at GPO from the 104th Congress forward. See http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cdirectory/index.html.
  • Legislation, floor debates, roll call votes, bills, resolutions, and public laws back to the 1980s may be searched on the Library of Congress’s THOMAS Web site at http://thomas.loc.gov. A useful print resource that discusses major acts of Congress is Steven V. Stathis’s Landmark Legislation, 1774–2002: Major U.S. Acts and Treaties (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 2002). Floor debates about legislation can be found in the Congressional Record (1873 to the present), which is available at the THOMAS Web site from 1989 to the present; an index of the Record from 1983 to the present is available at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cri/index.html. The editors also consulted the official proceedings in the House Journal and the Senate Journal. For House roll call votes back to the second session of the 101st Congress, visit the House Clerk’s Web site at http://clerk.house.gov/art_history/house_history/index.html.
  • For print copies of the Congressional Directory, the Congressional Record, the House Journal, or the Senate Journal, consult your nearest federal depository library. A GPO locator for federal depository libraries may be accessed at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/libraries.html.

Technology now permits research that even a decade ago would have been impossible. Using an online database, the editors were able to review key historical newspapers for the entire span of women’s participation in Congress; these include the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Wall Street Journal. News accounts and feature stories, particularly on the first generation of women in Congress, have done much to fill in the details about some of the more obscure women Members.

Significant photo research was carried out for this edition of Women in Congress. Previous editions included only a head-and-shoulders image of each Member. Individual picture credits were not indicated in the 1976 edition, though a photo acknowledgment page was included at the end of the book. In the 1991 edition, a photo credit was included with each picture, but many images were credited to Members’ offices that no longer exist or to the collection of the House Historian whose office closed in the mid-1990s.

In the current edition of Women in Congress, the editors strove to provide accurate information for all images that are accessible from public, private, and commercial repositories (with the expectation that researchers and the general public might wish to acquire photo reproductions). Among the major photo collections that were used for this project were the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), the Still Pictures Branch of the National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD), the Washington Star Collection of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library’s Washingtonian Division (Washington, D.C.), and the photo archives of the Associated Press. The editors also referenced a half-dozen Members’ manuscript collections to locate images for publication. For a small number of Member images, the Office of History and Preservation in the U.S. House of Representatives is cited. Images of the current Members were provided by their offices or reproduced from past editions of the Congressional Pictorial Directory published by GPO. Current Member offices should serve as the point of contact for persons seeking an official image.

Matt Wasniewski
Editor-in-Chief
Office of History and Preservation

Kathleen Johnson, Erin M. Lloyd, and Laura K. Turner
Writers and Researchers
Office of History and Preservation

 

Notes

  1. See, for example, Linda Gordon’s historiographical essay “U.S. Women’s History” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).