Who is a member?
Our members are the local governments of Massachusetts and their elected and appointed leadership.
Women bring a distinct perspective to the legislative process and are more likely than their male counterparts to work collaboratively, commentator Cokie Roberts said in a Jan. 21 speech in Boston.
“Having women on a town committee, in the state legislature, in the Congress, makes a difference in the communities they serve,” said Roberts, speaking at the Women Elected Municipal Officials luncheon held during the MMA Annual Meeting.
Research by Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics suggests that in state legislatures, women work “far more cooperatively, much more across party lines, and are more willing to effect positive change, especially for children and families,” Roberts said.
Roberts is the daughter of Lindy Boggs, 94, who served in Congress for 18 years following the death of her husband and Roberts’s father, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, in 1972. At that time, there were just 16 women in Congress.
“What she discovered, as many of you have discovered, is that when you are elected as a minority, you represent not only the 2nd District of Louisiana, but you represent the women of America,” Roberts said. “Because they come to you, and they come with their pleas because they feel freer to talk to you.”
Roberts, who also delivered the keynote address at the MMA Annual Meeting, described how her mother broadened the scope of what became the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.
At that time, single women, including widows, often had trouble qualifying for credit on their own. Though she was a member of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Lindy Boggs lost access to credit after her husband’s death.
An earlier version of the bill covered lending discrimination based only on factors such as race, religion and national origin. Lindy Boggs, according to Roberts, took a copy of the bill into a backroom, added a phrase covering gender and marital status, and returned to the committee room.
“She said, in her sweet southern way, ‘Surely, my colleagues have overlooked this,’” Roberts said. “That is how we got equal credit.”
There are now 72 women in the House and 17 in the Senate. While the majority of congresswomen are Democrats, Republican women picked up nine seats in the November elections – a good thing for their Democratic counterparts, according to Roberts, “because if you have all the women in one caucus, it doesn’t have the same attractiveness for people trying to move your votes.”
The 17 senators, she added, represent “the only remaining bastion of bipartisanship in the Senate.”
Roberts lauded the role of Nancy Pelosi, the nation’s first female speaker of the House. Among the family-friendly changes that Pelosi made after she replaced Dennis Hastert as speaker in 2007 was to install lactation rooms for House staffers who had babies.
“Any previous speaker didn’t even know what lactation was,” Roberts joked, “unless he came from a farm district.”
Having young children has long been seen as an impediment for women seeking political office. Roberts recalled how former congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who was first elected in 1972, would respond with satire when reporters asked, “Who’s going to take care of the children?”
“She would say, ‘Oh, the children? The children are fine. Jim and I get up in the morning, and we dress them and we feed them a very hearty breakfast, and then we put them in a freezer. And then we go to work, and then we come home, and we take them out and defrost them.’”