This was the first of a twopart program. You can view this and all other american artifact programs on our website, cspan. Org history. Each week, American History tv is american artifact visits museums and historic places. Next we take you inside the house wing of the u. S. Capitol to learn about the history of women in congress. In the second of a twopart program, we continue the story into the 1940s with republican congresswoman clare booth luce. I am sarah elliott. I am the curator for the house of representatives. I take care of a lot of the artifacts, artwork, objects that document the houses rich heritage. I am the historian at the house. My job is to collect biographical information on members, to gather data and historic lists and to conduct oral histories. We answer reference questions in our office that come from on the hill and off the hill. We try to tell the story of the house. Which is this very big, very Old Institution in a way in which people can connect with it at a humanly level. We do that through telling biographical stories or with clips from oral histories that give people kind of a human sense of a very large institution. Today, we thought we would try to do that with you by telling you about the history of women in congress. Which is a history that dates back to the early 20th century. This is a nifty piece of campaign ephemera. It is for clare booth luce, her reelection campaign. And it is quite handy. It even tells you what to do. Use this column when voting for clare booth luce. With a little arrow, how you go into voting booths and make sure you are pulling the lever to reelect clare booth luce. And Clare Boothe Luce wouldve been the republican counterpart of helen douglas. She was wellknown to the general public. Her career had started as a writer and editor. She was a managing editor for vanity fair magazine in the 1930s. She eventually, later in the 1930s, married henry luce, the founder of time and life and fortune. She had a prominent background before she came to congress. She was elected to two terms in the 1940s. She was originally a supporter of the new deal and then turned against fdrs domestic policies. But by the time she comes to congress, she is one of the more eloquent spokespeople in terms of criticism of fdrs wartime management. She is not an isolationist. She is an internationalist. She also is a woman who supports the equal rights amendment and an enhanced role for women in the military services and outside the home. So she is something of a feminist as well. [video clip] from america, this congressional delegation comes to the western front on a democratic mission. Mrs. Luce, congresswoman and playwright, and spot men costello and thomas serve on the house of representatives military affairs committee. The group travels toward the battle line, observing american weapons and supplies powering the big push to the rhine. [gunfire] off to look over newly liberated areas behind the lines on the return home, they will make their report to the american nation. She serves two terms. This would have been for her 1944 reelection. About that time, she suffers a personal tragedy. Her only daughter is killed in a car wreck near stanford where she was going to college. And with that, she kind of lost a lot of her zeal for public office. And she retires from the house at the end of the 79th congress in 1947. She and Helena Douglas wouldve overlapped for a term. They wouldve been known by the general public as two prominent women, both in a political sense, but also kind of in a cultural sense as well. This is one of my favorite buttons. She is a wonderful person. Matt talks about the transition of generations of women. And how that relates to what is going on in the nation at large. Coya in some ways pays the price of the changing view of women in the 1940s after world war ii ends. This is a photograph of her with her husband andy in front of andys hotel. He plays a prominent role in how her career ends. Up to this point, there are so many women who come to congress through that connection to their husband, through some kind of familial connection. And coya knutson loses her congressional career because of that familial connection. She came up first of all, she represented a district in minnesota for two terms. But she came up through the Democratic Farmer Labor Party in minnesota. And that is how she got her political start. She served in the minnesota house of representatives and had a very promising political career. In 1954, she decides to run for a u. S. House seat. She goes against the wishes of democratic farmerlabor leaders who are not happy with the fact she does not want to stay in the state house of representatives. She has to fund her own political campaign. She does so. She wins election. Her husband, andy, and that was a strained marriage to begin with, he grows jealous of her political success. And so, coya knutson in the house, has a successful career. She gets on the agricultural committee. It is a very promising career. One of the things she does is, because of her background as a teacher, she wants to push for federal student loan program. And she manages, after the sputnik crisis, to slip in an amendment to the National Defense education act in 1958 that establishes federal student loans. So she knows the legislative ropes and really pushes her agenda. Unfortunately, she runs for election that year, and democratic farmerlabor operatives sabotage her campaign. They write a letter that they get her husband to sign. The letter says that their marriage is suffering because to she is far from home and it intimates that there might be some kind of untoward relationship with the staffer that she has. And the tagline on the letter is coya, come home. And she essentially loses the reelection because of the negative publicity thats generated by that letter. And a lot of it is because of the social expectation that was still prevalent, that womens place was in this domestic sphere inside the home, and that really comes back to hurt the campaign. In the 1958 midterms, she is the only incumbent democrat to lose her seat. And her career comes to a shall close. She later tries to run for congress again but she is unsuccessful. Julia butler hanson of Washington State is one of the women in this era who is pushing the ball along for women in terms of this apprenticeship they are serving as a group. She becomes a very influential member of the house. And her background was actually as a member, a longtime member, of the Washington State house of representatives. So she has got a lot of legislative experience before she ever comes to capitol hill. She was the chair of a couple different committees in the state legislature. She served quite often as speaker pro tem. One of the things she did in washington was she was a prime mover behind establishing the ferry system. Mover behind establishing the ferry system. So, she has got a lot of legislative experience. And she is not your typical freshman when she is elected in 1960 in a special election. And she very quickly moves into a position of influence. She gets a seat on the Appropriations Committee in the house. And by the mid1960s, she vies for a subcommittee chairmanship, one of the socalled cardinals of the Appropriations Committee. And she competes for a seat on the interior and related agencies subcommittee. And it is a tough competition, but she wins. But the chairman of the committee, a man by the name of george mahan of texas, chairman of the full committee, decides, well, he tested her in getting the chairmanship, and he is going to test her as a new chairman. So the first time she comes to the full committee with her bill for interior and related agencies which is hundreds of millions of dollars, it is a big appropriations bill, he says to her, julia, this is great but you have got to cut 2 million out of it. And she kind of look to him and said, yes, mr. Chairman. She left. And she went back to her subcommittee. And she comes back a couple days later to the full committee, and she says, mr. Chairman, i want to report back to you i found 2. 5 million to cut out of the bill. Julia, that is wonderful. Where did you find it . Right out of your district, mr. Chairman. And he never bothered her again. [laughter] Martha Griffiths, who was a power in her own right, said of julia hansen that she knew how to exercise power better than any woman she had seen in any legislature, and that is high praise. So, here we have a campaign postcard of Martha Griffiths who was one of the influential women members from the 1950s into the 1970s. She represented a michigan district. And like some of the earlier women here, like julia butler hansen, she has got a lot of experience. She is a lawyer, she serves as a judge in michigan. And she is elected to the house in 1954 and she comes in in 1955. And she, too, very quickly moves into positions of influence. She is the first woman after a number of women in congress had campaigned with the speaker to get a seat on the very exclusive ways and means committee, the tax committee. And from that position, she really weighs in on a lot of the issues affecting women monetarily, but she is probably best known as the mother of the equal rights amendment. Every year, she reintroduced the equal rights amendment, which has a history in Congress Going back to 1923. And the bill was just stuck in the Judiciary Committee and it never came out. She was a lawyer by training. She was very critical of the Supreme Court. She did not think the Supreme Court was ever going to decide a case that would make women truly equal with men. And so she got behind equal rights amendment. She gets it out of the Judiciary Committee with the discharge petition in the 1970s. Passes the house, stalled in the senate. And then she comes back and does it again in the following congress. Finally, era passes in 1972 and it goes out to the states. It is never approved as a constitutional amendment, but Martha Griffiths is the prime mover behind that. The other thing she does during the 1964 civil rights act, she was very interested in pushing an amendment through that would give women equal rights in terms of employment. But she was very cagey about how she did it. She knew the chairman of the house rules committee, howard smith, was a segregationist, that he wanted to sink the 1964 civil rights act. She caught wind that he was going to introduce an amendment that would introduce sex, the word sex, into an amendment that would provide for equal opportunity, equal economic opportunities, title vii. She held back because she knew that smith could bring a lot of southern votes with him. And smith intended this simply as a gimmick to sink the civil rights act. He gets onto the floor and talks about how he wants to insert the word sex into this amendment. And there is laughter and giggles around the chamber. People guffawing. Martha griffiths followed smith up on behalf of the amendment and she said, if there was any need to prove we need this amendment, the laughing and the guffaws prior to me getting up here, they proved it. The chamber then fell silent. Eventually that amendment in title vi was included. Again, another key legislative action by Martha Griffiths. This is a Campaign Poster for Shirley Chisholm, the first africanamerican woman in congress. I love this because it says unbought and unbossed. But it is for Something Else entirely. It is actually for a president ial campaign she waged in 1972. And she went to the Democratic Convention and rounded up about 10 of the votes. She is the first africanamerican woman to run for president , and she did it on a shoestring budget and had a very admirable showing. But she had a reputation, national reputation, well before 1972. She is elected to congress in 1968 from a district that encompasses much of brooklyn. She becomes very prominent in that campaign. Her opponent in the general election on the republican, liberal republican ticket, was james farmer, one of the great civil rights leaders. There is this back and forth between these two. Farmer runs on and the idea that brooklyn needs a man in congress. And Shirley Chisolm, she fires back. Her Campaign Theme is like the one expressed on this poster. Unbought and unbossed. Im fighting Shirley Chisolm. Im to be your congresswoman. She embraces this role. She becomes the first africanamerican woman in congress in 1969. And she serves a career that in a lot of ways is symbolic. She is the first. She helps establish the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971. And that she also gains a very prominent committee assignment. She is the first africanamerican woman to serve on the house rules committee, which is the committee that pulses legislation onto the floor. So she had her hands on a lot of important developments in the house. She also had a national reputation. And she was someone who was very outspoken, which represents really a lot of the women who were coming in to congress at this point. Her colleague from new york city was bella abzug, served in the 1970s and would later go on and try to be elected mayor of new york. Unsuccessfully. But these were two women who spoke their mind, whether it was about Committee Assignments they did not agree with. Shirley chisolm was assigned originally to the agriculture committee. And she went to the leadership and she was told by the speaker of the house, be a good soldier. So she went out onto the floor and started saying things like, i got a lot more veterans in my district than i do trees. She is assigned to the Veterans Affairs committee. [laughter] these were not people who were going to sit and be quiet, eithe r in terms of the expectation for freshmen generally or for women members. So they really kind of challenged the system. This really reflects a lot of whats going on in Wider Society with the womens Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. That women are challenging these roles that had been carved out for them, and really trying to participate in a much more important and fuller way in u. S. Society. And Shirley Chisolm certainly represents that. One of the things we did in the last 10 years was commission portraits of some of the pioneers in the house. That certainly included Shirley Chisolm. And the portrait we did very much deliberately depicts a lot of what matt was talking about, about her, that she had a national agenda. She took on an advocacy role. So this portrait of her is in a few ways, a traditional congressional portrait. It highlights the figure, the subject, but the capital is present, too. So you know where she is. But it makes the capitol smaller than her stature nationally. She very immediately was taking on those roles. Also it is a very assertive portrait. She is looking at the viewer, and she is gesturing to the viewer. In order to do that, we sought out artists we felt could tell a story very quickly. And that included Childrens Book illustrators. This portrait was done by on someone who is an internationally Award WinningChildrens Book illustrator. Interestingly, it is become one of the portraits that is the most loved by children who visit the capitol. They look at it and they immediately can see what is going on. And it is a piece of history that is a great thing for kids to hear and for tour guides to be telling when they bring kids around to see this. One of the things that is happening with Shirley Chisholm as well, she is a great example in this era forward, the modern era from the 1970s up. A lot of women elected to congress increasingly have prior legislative experience. She served in the new york legislature, the new york state legislature. And she had that background. And a lot of the women who are coming in with her have got that kind of legislative experience already. And that makes a tremendous difference when you get into the latter decades of the 20th century, the 1980s, the 1990s, because you have got women who are experienced running campaigns, and they are stronger candidates. And that is part of the reason why we see the growth of women in congress, particularly in the 1990s. When we go from what had never been more than really 20 women at any one time to 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 women serving in any given congress. [laughter] right here these are just a few of the hundreds of Campaign Buttons in the house collection. I love seeing them together. Matt and i often say we try and put a human face on the house, and to give people individual stories to latch onto and understand. Each of these women jeannette rankin, lindy boggs, julia hansen, they have fascinating stories. I have to admit, one of the things i love is seeing them all together in seeing this great richness and variety of women putting themselves forward to serve their country in congress. I am deeply impressed by all the women who have run for congress and all the women who served there. One of my favorite is lindy boggs. Lindy boggs comes into congress in 1973 and a special election. And it is interesting because this is the time when we see more and more women who have political careers in their own right who are elected to the house. But she follows that old widows mandate route. Her husband hale boggs had represented a new Orleans Center district for almost three decades. He had risen to become the majority leader in the house. And many people expected him to become speaker of the house. And in october, 1972, during a Campaign Trip to alaska, his aircraft disappeared and he was presumed dead. The