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Review by Marsha VandeBerg
Women on the Hill is a laudable effort to describe the essence of the part played by the women the author says were swept into office on Anita Hill's coattails.
"With their numbers almost doubled," Bingham writes, "the women on the Hill set forth to re-frame the public debate and challenge the culture of Congress."
The author begins her story at two points: first, with Hill's testimony against the U.S. Supreme Court nomination in October 1991 before an all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee, and second, with the November 1992 election of Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress. She concludes with the seismic political shift in November 1994 and the Republicans' takeover of Congress.
Her storytelling vehicle is the political lives of four women, all elected in 1992, three to the House and one to the Senate, and all Democrats. These women, Cynthia McKinney, Louise Slaughter, Pat Schroeder, and Patty Murray, "represented the electorate's wish to bring women's voices into the tradition-bound halls of Congress."
Four years later, three of the four remain in office, Murray, senator from Washington, and Slaughter, of New York, and McKinney, of Georgia. Schroeder, the "dean" of the women in the 103rd Congress, opted out, deciding not to run in 1996. While more women will be sworn in next January than were elected in women's watershed year of 1992 (based on an early count, 56 elected to the House in '96 versus 48 in '92), the political climate now seems less welcoming to those "women's issues" defined by the feminist majority of the 1970s and the 1980s. Gone are the champions of abortion rights. Gone is the Women's Congressional Caucus.
"(A)s the caucus passed into history, its influence on the larger institution would be revealed," writes Bingham, taking note that 66 bills relating to women's issues were enacted during the 103rd Congress. These laws made a "greater impact for women and by women than any previous Congress," she adds.
Despite victory in battle, victory in war fell victim to partisan politics and a gender shift in who was the most angry in the American electorate. In 1992, it was women who were enraged that women's voices were not being heard. In 1994, it was men who were angry over getting shortshrift. Their anger reinforced gender party preferences -- women on the side of the Democrats, and men on the side of Republicans.
Bingham captures that moment of victory in battle and gives it an important and deserving context. Had that not been done, these two critical years for women on Capitol Hill might have been lost in the shuffle of discarded papers and the press of today's legislative and political agenda. She conducted 300 interviews in her research and had access to archival materials, most importantly from the Congressional Caucus on Women's Issues. She chose to weave the lives of four politicians through the book, but in doing so, she divided her focus between their biographies and her other, more important goal, namely to record the impact of women, writ large, on the institution of Congress. Her goals are not mutually exclusive, but neither is accomplished to full satisfaction.
That does not discredit the work of this first-time author. To the contrary. Women on the Hill is a laudable effort to capture a moment in time in American political history written by women with one exclamation point after another.
Marsha VandeBerg is the author of the VandeBerg World Report at www.elibrary.com.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.