Liza Mundy, a contributing editor at Politico Magazine, is program director at New America and author, most recently, of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners is Transforming Sex, Love, and Family.

Kay Hagan just wanted to swim. It was late 2008, and the Democrat was newly arrived on Capitol Hill as North Carolina’s junior senator-elect. But Hagan was told that the Senate pool was males-only. Why? Because some of the male senators liked to swim naked.

It took an intervention by Senator Chuck Schumer, head of the Rules Committee, to put a stop to the practice, but even then “it was a fight,” remembers pollster Celinda Lake, who heard about the incident when the pool revolt was the talk among Washington women.


The pool wasn’t the only Senate facility apparently stuck in the Dark Ages. The restroom closest to the Senate floor that was set aside for women senators had only two stalls. By 2013, with 20 women in the Senate, restroom traffic jams were commonplace, forcing some of the female senators to traipse to a first-floor restroom far from the chamber. Two additional stalls, an extra sink and more storage space were added in the fall of 2013, after several female senators raised the issue publicly.

The great potty controversy received news coverage in both the Washington Post and the New York Times, where the female senators were reduced to raving perkily about their new facilities. “We’re even going to have a window,” New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a former governor and foreign policy specialist, was quoted as enthusing.

Yet some indignities have nothing to do with a lack of accommodations.

Debbie Stabenow, a veteran lawmaker, recalls meeting with a senior agricultural lobbyist several years ago, when she was chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee and shepherding the massive farm bill.

As they were talking in her office, the lobbyist, an older man, reached over and patted her hand. “I know it’s going to be tough,” he assured her, “but you’ll do the best you can.”

“My blood pressure went up about 20 points,” Stabenow remembers, tension rising even now, long after the farm bill made it through to passage.

In the entire history of the United States Senate, a mere 44 women have served. Ever. Those few who have were elected to a club they were never meant to join, and their history in the chamber is marked by sexism both spectacular and small. For decades in the 20th century after women first joined, many male senators were hardly more than corrupt frat boys with floor privileges, reeking of alcohol and making little secret of their sexual dalliances with constituents, employees and any other hapless subordinate female they could grab. But perhaps more striking is what I found after interviewing dozens of women senators, former senators and their aides over the past several months: Even today, the women of the Senate are confronted with a kind of floating, often subtle, but corrosive sexism, a sense of not belonging that is both pervasive and so counter to the narrative of real, if stubbornly slow, progress that many are reluctant to acknowledge this persistent secret.

Melina Mara/The Washington Post

A few months ago, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand published a memoir, Off the Sidelines, in which she revealed that after she went on a diet and lost 50 pounds, one of her “favorite older members of the Senate”—later reported to be the late Hawaii Democrat Daniel Inouye—approached her from behind, “squeezed my waist, and said, ‘Don’t lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby!’” Gillibrand’s memoir sparked a kind of public outrage that it might not have a few decades ago. But to many of the women senators I spoke with, Gillibrand’s story is so run-of-the mill that they marvel she considered it worthy of mention. “People have commented on my looks,” says Kay Bailey Hutchison, the retired Republican from Texas. “I just think that there are some things you just ought to brush off.”

Office of the Historian and Clerk of the House Office of Art and Archives

For many of the women, things are still immeasurably improved from their days as a truly embattled minority. It is, after all, progress of a sort that the 20 women senators today have outgrown their single tiny restroom; that they are committee chairs (six of the panels under the outgoing Democratic Senate were led by women); and legislative leaders who get things like December’s giant omnibus spending bill done. It’s a “sea change,” says Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill.

But there’s another present too, of exclusion and unstated assumptions; these women have all found themselves at one point or another uncomfortably aware of being outsiders in an environment conceived and constructed for men. Sometimes it’s the tacit dismissal of their expertise; like Stabenow, Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, finds that people who approach her to impart information, or extract it, sometimes will turn to her male aide, “and won’t make the eye contact or have the conversation with a woman senator.”

Open In New Window OPTICS: Ben Baker's field guide to the new Republican Congress. (Click to view gallery.)

Even in the not-so-recent past, this was not merely a matter of making women feel excluded; some of what the female senators have experienced bordered on sexual harassment or the threat of it. In one infamous 1993 episode, the late South Carolina Republican Strom Thurmond tried to fondle Washington Democrat Patty Murray’s breast on the Senate elevator. So notoriously predatory was Thurmond that when Susan Collins came to the Senate in 1997, she was warned to avoid getting on an elevator alone with him. A Republican from Maine, Collins describes publicly for the first time being headed for the senators-only elevator and seeing Thurmond walking in the same direction. She did a U-turn and took the stairs. “The reason I remember the incident so well is because it was observed by one of my Republican male colleagues,” recalls Collins. He “started laughing because he knew exactly why I was turning around and not getting on the elevator.”

That was nearly 20 years ago, yet women still are seen as intruders into many of the Senate’s formerly all-male spaces. Even McCaskill, who lauds the progress made over the past three decades, has stories to tell. The first time she tried to venture onto the Senate floor after taking office in 2007, she was barred by a doorman who told her there were no floor passes for staffers. “I said, ‘I think I deserve my floor pass,’” recalls McCaskill. “He was mortified.”

***

For most of the 20th century, the few women who served as U.S. senators usually did so briefly, upon the death of a husband. They were appointed to keep the seat warm, which is to say, safe, until the political establishment could choose a real successor—a man, of course.

One early senator defied these expectations, though: Hattie Caraway, who in 1931 was appointed to the seat held by her late husband, Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas. Betty Koed, associate historian of the U.S. Senate, points out that Caraway took the job in part because she needed the salary: Her husband left her with debt, her house had to be auctioned off and the job—unlike the few other positions available to her in the 1930s—paid a woman the same as a man. Arkansas power brokers counted on her to relinquish the seat when the regular election came around.

Caraway kept a diary that shows she was highly aware of her freakish outsider status. How could she not be? She dressed in widow’s black, and was told by one senator that her colleagues would need a flashlight to find her. She was given the desk once used by Rebecca Felton, who had been appointed to serve just one day, by a politician who needed to mollify his suffragette constituents. Unimpressed, Caraway tartly noted in her diary that her colleagues probably gave her the desk because “they wanted as few of them contaminated as possible.”

During the long legislative sessions, Caraway knitted, worked crossword puzzles and wrote bad poems about the legislative process. (Sample line: “Sen. Costigan parades with mien most sad / His arguments they refute. / The same comes to the Lafollette lad”). She fastidiously recorded what she ate (“chicken gumbo, oysterettes and coffee”) and kept close track of her spending. She paid painstaking, almost gleeful, attention to the sartorial choices of her colleagues: “Sen. Lewis a symphony in brown today, with a grey vest and spats.” As well as their grooming habits: “Sen. Dill is making a Speech. I think he must use a blackening for his mustache.”

She also wrote about serious things—how much she missed her husband; how difficult it was, at first, deciding how to vote; summoning the courage to make her first remarks in committee. She confessed how inadequate she sometimes felt: “I did say a fool thing to [John Hollis] Bankhead, [Jr., a senator from Alabama]—but it was innocently done, and I’m not going to worry.”

But she also tracked her growing ease and enjoyment. “1st Caucus. It was great. Demagogery rampant.” During her first year, she began to seriously consider running for her own seat. “I really want to try out my own theory of a woman running for office.” After deciding, at the last possible moment, to run, “I am a nervous wreck,” she wrote, noting with gratitude the colleagues who encouraged her. “Mr. Bankhead, Mr. Wheeler, Mr. Cohen all say they hope I win.” She did, and went on to serve two terms, from 1932 to 1945.

But no matter how robust and detailed her observations of the other senators, they did not treat her as a colleague, at least not at first. Seated in the back row because of low seniority, she rarely spoke, and the press began to refer to her, derisively, as Silent Hattie.

A Century of Women in the Senate “When the women of the country come in and sit with you … you will get ability, you will get integrity of purpose, you will get exalted patriotism, and you will get unstinted usefulness.” — Rebecca Felton, who became the first female senator in 1922. Hattie Caraway (1931-1945) Caraway, appointed to her husband’s Senate seat after his death, later became the first woman to win election in her own right. She was derided by some as Silent Hattie because she rarely spoke out. Margaret Chase Smith (1949-1973) Smith was the first senator to take to the floor to denounce McCarthyism. Senator McCarthy branded Smith and the six male senators who sided with her “Snow White and Her Six Dwarves.” Nancy Landon Kassebaum (1979-1997) Daughter of former Kansas governor Alf Landon, Kassebaum was the only woman in the Senate when first elected in 1978. In 1995, she became the first woman to chair a major standing committee. “Calling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or Year of the Asparagus. We’re not a fad, a fancy or a year.” — Sen. Barbara Mikulski, center Nine and Counting (2000) At the beginning of the 21st century, there were still only nine women in the Senate. The nine collaborated on a group memoir, making joint appearances on such TV shows as “Larry King Live” to hawk the book. Photos: Library of Congress; U.S. Senate Historical Office

The same could not be said of Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith—Caraway’s most notable successor. Smith was the only woman in the Senate for entire stretches of the mid-20th century. First elected to the Senate in 1948 after serving four terms in the House, Smith had a near-perfect record for voting, which the Los Angeles Times pejoratively referred to in 1960 as a “fetish.” She liked to say she was elected to be a senator, not a woman senator, but was an advocate nonetheless, championing the cause of benefits for women in the military, who had been largely ignored despite their service. “Literally she was the first person on the Armed Services Committee to mention women,” says Koed, the historian.

And Smith spoke up when it mattered most. She was the first senator to take to the floor to denounce Senator Joe McCarthy’s tactics in his communist witch hunt during the Cold War, delivering a stinging “Declaration of Conscience” in which she was as critical of the Senate itself as she was of McCarthyism. She said that the Senate had become “debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination,” adding, “I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American.” When McCarthy fought back, it was no surprise which line of attack he chose. “I don’t fight with women senators,” a furious McCarthy said, dismissing her and six male senators who sided with her as “Snow White and her Six Dwarfs.” She was also targeted by right-wing tabloid journalists Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, who called her “a lesson in why women should not be in politics.”

In 1960, when Smith was challenged for reelection by another woman, Lucia Cormier, the Washington Post predicted “a real fur-flying political cat fight.” Even after Smith left office, Koed says historians persisted in attributing many of her accomplishments to her male chief of staff.

Remember, too, that this was a time when the Senate was awash in alcohol and cash, and the men engaged in dalliances with women not their wives. Bobby Baker, who came to Washington as a page and eventually became LBJ’s fixer and secretary to the Senate’s Democratic majority, provided a hair-raising reminiscence to the Senate historian’s office in which he evoked a capital scene that seemed positively medieval in its assumption of a kind of droit du seigneur. Senator Burnet Maybank, Baker said, drank “half a tumbler of bourbon” when he woke up; Senator Clyde Hoey would call a pretty girl over to “try to play with her breasts”; Estes Kefauver “smelled like booze all the time”; many members traded votes for cash; pages would be deployed to buy condoms; Jacob Javits was a “sex maniac” who was caught by his postman “on his couch having a sexual affair with a Negro lady.”

It took a long time for this kind of behavior to dissipate: Into the mid-1980s, Senators Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy (among others) were notorious partiers who once reportedly played a game of “waitress toss” with a server in one D.C. establishment.

What this environment was like for somebody like Margaret Chase Smith, a proper New Englander who wore a trademark rose on her lapel, is hard to imagine. But when Susan Collins came to Washington as part of a high school Senate youth program, she was gratified that Smith spent the better part of two hours talking to her about public office and its satisfactions. “Never once did she say, ‘I’m the only woman in the Senate,’ or that she had run into any barriers,” says Collins. “Nevertheless, when I left her office, I remember thinking that women could do anything. And back in 1971, that wasn’t always apparent to teenagers my age.” She sits today at Smith’s desk, Collins says, “and that is very powerful to me.”

***

The modern history of Senate women really begins in the 1980s with Barbara Mikulski, who was running at a time when women had reached parity on college campuses and even begun to outnumber men. Women had also entered the workforce en masse, yet the Senate when she came into it was 2 percent female: Republican Nancy Landon Kassebaum, the daughter of former Kansas Governor Alf Landon, was the only other woman.

Ann Lewis, then a Washington political consultant, remembers being at a cocktail party in 1986 talking up Mikulski, then a Maryland House member and a former social worker and community organizer. As Lewis was speaking, “a man I know very well looked down at me, really pitying me, and said: ‘You don’t understand, Ann. Barbara Mikulski doesn’t look like a senator.’”

Which was undoubtedly true: At 4-foot-11, the pugnacious Baltimore activist couldn’t have been more of a contrast with the rest of the place. She was also very ambitious, and when she won (boosted by a new fundraising group, EMILY’s List, that would become one of the main vehicles for promoting Democratic female candidates), her immediate goal was to get a seat, as a freshman, on the powerful Appropriations Committee. She calls the men who helped her “Galahads.”

But Mikulski, who is legendarily explosive, also managed to intimidate even the Galahads.

There is a story that the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd was standing with a group of senators when somebody’s phone or beeper kept going off. Byrd asked that it be silenced; Nevada Senator Harry Reid looked down and realized it was his. “I’m sorry, I thought it was Barbara’s,” Reid said.

“If it was Barbara’s, I wouldn’t have said anything,” Byrd replied.

How the diminutive Mikulski achieved this is the subject of much study by those who know and have worked for her. One early aide reflects that Mikulski treated her male colleagues in a way they were not accustomed to being treated by women—as equals. These were men used to women who deferred to them, and “the fear of having her get in their face gave her a lot of advantages that other people didn’t have,” the aide recalled.

Mikulski also experienced, from the inside, the notorious Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, which cast the Senate’s woman problem in sharp relief. In 1991, these televised hearings showed America an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee listening, uncomprehending, to Hill’s allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed her. A former aide recalls that Mikulski, with the help of Senator Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, then convened a series of off-the-record, bipartisan consciousness-raising dinners, at which the male senators were treated to gender education from the likes of academic feminists Carol Gilligan and Deborah Tannen, as well as Sam Keen, a California philosopher and proponent of a kinder, gentler masculinity. Keen gave a presentation that included a slide of a soldier holding a baby, which he described as “prophetic.” Republican Alan Simpson of Wyoming misunderstood and took offense, the aide remembers, asking Keen why he thought the photo was “pathetic.”

The Thomas hearings were the catalyst that brought four new women, all Democrats, to the Senate in 1992. In Illinois, Carol Moseley Braun was moved to enter the Democratic primary, she says, by the sight of Thomas taking Justice Thurgood Marshall’s place on the Supreme Court. When Moseley Braun defeated the incumbent, Alan Dixon, in the primary, Patty Murray’s poll numbers shot up in Washington State, as observers began to reconsider women’s political prospects. “It totally gave people momentum,” recalls Lake, the pollster. Women’s fates were tied to the fates of other women in all sorts of complicated ways. In California, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein were running for separate Senate seats. Women were considered so interchangeable that there was a lot of skepticism over whether a single state would—or should—elect two. “We heard that constantly,” recalls Boxer, who is sure “I would not have gotten elected,” were it not for the Thomas hearings.

When the newly elected female members arrived on Capitol Hill, Mikulski was waiting: She hosted a meeting to give the women a crash course in Senate procedure, and had compiled briefings on how to get on committees and run an office. Mikulski would become known as the “dean” of women.

Literature on women joining male-dominated workplaces suggests that they tend to be “disruptors,” but this new crop of Senate women wanted nothing of the sort, at least not right away.

“I never wanted to be a disruptor; I wanted to be a legislator,” Boxer says.

Slights and Whispers “There are some things you just ought to brush off,” says retired Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, left. Still, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, right, can’t forget the time a male lobbyist patted her on the hand and said, “You’ll do the best you can.” | Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A former Democratic staff member recalls that Boxer, an outspoken liberal who as a House member had marched to the Senate with a delegation to ensure that Hill’s allegations were heard, wanted to keep her head down. They knew their male colleagues were wary. “I wouldn’t say that they welcomed us with open arms,” the aide says. “I would say that it was more skepticism. They saw the women as these rabble-rousers—like … they’re going to cause trouble.”

Moseley Braun recalls that soon after winning she got a call from Joe Biden, then chair of the Judiciary Committee, who had been mortified by the image hit the Senate—and he—had taken during the Thomas hearings. Moseley Braun told him she hadn’t unpacked her things in a new apartment, and tried to put him off. “He would not have it,” she remembers. He showed up, and they sat on boxes and ate cherry pie while Biden lobbied her to accept a place on the Judiciary Committee. Moseley Braun, who is African-American, said he just wanted to have Anita Hill sitting on his side of the table. Biden didn’t think that was funny. She said no, but he insisted. “In the end,” she says, “I gave up.”

In a series of interviews with the Senate historian shortly after her reelection defeat in 1998 and recently made public, Moseley Braun recalled another committee assignment she was obliged to accept, like it or not. Many male senators were leery of sitting on the Banking Committee, in the wake of the Keating Five scandal; Moseley Braun, Murray and Boxer were assigned to the panel. “We used to joke,” Moseley Braun says, “that the three of us got put on the committee because nobody else wanted it, so they just stuck the girls on there.”

As traumatic as the Thomas hearings were, it would take a different scandal to more truly transform the culture and character of the Senate. This was the episode in which at least 17 women provided detailed accounts that Robert Packwood, a liberal Republican from Oregon, had sexually harassed and even assaulted them. Packwood was a full-fledged member of the Senate men’s club, but he was also an abortion rights Republican regarded as an ally to women. The allegations against him, which were first aired in 1992 news accounts, were shocking: One staffer said he had chased her around a desk, and another recounted how he had grabbed her by her hair, pulled her head back, tried to force his tongue into her mouth and reached under her skirt. Lobbyists, desk clerks and a restaurant hostess all attested to unwanted advances, and worse. Packwood defended his action as “overeagerly kissing,” but also kept a diary, in which he acknowledged having “made love” to 22 aides and spoken passionately of his feelings for 75 others.

The women senators—by 1995, there were a grand total of eight—played a major role in forcing the Senate to reckon with these charges. The allegations were considered in some 50 closed-door meetings by the Senate Ethics Committee, which included Mikulski as the sole female member. There were three Democrats and three Republicans, including Larry Craig, who would later fall in a scandal of his own, arrested for lewd conduct in a men’s airport restroom. Boxer began to push for public hearings; Mikulski, she says, was dispatched by Republican Senator Mitch McConnell to tell her that if she continued to do so, the Ethics Committee would go after Democrats, including Ted Kennedy. A power struggle ensued: Boxer says she confronted McConnell and asked him if he was threatening her. Five of the Senate women sent the committee a letter calling for public hearings; in committee, Mikulski had called for the same thing. McConnell, referring to Boxer, wrote that “the Ethics Committee’s timetable will not be set by a single senator.”

Finally, in 1995, the dynamic changed when a former summer intern came forward to say Packwood had accosted her when she was 17. The committee recommended the expulsion of Packwood, who resigned.

“I think Bob Packwood and that whole incident really made a lot of them clean up their own personal behavior,” reflected one aide.

***

One striking thing about the women who came in during this period is how difficult some of their personal histories were. Moseley Braun grew up in a household with a father who was abusive and violent; he whipped them, she says, with wet ropes. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican elected senator in 1994, lost her mother to breast cancer when she was eight years old, and her father died not long afterward; she was sent away to school in New York. As a child, she would take the train by herself to visit relatives in Auburn, sometimes spending the night, alone, with her luggage, in Grand Central Station. Her husband died young in a car accident on a snowy highway; she succeeded him in the Maine legislature, and often reflected—like Hattie Caraway before her—on women’s economic vulnerability.

Hutchison graduated from law school in the 1960s, at a time when no firm would hire her; she supported herself as a reporter before going into politics. During her career she had two stalkers, including one who was sitting on a wall in her front yard when her husband came outside one morning, and one who stalked her for 20 years.

Given this, it’s hardly surprising that the women came together on legislation based on their experience as women.

“Who else would be their voice?” says Snowe.

When Hutchison approached Mikulski about collaborating on a bill to enable homemakers to put money in an IRA, Mikulski agreed. When it emerged that many major health studies were performed primarily on men, Mikulski and other women, including in the House, worked to make women part of studies and clinical trials, and to establish an office of women’s health at the National Institutes of Health. The women also came together to increase funding for breast cancer research and to ensure insurance coverage for women under 50 whose doctors recommended mammograms.

“We banded together on that,” says Hutchison. “We were a merry little band in the beginning.”

They bonded in more informal ways, as well. In the late 1990s, the women senators began meeting for regular dinners. Mikulski set the ground rules: “no staff, no memos, and no leaks.” Collins recalls her first dinner taking place at the home of Dianne Feinstein, a millionaire many times over who “had this extremely elegant home, with a beautifully catered dinner, and everything was absolutely perfect.” The next dinner fell to Collins, who had just rented a place on Capitol Hill and lacked the infrastructure for even a small dinner party. She borrowed chairs, bought china at an outlet and stayed up all night baking apple crisp.

Open In New Window OPTICS: Inside Sen. Mikulski's hideaway, where the Senate's women come together. | Getty (Click to view gallery.)

To this day, some themes remain: “We never talk about the male senators. Ever,” jokes Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar.

The women also came to rely on each other for practical, everyday life advice. They talked about where to find child care, what to do with children during summers. Hutchison adopted two children during her Senate tenure, and found the unpredictable Senate schedule excruciating.

But even at the outset, there were also tensions. “I took the lead on women’s pension issues,” Moseley Braun told the historian. “Barbara Boxer was close behind, breathing down my neck, because she really wanted the issue. I got there first.” But she said she lost a contest to Hutchison over sponsorship of a resolution condemning the burning of black churches in the South. “She got lead sponsorship because the Republicans were in the majority,” she said. “I pointed out to her that as the only black person in the Senate that it was not fair.”

One thing uniting the women was that many of them, like the Galahads, respected but also feared, at least a tiny bit, Mikulski. An aide remembers that the female senator she worked for sometimes regarded the dinners as infringing on her family time, but attended in part because of Mikulski’s gravitational force. The aide recalls her boss marveling when one newly elected senator had the “courage” to miss a dinner. “It’s important to remember that the Senate women are not a caucus, but a zone of civility,” Mikulski wrote to me in an email. “That’s what keeps these dinners going, and that’s what keeps the women senators attending.”

Mikulski wrangled the women in many ways. She was instrumental in securing a group appearance at Democratic conventions, and she extracted a promise from Senator Tom Daschle, in his tenures as minority and majority leader, to put a woman on every major committee.

In 2000, the women collaborated on a group memoir, Nine and Counting; during an appearance on “Larry King Live” to hawk the book, Mikulski said they had a bipartisan pact not to campaign against each other—a declaration that came as a surprise to some of her colleagues.

And then came Hillary. In 2001, Hillary Clinton was sworn in as a senator, and aides say she enjoyed the women’s dinners. But in 2008, she was running for president and McCaskill endorsed Barack Obama despite the fact both Hillary and Bill Clinton had backed her. One staffer remembers being at a meeting of all the Democratic women senators, and when McCaskill entered, “the temperature in the room dropped by about 15 degrees.”

“It was painful,” recalls Tamera Luzzatto, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the time. McCaskill would become an early supporter of a 2016 presidential run for Clinton, and recently, the Democratic women signed a letter, organized by Boxer, urging her to run.

The women say it’s important to them that the collaboration—as strategic or opportunistic as it may be—continue. Klobuchar said she worked hard to get not only her Democratic but also her Republican female colleagues to vote for the Violence Against Women Act; that way, when the bill went to the House, voting against it would mean “voting against every woman in the Senate.” In 2013, when Collins went on the floor to call for an end to the government shutdown, “the first three people who called me to offer help were women senators. The first was Lisa Murkowski, Kelly Ayotte was second, and Amy Klobuchar was third.” But they also diverge on many, maybe most, partisan issues. Of particular note: All of the Republican women voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have made it illegal for men and women performing equal work to earn different salaries. That divergence is only likely to grow.

***

“ So this is all of us through the years; it started with two.” Barbara Mikulski hovers near a bank of photos hanging on a wall of her Senate hideaway office on an upper floor of the Capitol. The hideaway is an unmarked room accessed by corridors and staircases reminiscent of the ones that appear and disappear at Hogwarts; spacious, it’s furnished with a couch and chairs, a massive gilt-edged mirror, a chandelier, NASA memorabilia and scores of photos showing the history of Senate women. Around her stand a dozen or so female colleagues, laughing appreciatively.

It is late on a Thursday afternoon in November; midterm elections are concluded and newly elected senators have descended on the Capitol to meet colleagues and get their bearings. Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have been elevated to Democratic leadership, joining Murray and Stabenow. But most of the six Democratic women running for Senate seats lost, including incumbent Kay Hagan, and control of the Senate has passed to the Republicans.

From left: Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Sen. Susan Collins, who were instrumental in ending the 2013 government shutdown. | Andrew Burton/Getty Images

The purpose of this gathering is to welcome two new Republican members, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. Their wins bring the number of Republican women senators to six, a historic high.

The photos being shown are group shots of all the women senators in successive Congresses. Hair colors and styles have changed over the years, of course, but what is most conspicuous is how slowly the group has grown. With Mary Landrieu’s loss in a December 6 runoff in Louisiana, there will still be 20 women in the incoming Senate—the same number as last Congress.

In contemplating the group, it’s possible to identify an old guard—women like Patty Murray, who did not live their early professional lives planning to run for office. There’s also the advent of a new guard, women who came to office much as men have—as prosecutors, lawyers, political operatives, and whose ambitions go much higher than their predecessors. There are a number of women now in the Senate—Warren, Ayotte, Klobuchar—who are seen as future candidates for national office.

But the Senate women are operating in a hotly partisan environment that makes their old collegiality and collaboration harder. For years, many of the women did, indeed, avoid campaigning against each other. “I certainly would not campaign against, and never have campaigned against, one of my colleagues, male or female,” says Collins. “Because I think the Senate is too small a place to do that. There are only 100 of us, and it generates enormous ill will when one of your colleagues comes into your state and essentially says you’re not doing a good job.” During last fall’s midterms, though—with both parties competing intensely for control of the Senate—Ayotte campaigned against her own New Hampshire colleague, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, who ultimately prevailed. There are said to be hard feelings.

There is also a different kind of dynamic playing itself out in the modern era that is increasingly affecting female senators and candidates—particularly Republicans: Women being criticized for essentially not being woman enough. And many of the sharpest barbs are being flung by other women.

During the 2014 election season, Warren campaigned against Joni Ernst in Iowa, arguing that Ernst didn’t understand working families and women’s issues and that her male Democratic opponent, Bruce Braley, was the real “women’s candidate.” Ernst at one point was prompted to make the unusual proclamation, “I am a woman.”

The competition for leadership on issues has also gotten more intense, creating intraparty friction. Gillibrand and McCaskill came up with competing bills to deal with sexual assault in the military. McCaskill’s version won out—for now—but the disagreement got a degree of press attention that the women felt was unfair, and hearkens back to the press’s love for a fur-flying cat fight. “I really was a little offended,” Stabenow says.

All 20 female senators gather for a 2013 dinner with President Barack Obama. | Pete Souza/White House

For McCaskill, it’s a reminder that they are in the club but not yet entirely of it. “There have been many times in my career that I have had a probably subconscious fear that somebody was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘What are you doing? You don’t belong here,” she says.

And yet others experience quiet, unexpected victories even when they find themselves the only woman in the room.

Susan Collins had one such moment when she was chairing a hearing of the Homeland Security Committee; then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was the main witness.

“I remember looking around the dais where the senators were sitting, and realizing all of a sudden that I was the only female,” Collins recalls, “which I hadn’t really thought about much before this particular hearing.”

Collins looked across the room. “And then sitting at the witness table, I have an array of high-ranking officials from the Department of Defense, including the secretary of defense. And not one of them was a female.”

Depressing? Sure. But for that moment, at least, that’s not how it registered for Collins.

“The great thing was,” she says, “I was in charge.”