Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, members of the new U.S. Congress were sworn in during ceremonies in the nation’s Capitol.    Of the nearly 2,000 senators in the history of Congress, only 44 have been female. The first woman (Rebecca Felton – Georgia) in the Senate served for only 24 hours in November of 1922, and no woman was elected to the body until a decade later, when Hattie Caraway was chosen by Arkansas voters. Now, there are 20 women senators in the 113th Congress. Ten of those women were sworn in yesterday, four of them for the first time.  The four new women senators (Elizabeth Warren – Massachusetts; Deb Fischer – Nebraska; Heidi Heitkamp – North Dakota; and Tammy Baldwin – Wisconsin) are all Democrats.  Tammy Baldwin also has the distinction of being the first openly-gay senator. After she was sworn in for her second term, Senator Claire McCaskill (Missouri) said women were making progress in the Senate. “I don’t think we should be satisfied until we have the same number of women in the Senate that represent the percentage of the population that are women, so we still have a long way to go,” she said.

Tony