Texas lawmaker sees progress since ’73
WASHINGTON» Colleagues warned Senfronia Thompson that speaking out would jeopardize her political future.
It was spring 1973, and the 34-year-old Thompson had just started her first term in the Texas House of Representatives. That day, she was walking into a popular lunch place near the Capitol in Austin when Democratic state Rep. C.C. “Kit” Cooke saw her and said loudly, for everyone to hear, “Oh, here comes my beautiful black mistress.”
She was infuriated. That same afternoon, Thompson, a Democrat, stepped onto the House floor to tell her mostly white, male colleagues she would not tolerate racist or sexist insults.
“We will never root these maladies out of Texas,” she said, “unless we start with ourselves in this House of Representatives.”
Even as sexual harassment allegations explode in statehouses around the country, Thompson, now 78, says that in Austin’s pink granite Capitol, she doesn’t see male lawmakers and lobbyists harass women like they did 44 years ago. Nevertheless, the nation’s longest-serving female legislator says that when it comes to winning and wielding political power, women remain at a distinct disadvantage.
Women hold a quarter of all the state legislative seats but less than a fifth of the leadership positions, including Senate presidents, House speakers and majority and minority leaders, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. And they rarely make it all the way to the top: Women lead just five Senate chambers and six House chambers nationwide. Only five states have female governors.
“Women aren’t being tapped in the same way that men are,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Rutgers center.
During Thompson’s first year in office, states were ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, and Roe vs. Wade affirmed a woman’s right to have an abortion. In Texas, Democrat Frances “Sissy” Farenthold had just run for governor, and Sarah Weddington, who represented “Jane Roe” in Roe vs. Wade, was one of the women in Thompson’s freshman class of lawmakers.
But women had very little legal recourse against harassment. It wasn’t until 1980 that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission officially defined sexual harassment and declared it a violation of a Civil Rights Act provision that prohibits employment discrimination.
During Thompson’s first term, she was one of just five women in the Texas House; there was one female senator. Only 22 women had been elected before her in either state chamber. She was one of just eight black representatives. “People just watched us like we were from outer space,” she said.
Thompson was outnumbered, but she refused to be disrespected. “Being an African-American person, and having an Anglo call me a black mistress,” she recalled, “that’s just like being called a black whore.”
As the number of women in the Texas House and Senate has increased to 37, or 20.4 percent of all 181 lawmakers, Thompson said the atmosphere has become considerably more welcoming and respectful to women.
The percentage of state legislators in the United States who are women shot up from 6.4 percent in 1973 to 20.5 percent in 1993. But it hasn’t grown much since. This year there are about 1,840 female lawmakers, or a quarter of all 7,383 state legislators in the U.S.
When canvassing for votes, though, women still report facing sexist comments, said A’shanti Gholar, political director of Emerge America, a political advocacy group headquartered in San Francisco that aims to get Democratic women elected. People ask female candidates why they aren’t home taking care of their kids, she said, or even tell them directly that they won’t vote for them because they are women.
“The first people they want to vote for are white men,” Gholar said.
And though things may be better now than they were in 1973, discrimination and harassment remain rampant in statehouses across the country. In the past month, after many women accused Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, women in many state capitols — including Colorado, Arizona, California, Illinois, Kansas, South Dakota and Rhode Island — have come forward to accuse male lawmakers of harassment. Just weeks ago, the Republican speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives tearfully stepped down from his leadership role following harassment allegations.
While Thompson said she doesn’t often hear about men harassing women in Texas, state Rep. Donna Howard, 66, a Democrat, said she does. When asked if women were fully respected, she laughed. “In a word, ‘no.’ ”