A remembrance of the liberal Democrat and women's rights activist, who died Monday at 82
hen Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder was immediately alarmed. Schroeder, a liberal Democrat from Colorado, knew Thomas from his prior work as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In testimony before the Post Office and Civil Service subcommittee that Schroeder co-chaired, Thomas had seemed dismissive of the agency’s very mission.
When they confronted Biden, he was none too pleased with their presumptuousness, Schroeder told me. “Biden said to us, ‘You don’t understand—the only thing you have around here is your word, and I gave my word that this wouldn’t happen,’” she recalled. In the Senate gym, where women had only recently been allowed, Biden had promised a fellow senator, Republican Jack Danforth of Missouri, that he would not hold hearings on the allegations. “This did not please us,” Schroeder told me dryly.
When I reached Schroeder at her home in Celebration, Fla., she lived up to her reputation. Razor-sharp and unsparing, her sarcasm practically crackled across the phone line as she described what things were like for women in Congress in those days.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images It wasn’t just the lack of women lawmakers that made Congress in those days feel like “an overaged frat house,” as Schroeder once termed it. “There were no women pages, no women police officers, no women parliamentarians, no women doorkeepers,” she told me. “There were just no women at all.” When congressmen socialized with women, it was not, shall we say, as peers. “A lot of lobbyists on the Hill would invite the guys over for drinks,” Schroeder said. “I understand there were women there.
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