WASHINGTON — When Katherine Clark first came to Congress, someone manning the House chamber tried to stop her from setting foot inside. They didn’t recognize her.
The second time it happened, she wasn’t even all that new. “I was walking in with a male colleague. They just looked at us together, assumed we were a couple, and he was the congressman and that I was a spouse going onto the floor when it wasn’t permitted,” the Massachusetts Democrat recalls.
She’s one of several congresswomen CQ Roll Call spoke to in recent weeks, after a vulgar comment made by Rep. Ted Yoho on the Capitol steps in July touched off a new round of questions about exactly how far women have come.
Back when Clark arrived on the Hill in 2013, she heard warnings about certain male lawmakers, the kind of informal whispers that professional women have relied on for decades. “There were members that we were told, ‘Don’t get in the elevator with them,'” Clark says.