DePauw Stories

In the political world, it’s the Year of the Woman. In the History Department at DePauw, that means Sarah Rowley is absorbed in what will develop over the next few weeks.

“We won’t know until November” how many women will be sworn into office come January, “but we already know that there are more women running,” says Rowley, an assistant history professor at DePauw who, as a scholar, is interested in the intersection of culture and politics, specifically around issues of gender and sexuality. She taught a class in U.S. women’s history last spring and plans to teach it again in the future.

According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics, 22 women are running for the U.S. Senate; the previous record was 18 in 2012. A record 235 women are running for the U.S. House, compared to the previous high of 167 two years ago.

Even if women candidates are wildly successful, it’s impossible to predict whether they will effect lasting change, Rowley says. History tells her as much.

“Women’s mere presence changes the institution,” she says. “How much it changes the institution depends on what they do with that presence, whether they are actively trying to break down the exclusionary structures around which those institutions were designed, whether they’re arguing for gender equity, whether they’re elevating other women into positions of power, whether they’re trying to fundamentally change it or whether they’re just trying to integrate into a system that has excluded them.”

Rowley focuses her research on the 1970s, the decade that ushered in “the first generation of congresswomen to enter national politics in their own right, as opposed to as inheritors of their fathers or the husbands’ political careers or legacies,” she says. Members such as Pat Schroeder of Colorado and Yvonne Burke of California were young mothers – a new phenomenon for Congress – who “really challenged the entire institute of Congress just by being there.”

The women challenged the seniority structure and committee assignments but their progress was incremental. So when Anita Hill testified in 1991 at the hearing into Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, she faced an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee. Many believe that contentious hearing prompted a record number of women to run for office in 1992, prompting the news media to dub it the Year of the Woman.

This year had been so named even before the recent hearing into Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the high court and its echoes of 1991. Many observers say the large number of women running for office were prompted by President Trump’s election “and the language that he has used in public about women,” Rowley says.  

She hasn’t talked about the Kavanaugh hearing in her U.S. history class – “I was trying to get through the New Deal,” she says – but a number of students have come to talk with her about it during office hours. Many are unaware of the Thomas hearing – it happened before they were born but is too recent to make it into most U.S. history classes – so when she compared the two events, “I’ve been able to see in their faces the sort of impact that it has for a young woman who is trying to process the Kavanaugh confirmation to be told that a similar thing happened 27 years ago.”

In the hearings in both 1991 and 2018, “women’s mere presence wasn’t enough to actually change the values of that institution,” she says.

The lesson, Rowley says, is that “engaging in discourse, civil discourse, about politics matters. Being informed citizens and staying up with the news, as hard as it is sometimes, and having a variety of perspectives in your own news feed so you don’t get into an isolated bubble, is important.

“Learning the history so you can place these larger forces and moments in context is important and then (so is) deciding what the vision that you want for the nation in which you live and then living that out in your daily life, making those values real.”