Exhibition honors women
If you’ve found yourself on the second floor of the Scarborough-Phillips Library recently, you might have noticed the walls lined with black and white photographs of important-looking women.
These women are in fact 14 women from the United States Senate, documented by photojournalist Melina Mara between 2001 and 2003, in a series called “Changing the Face of Power: Women in the U.S. Senate.”
The exhibit first debuted in 2003 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and is from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. It has been brought to St. Edward’s University by the Kozmetsky Center of Excellence in Global Finance and Scarborough-Phillips Library.
At first glance, the 38 photographs simply look like women in suits giving speeches, meeting with important people or doing something that will ultimately affect the greater public.
A closer look, however, reveals that these women are familiar and prominent politicians such as Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and former New York senator and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Below each photograph is a short caption about the photograph itself or the woman in it. The captions were compiled by now-retired columnist Helen Thomas and the Center for American Women and Politics.
From looking at the captions, one can learn that women held only 14 percent of the Senate seats in 2003, compared with 2 percent in 1992 and 17 percent today.
One can also discover that in 2001 and today, the Maine, Washington, and California Senate seats are completely occupied by women.
It took 133 years since the Declaration of Independence for a woman to serve on the Senate. The first woman was Rebecca Latimer Felton, who served for only 24 hours.
The exhibit also features Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who is and was the longest serving woman in the U.S. Senate, and Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who was raising four young children as she served in the Senate in 2001.
The then-junior Senator from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Republican, is also featured in the gallery. Hutchison is now the state’s senior senator.
On the main information board, the compiler quotes, “The move toward gender parity has irreversible momentum.”
Mara began the project after receiving her bachelors’ degree in political science from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. She also has her masters from the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.
Mara interned for the late U.S. Rep. Billa Abzug, D-N.Y., worked as a teacher, and is based in Seattle, Wash. as a freelance photojournalist.
Passing students glance at the photos and captions as they prepare to study or as they walk into the depths of the library, as many go from picture to picture, studying the dynamics and reading the stories to get a break from their studying in the library.