Feminism and flamboyance — unlikely congressional legacies

Two notable stars in the select firmament of former members of Congress — both Democrats —went dark last month: Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, who served with distinction and enormous impact from 1973 until 1997 and John Jenrette of South Carolina, whose flamboyant career spanned the period 1975 through his ignominious resignation six years later.

At first glance, aside from their voting cards, it would seem these two veteran legislators had little in common. Schroeder was a Harvard Law graduate, a pilot, an ardent feminist and a vigorous opponent of the war in Vietnam, elected in a district that Richard Nixon carried by 28 points en route to a national landslide. (Several better-known men had declined to seek the Democratic nomination.) One of just 16 women in the 435-member House during the 93^rd Congress — her entering class included Lindy Boggs (D-La.) and Barbara Jordan (D-Texas) — Schroeder wasted little time before confronting the male dominance of the House. When Speaker Carl Albert encountered her and her husband during a freshman orientation event, he mistakenly asked Jim Schroeder his preference for committee assignments. Pat quickly set him straight. Later, when questioned (as no male member ever was) about the challenges of balancing family duties with service in the Congress, the always quotable Schroeder responded, “I have a brain and a uterus, and they both work.”

While not seeking to be pigeonholed as solely a women’s advocate, Schroeder relished promoting feminist issues to her largely male colleagues, once even bringing diapers to the House floor and advocating for paid family leave. At the same time, she demanded appointment to the Armed Services Committee, where she could join a handful of others voicing opposition to continued U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. When she, along with similarly anti-war Black congressman Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) sought to be named to the traditionally pro-Pentagon panel, the crusty chairman Edward Hébert (D-La.) staunchly refused. He was over-ridden by the leadership and forced to accept, reluctantly, the two new members, as noted in my book “The Class of ’74,” but he ordered them to share a single chair because he considered each “only worth half a Member.” When I asked how she responded to such an affront, Schroeder recalled, “Ron and I gulped and sat on one chair.”

Congress was pivoting in Schroeder’s direction.

Reformers denied Hébert his chairmanship two years later, but Schroeder went on to a long and celebrated career, including a brief run for president in 1988. She retired to widespread accolades in 1996, citing exasperation with the new Republican majority. Sharing a chair (briefly) with Dellums was, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) later recalled, “the only half-assed thing Pat Schroeder ever did.” She went to work for the Publishers Association and produced an account of her career in Congress entitled “24 Years of House Work … and the Place Is Still a Mess.”

Jenrette’s career had a markedly different arc, one in which his excesses invariably have served to diminish his own significant backstory.

Throughout a career documented in the appropriately titled biography “Capitol Steps and Missteps: The Wild, Improbable Ride of Congressman John Jenrette,” his was “a volatile life of meteoric rises and Icarus-like falls,” as family members described in his obituary. Where Schroeder devoted her post-congressional career to publishing, Jenrette first spent time in prison for his role in the Abscam scandal (“I’ve got larceny in my blood,” he unwisely admitted to an undercover FBI agent) and then bred horses in Bulgaria and promoted tobacco sales in Eastern Europe.

But there was a more historically significant side to Jenrette’s career that is generally overlooked. (He proudly told me that passing a bill to promote the tourist industry was his most significant legislative achievement.) Jenrette, who began his career representing — and you can’t make this up — Horry County, S.C., in the state legislature, was one of those white politicians who benefitted from the enfranchisement of millions of Black voters following passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Assiduously courting these new voters, who were participating at ten times their rate at the outbreak of World War II, Jenrette ousted the longtime segregationist Rep. John McMillan in the 1974 Democratic primary and continued to win re-election along with South Carolina colleagues like Butler Derrick and Ken Holland and another recent loss from the ’74 class, Elliott Levitas (D-Ga.). When the region’s white conservatives migrated to the Republican Party, reviving it in the South and diminishing the Democrats’ lock on the majority that had largely prevailed from 1933 to 1994, these southern white moderate Democrats were uniformly replaced by hard-right Republicans.

Jenrette, the son of a former Ku Klux Klan member, was delighted with the significant role he and his reformist colleagues had played in transforming politics in the Old Confederacy. “I was part of the New South, not the old South,” Jenrette told me. “I felt more kinship with other new and progressive members from throughout the country than I felt for the old guard, which had been against me.”

The ability of millions of formerly disenfranchised Black Americans to participate in the basic right to vote, now once again under threat in numerous conservative states, had “completely changed the political landscape of my district,” and the nation as well, Jenrette recalled, and he proudly placed himself in the forefront of their struggle.

Nothing in this retrospective is meant to equate the careers of these two very different political figures. But with respect to the historically significant changes in our national politics and culture that emerged from the mid-1970s, the growing influence of women and Black voters, the transformation of the southern Democratic Party and the revitalization of the Republican Party are monumental factors — and the careers, and the passing, of key players like Pat Schroeder and John Jenrette are both well worth recognizing.

John Lawrence is visiting professor at the University of California Washington Center and author of “Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership 2005-2010” (2022) and “The Class of ’74: Congress After Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship.” He was Speaker Pelosi’s chief of staff from 2005-2013.