“Women in childbearing ages still have difficulty managing work outside of the home and responsibilities within the home,” Landrieu said. “And I think that continues to be a barrier for women running for public office.” Landrieu has had to clear that barrier herself, raising two young children — including a daughter she adopted in 1997, her first year in the Senate.

Among her male colleagues, Landrieu noted, having small children is commonplace, and the juggling act is a concern, but never a barrier. “With men, the rule is that you are elected to office and that you are married with children,” she said.

However, there is a growing younger generation of women lawmakers who, like Landrieu, are doing double-shift duty as mothers of younger children. Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln , 48, has two small children. Forty-two-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand , the New York senator recently appointed to replace Clinton, gave birth as a House member in 2008. California Democratic Rep. Linda T. Sanchez , 41, recently announced that she was pregnant.

The age at which women first hold political office may be declining, Dolan said. That marks a departure, she noted, from the traditional path followed by high-profile officials such as Clinton and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, who waited until after their children had grown to run for office. The emergence of lawmakers who are also young mothers is a welcome development, Dolan said, since it “pushes the envelope” and “expands our understanding of what’s normal.”

At the same time, though, motherhood can itself become a flash point of political controversy, as the media coverage of Palin’s vice presidential candidacy demonstrated.

Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster and president of The Polling Company, agreed that Palin was the subject of “a lot of smarmy, invidious comments,” having to do with her appearance and her role as a mother. Conway pointed to the incessant discussion of Palin’s children, the unspoken judgment being, “Who the hell does she think she is, having five of them, including an infant?” The alarmist coverage focused on Palin’s gender and family was especially intense, experts suggest, because she was a newcomer on the national political stage. With battle-tested figures such as Clinton, Dolan notes, “we had already worked through a lot of the traditional gender lenses we would use to evaluate her.”

The successful runs of other 2008 candidates such as Perdue and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen , who won a Senate seat in New Hampshire, confirmed that greater familiarity with the electorate meant that gender played less of a role in their campaigns. Running as a woman, Shaheen said, “was not really an issue for me,” since she’d already won a statewide race for governor.

Still, observers and voters across the political spectrum agree that sexism in the media remained a widespread problem for women in politics in 2008, especially in national politics.

A poll of women voters conducted jointly by Conway and Democratic pollster Celinda Lake found that 64 percent of women thought the coverage of Palin was more negative than that of other candidates, and 79 percent thought there was too much coverage of her clothing. The proportion of respondents holding the same views of Clinton’s coverage was 31 percent and 44 percent, respectively.

Conway worried that the negative coverage in 2008 could mean that prospective women candidates “will feel reluctant to pay the cost of admission.”

Others contend that even with heightened, and often adverse, media scrutiny, the campaigns women have waged are a positive inducement for other women with political aspirations to get involved.

“Any time you have women running for high political office,” Snowe said, it serves as “a model of encouragement for other women to run.

“I think it’s always beneficial,” she said.

The present playing field for special elections in the House would seem to bear out Snowe’s view: Of the three open-seat House races right now, two feature high-profile women candidates. On this week’s ballot in Illinois to fill the House seat vacated by Rahm Emanuel when he became President Obama’s chief of staff, Democrat Sara Feigenholtz leads the field in fundraising. In California, Democrat Judy Chu is considered a leading contender to replace newly confirmed Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis .

Broadening the Base

When the Senate passed the pay discrimination bill Jan. 22, all four Republican women crossed party lines to vote for it. It is named for Lilly Ledbetter, the Goodyear employee whose suit the Supreme Court dismissed, saying she did not file it soon enough.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray , the highest-ranking woman in the Democratic Senate leadership as conference secretary, said women lawmakers didn’t formally coordinate their support for the Ledbetter legislation. “It just came from an understanding from each one of us,” she said. “We’ve been there; we have a sister who’s been there; we have a mother who’s been there.”

Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison , who initially fought to amend the bill, ended up voting for it. “I did want to try to right what I thought was a wrong,” she said, adding that being a woman “definitely” gave her a different perspective on the issue. “I have been discriminated against, so I do know the problem firsthand.”

Shaheen said this sort of shared understanding isn’t unusual among women in Congress, though it doesn’t mean they act in concert, any more than men do. “Because we’re women,” she said, “our experiences tend to be different than men’s. They’re not better or worse, but they are different.”

So while most advocates of traditional feminist causes regard Obama as an ally, neither do they plan to stop pressing for greater female representation at all levels of government. “The more we have those views represented at the table,” Shaheen said, “the more our lawmaking is going to reflect what the spectrum of families and people across the country are experiencing.”

And while they continue to work on signature feminist issues such as reproductive rights, women political leaders have expanded their portfolio of issues, raising their profiles.

The House now has 76 women members, while the Senate has 17 — both records. Pelosi’s election as Speaker in 2007 was a first for women, as was Landrieu and Snowe’s joint leadership of their Small Business panel. Democrats Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein of California chair Senate committees, while Hutchison, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are ranking Republicans on committees. Four women are chairs or ranking members of House committees.

“When I came here in ’92, there were seven of us, and we were spread really thin,” recalled Murray. “Today every committee that I sit on has one or two — or more — women on it.”

Still, the delegations in both chambers are short on ideological diversity, with just four GOP women in the Senate and 17 in the House. Studies have found, Dolan said, that “women still have a somewhat harder time coming through the ranks of the Republican Party establishment.” But some observers suggest that Palin’s candidacy might have cracked that glass ceiling. “The major lesson from Sarah Palin ’s candidacy is that the Republican Party finally figured out that women are the majority of voters, that someone has to pay attention to them,” said Gandy.

If the GOP makes strong inroads in recruiting women candidates, that could foment some discord among constituencies that have traditionally backed women candidates: socially progressive, comparatively affluent Democrats. Many left-leaning feminists were derisive of Palin’s breakthrough candidacy, for example, because of her ardent opposition to abortion rights. Meanwhile, the culturally conservative Gillibrand has already drawn the threat of a 2010 primary challenge from seven-term New York Rep. Carolyn McCarthy , who is the widow of a shooting victim and a prominent advocate for gun control. Gillibrand, who hails from a rural upstate New York district, strongly opposes gun control and boasts high approval ratings from the National Rifle Association.

In some senses, such divisions are clear signs that women lawmakers have come into their own; observers note that any group representing more than half the national electorate wouldn’t have a monolithic consensus on any issue.

Nevertheless, one kind of consensus does still hold among women lawmakers: that they face unfair struggles for equal treatment, and that progress is incremental. Snowe, who has been in Congress for 30 years, said their status “has improved — but we still have a long ways to go.”

FOR FURTHER READING: Wage discrimination lawsuit rules (PL 111-2), CQ Weekly, p. 259; Palin, 2008 CQ Weekly, p. 2356; gender issues in politics, 2007 CQ Weekly, p. 310.