After Senate Race, Some Say Barrier for Women in Massachusetts Still Stands

January 25, 2010

By KATIE ZEZIMA, The New York Times

The defeat of Martha Coakley in last week’s special election to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy has reignited the debate over whether there is a glass ceiling for women in Massachusetts politics.

“Welcome to liberal Massachusetts — we’re not,” said Mary Anne Marsh, a Democratic political consultant. “And if you didn’t believe it before, anyone who thinks that Massachusetts is liberal in light of Tuesday’s results need only look at the record and lack of success women have had in Massachusetts politics. That should just put it away for good.”

For decades, women have been unable to gain a solid political toehold in Massachusetts, a state long dominated by male political figures. Five women in Massachusetts’s history — including Ms. Coakley, the attorney general — have been elected to statewide constitutional office, and four have been elected to the House of Representatives.

Currently, the only women to hold high elective office are Ms. Coakley, Representative Niki Tsongas and the State Senate president, Therese Murray.

“Women in Massachusetts have had a hard time winning statewide office and holding it if they got it,” said Dan Payne, a Democratic strategist. One reason, he said, is that there are not enough women running at lower political levels to move up.

Ms. Murray, the first woman to be State Senate president and the 16th woman elected to the body since 1790, has been cultivating a network of politically involved women to run for local office or raise money for female candidates through forums and mentoring groups. And in Cambridge, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation analyzes the role of women in politics and writes guidebooks to help them get elected.

“I think the guys have done a better job with having a pipeline and a team effort in the past,” Ms. Murray said. “We’re in the process of making it strong for women, and we have to make it stronger.”

But doing so has been particularly difficult.

“Massachusetts is a place where there have been just a few groups that have defined the political field, and I’ve never heard of women being a concern,” said Swanee Hunt, the founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the United States ambassador to Austria from 1993 to 1997.

“For women to run, they have to break through the way things have been done,” said Ms. Hunt, who is also the Eleanor Roosevelt Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School.

Mr. Payne said he believed women had given Ms. Coakley a late push in her primary victory against three male opponents. But he said Ms. Coakley never mentioned her gender or that she would have been the state’s first female United States senator, while Scott Brown, her opponent, ran “a macho, testosterone campaign,” driving around the state in a pickup. (No tallies of the vote by gender were available.)

Shannon O’Brien, a former state treasurer who lost to Mitt Romney in her 2002 bid to become governor, said many in Massachusetts and around the country still did not see women serving in boardrooms and executive suites or holding high political office.

“When you close your eyes and think of a governor or a president, immediately a picture comes to mind — for many people that is not a woman,” Ms. O’Brien said. She said she remembered being judged harshly because of her gender, and recalled a man who wrote a letter criticizing her for having a baby while in office.

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