Scant Role for Women in Albany Mess

By SUSAN DOMINUS, New York Times

Locked out of their chamber after staging a leadership coup by nabbing the support of two Democrats, New York State’s Republican senators let themselves back in Thursday afternoon apparently with the use of, as The New York Times put it, “a mysterious set of keys.”

A mysterious set of keys — now that’s strategic maneuvering to inspire envy in the Dungeons and Dragons crowd. What will the Democrats counter with? A cloak of invisibility and a plus-two sword? Maybe that magically empowering invisibility is what the Democrats were going for at the outset of the crisis, when the best idea they could come up with, after the Republicans claimed control on Monday, was to turn out the lights.

Has anyone else noticed that this whole affair has the feel of some all-boys clubhouse where they have all gone off their meds at the same time? It’s not just the boyishness of the behavior — it’s the boyishness of the players.

Click through page after page of news of the people involved in the affair — the behind-the-scenes string-pullers, the installed puppets, the hypocritical apologists, the coy waverers, the ineffectual leaders — and you won’t come across the names of any women at all.

Oh yes, there is one: Karla Giraldo, who was on the other end of the jagged broken glass that Senator Hiram Monserrate, one of the two Democrats who agreed to throw their votes in with the Republicans, is accused of wielding in December. (For anyone who missed this pertinent detail about Senator Monserrate, he’s currently facing felony charges in the case.) In Albany these days, the unfortunate Ms. Giraldo may prove the second-most influential woman to shape New York State politics — a distant second, granted, behind Ashley Dupré.

It is a little hard to get worked up over the absence of women wielding real power in the State Senate when this is what power looks like — it would be like bemoaning the under-representation of women on chain gangs or in the Watergate scandal or on the set of “Heaven’s Gate.” Besides, it’s not as if there are no women in the Legislature: one in six state senators in New York are female, one of whom, Liz Krueger, is vice chairwoman of the Senate Finance Committee (er, was? That’s presumably pending litigation, like everything else in the Capitol right now). Until this fiasco unfolded, one might have assumed the women in the Senate were real players; but when it comes to machinating, scheming and power-grabbing, they either do not have any clout or are slackers, falling down on the job.

ONE in six is still a far cry from women’s 50 percent share of the population. Feminists are forever debating whether there are so few women in politics because they are not encouraged to run or because they have less interest in doing so. As early as 1978, Carol Bellamy, one of the first women to serve in the New York State Senate, suggested women’s lack of interest had a lot to do with it.

“Politics has a terrible reputation,” she told Time magazine. “We’re striving to come up to the level of the used-car salesman. So if you have some options, who’s going to go into politics?”

What was that Groucho Marx said? Something like: I refuse to join any club that would have Pedro Espada Jr. as a member. (Mr. Espada, the other turncoat Democrat, has a rich history of legal troubles for refusing to disclose political contributions and potentially corrupt diversion of funds.)

So should women be dismayed that their sisters in the Senate have been excluded from the clubhouse fight-fest? Or proud? Call me a ’90s-era essentialist, but I’m proud, even a little relieved. One thing women have going for them when they run for office, according to various studies, is the belief that they are more compassionate. Regardless of whether that is true, it would be a shame to lose that advantage, slight though it may be, given that female politicians no doubt have plenty of other stereotypes that cut the other way.

Certainly, things have come a long way for women since Carol Bellamy arrived in the State Senate in 1973. It was not that she and the two other women in office that year were mistreated or ignored, Ms. Bellamy recalled this week, it was just that “they had no idea how to deal with us.”

Unfortunately, the Senate itself seems to have sped downhill since that time. “I was always proud to say I’d been a state senator,” said Ms. Bellamy, now president of World Learning, a global education and development organization. “It’s getting a little harder to say that these days.”

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To read the full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/nyregion/13bigcity.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=susan%20dominus&st=cse