Women set to reach new high in Massachusetts Legislature

The election of seven new female state representatives this week is poised to boost women’s representation on Beacon Hill to a new high next session.

Sixty-two women — a dozen in the Senate and 50 in the House — won their elections Tuesday, meaning that women are set to hold 31% of the state Legislature’s 200 seats when the new two-year term begins on Jan. 6.

Counting turnover that’s occurred through special elections, next year’s ranks of women lawmakers will be five more than the previous record of 57 at the start of this session in 2019, and 10 more than 52 seats held by women in 2017.

According to the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators, a total of 213 women and more than 20,000 men have served in the Legislature. The first women elected to the Massachusetts House were Reps. Sylvia Donaldson of Brockton and Susan Fitzgerald of Jamaica Plain in 1923, and Sen. Sybil Holmes of Brookline was the first woman elected to the state Senate, 14 years later.

Women make up 51.5% of the Massachusetts population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

No female incumbents lost their re-election bids this year, and one woman — Lowell Democrat Vanna Howard — unseated a male incumbent, Rep. David Nangle, in the September primary.

The other six female representatives-elect, all Democrats, claimed open seats: Jessica Giannino of Revere, Erika Uyterhoeven of Somerville, Patricia Duffy of Holyoke, Brandy Fluker Oakley of Boston, Meg Kilcoyne of Northborough and Sally Kerans of Danvers.

Kilcoyne will be the first woman to hold the 12th Worcester District seat, and Kerans is a former representative who served on Beacon Hill in the ’90s. When Kerans began her first term in 1991, there were 38 women in the state Legislature.

The House’s party breakdown among women in the new term is set to be 44 Democrats, five Republicans (Reps. Kimberly Ferguson of Holden, Susan Gifford of Wareham, Sheila Harrington of Groton, Hannah Kane of Shrewsbury, and Alyson Sullivan of Abington) and one unenrolled lawmaker, Athol Rep. Susannah Whipps.

In the Senate, all 12 women are Democrats who ran as incumbents, including Senate President Karen Spilka of Ashland. The last Republican woman to hold a state Senate seat in Massachusetts was Jo Ann Sprague of Walpole, who opted not to seek re-election in 2004.

Seventy-six women, mostly Democrats, ran for state legislative offices in Massachusetts this year, down from the 79 who ran in 2018, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Nationwide, the center reports women accounted for just over 29% of the country’s 7,383 state legislators in 2020.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/369Fo0t