Dvorak

The people’s house has long struggled with welcoming all the people.

“Capitol Traditions Will be Upset When Miss Rankin Arrives,” The Washington Post said as the House of Representatives freaked out when its first female member, Rep. Jeannette Rankin, was elected in 1916.

There was no restroom for Rankin to use near the House floor — that didn’t happen until 2011.

In 1929, the all-White Congress was faced with another challenge to their sense of dominance when voters in Illinois sent to Washington Rep. Oscar De Priest, a Black American elected to work in a Capitol that didn’t welcome him.

And here we are in 2024. Congress has another historic newcomer in Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of the House. And Congress is doing it wrong. Again.

In response to McBride’s election, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) introduced the Protecting Women’s Private Spaces Act, which will “ban biological men from using women’s private, protected facilities — such as bathrooms and locker rooms — on all federal property,” she said in a statement.

It flustered House Speaker Mike Johnson, who told reporters at the Capitol last week: “This is an issue Congress has never addressed before.”

Untrue. The White men of Congress have a history of banning people from their inner sanctum instead of dealing with their own discomfort.

There was, of course, the election of Rankin in 1916.

Did Americans wonder if she’d be treated fairly? Comfortable? Heard?

Nope, that wasn’t the worry.

Scores of articles that year pearl-clutched about the impact a woman would have on the boys’ club that has been our nation’s Congress.

“But how about the men? Will they feel embarrassed?” said one of the stories in a full-page display on Dec. 3, 1916, in the San Francisco Examiner.

It wasn’t until 2011 — almost a century after Rankin was elected — that women finally got a restroom near the House chamber. There were more than 70 female members that year.

Meanwhile, as Congress slowly began to look a little more like America, the White male members continued to be easily bruised by change.

When De Priest was elected, “Southerners in the House of Representatives wondered ‘what should be done’ when De Priest sought to use the private restaurant reserved for members,” Elliott M. Rudwick, then a sociology professor at Southern Illinois University, wrote in 1966.

“After he began taking his meals there, some of his colleagues ate at the Senate restaurant to avoid ‘the embarrassment’ of lunching in the same room with a Negro,” Rudwick wrote.

For the most part, De Priest tolerated the restaurant racism until 1934, when his aide Morris Lewis — who was Black — took his son to a public part of the restaurant and they were refused service.

The restaurant was segregated well into the 1950s, according to Rudwick.

By then, the number of women with no place to relieve themselves was becoming ridiculous as their numbers in Congress were growing. It wasn’t until 1962 — when there were 20 women in Congress — that the Architect of the Capitol finally added a women’s bathroom to the first floor of the building.

“In such ways, the very architecture of the Capitol reminded women that they were, at best, tolerated as adjuncts to the male members of government,” Bonnie J. Morris, a women’s history professor at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote in 2018.

The current transgender bathroom fight underscores this.

“Bathroom politics is a reflection of actual politics, in any historical moment,” Morris said.

The urge to exclude wasn’t limited to bathrooms and restaurants.

The “Men Only” sign on the Senate pool thwarted newly elected Sen. Kay Hagan when she tried to go for a swim. She was told it’s because at least two senators swim naked. It wasn’t until 2009 that the sign was replaced by one that said “Proper Attire Required” and women were allowed to dive in and do their laps.