Updated with a statement from Boxer (below) at 5:57 p.m.
As a freshman senator, Barbara Boxer (D-CA) allegedly laughed off her colleague Patty Murray’s (D-WA) story about being groped in an elevator by longtime South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1993.
Sexism on Capitol Hill has been a heated topic of conversation since Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) raised the issue in an interview this week to promote her upcoming book “Off The Sidelines,” recalling how some colleagues called her “porky” or “chubby” in reference to her self-described struggle with weight. Some reporters then voiced their own experiences with male lawmakers’ inappropriate comments.
The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty argued in a piece published Friday that no one who spends time around Congress should be surprised that the kind of sexism Gillibrand described is still kicking in the Capitol. To illustrate, she revisited the 1993 incident where Thurmond was accused of groping Murray.
Thurmond didn’t recognize Murray as as a fellow lawmaker while the two shared an elevator and asked if she was married before grabbing her breast, according to journalist Clara Bingham’s 1997 book “Women On The Hill.”
Tumulty pointed out that when she reviewed Bingham’s book for the Los Angeles Times, the pre-publication copy stated that Murray related the incident to Boxer, who then laughed it off.
Once “Women On The Hill” was actually published, the text stated that Boxer encouraged Murray to go public with the story.
Murray told Bingham directly that she regarded the elevator episode as a “non-incident,” Tumulty noted.
Update: Boxer released the following statement to TPM.
“The headline and lede of your story is false and the opposite of what happened – and the record on this was corrected 17 years ago,” said Boxer spokesman Zachary Coile. “Senator Boxer urged Senator Murray to go public with these serious allegations.”
I’d like to believe in Hell, just to imagine Strom Thurmond being there.
I wish he could have lived forever, because watching the natural progress of society would have been more painful to him than anything in hell.
A black president while gays marry all over the country? You betcha.
1993 — That was during the years women wore ungodly shoulder pads to buck up their manly bona fides, especially if you were a women in Congress (though thankfully that trend was beginning to wear itself out as a mimic to masculine militaristic dress habits). It was also a time when women, for some bizarre reason, stuffed their bras or bought padded types to buck up their femininity, before bringing back the almighty cleavage, and the strange habit of wearing bras over the shirt, as opposed to under them. Thanks Madonna.
Eh, different times. Different generations of women too. Anita Hill’s testimony was only two years earlier and look how they treated her. So, reactions back then…no surprise.
What bothers me about the article is that it’s a lousy attempt to divide women on a fairly basic understanding of what is generally accepted as harassment today. And honestly, it took years to get where we are today. It didn’t just happen overnight. Male dominated institutions still fight over the meaning of sexual harassment, and that’s the bigger shame.
The story here is that when women do come forward with stories of harassment or worse, unsympathetic (and worse) males attack them for being too sensitive and blowing things out of proportion. What we have here is a woman Senator commenting on stuff, and it makes people go back over other incidents that were noted but that the harassed women in fact let slide, for good or bad.