An unnamed "prominent" senator later told Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who was one of the House members who had knocked on the caucus-room door, "We don't let strangers in." The word "strangers" simply meant non-senators, Boxer was informed, but in her 1994 book, Strangers in the Senate, she cast doubt on that explanation.

"It's hard for me to explain how it felt for seven grown women, experienced in life and in politics, to have to pound on a closed door, to have to beg to be heard on a crucial issue that couldn't really wait for niceties," Boxer wrote. "The truth is that women have been strangers in the Senate ... the highest, most powerful legislative body in the world."

Public anger over the spectacle of the all-male, all-white Judiciary Committee awkwardly questioning Thomas and Hill helped to send Boxer and three other women to the Senate the following year. In what the media dubbed the "Year of the Woman," the number of women in the Senate tripled -- from two to six -- with the 1992 election of Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Carol Moseley Braun, D-Ill., the first African-American woman senator; and Patty Murray, D-Wash. They joined Sens. Nancy Kassebaum, R-Kan., and Barbara Mikulski, D-Md. Their presence was quickly felt in the clubby, tradition-bound Senate, because the chamber had never before had more than two women serving at one time.

Today, 14 women are members of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body. Women senators chair two committees, and hold several party leadership posts, including the chairmanship of a campaign committee. Every Senate committee includes at least one of them, and the women are playing key roles in high-stakes legislative battles, over issues from Social Security to homeland security. On occasion, the senators have come together on a bipartisan basis to advance legislation expanding breast cancer research and requiring that women be studied as part of other federally sponsored medical research.

The women senators' high visibility these days presents an inescapable question: Has the Senate reached a point at which gender is no longer all that relevant, or is the chamber still an Old Boys' Club in the process of transition?

"All the academic research that has been done on when women really become part of something says there must be a critical mass," former Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., one of the women lawmakers who marched to the Senate in 1991, observed in a recent interview. "People debate what a critical mass is, but no one has ever said it is 14 percent -- that's still pretty low."

In interviews with National Journal, the 14 women senators expressed a wide range of views about their role in the chamber and whether they now are, indeed, fully a part of the Senate club.

For instance, Mikulski, the first Democratic woman elected to the Senate in her own right, without assuming a seat previously held by her husband, emphasized that big changes have occurred. "When I came in 1986, in all of American history, only 15 women had served in the Senate, and one had only served for one day," Mikulski said. "Gender does matter, but where we are now is, we are no longer considered a novelty. And we're all very much a part of the Senate fabric."

The most senior of the five women Republican senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, also was upbeat. "It is more gender-neutral than it has ever been, because there are 14 of us, and we have moved up in seniority," said Hutchison, the vice chairwoman of the Senate Republican Conference. "We are in leadership positions. We are chairmen of committees. It is less of an anomaly."

And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., contended that the Senate is far different from what it once was, although she noted that work remains to be done to boost the number of women members to better reflect the population. "We have reached critical mass, and it is a serious mass," Clinton said. "We are no longer the exception, as was the case 20 years ago when Senator Mikulski was first elected. We are part of the team. We are part of the leadership."

Asked whether women House members today would be turned away at the Senate Democratic caucus door, Clinton laughed. "Oh, no -- that would never happen today. That is not even imaginable today. So look at the progress we have made."

But some other women senators were slightly more skeptical about the amount of progress made. "It is still basically a men's club, but I think it is in the process of transition," said Feinstein, the first woman to sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Initially, when there were six or seven of us, the men ... kind of looked at it as amusing and not much else," Feinstein added. "But as women have played a major legislative role, that has changed. After all, in what we do, the bottom line is being effective. If you are effective, you are going to have credibility."

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who played a pivotal role in last year's enactment of intelligence reform legislation, said that female senators find they must "prove" themselves more than their male colleagues.

"When men are elected, there's an assumption that they belong there, that they are qualified, that they have earned their way," said Collins, the chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "With women, there's still an extra barrier to be surmounted initially. But once you surmount that, then I think women are accepted as members of the club."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., who has seen plenty of changes since he was first elected in 1984, praised Collins's shepherding of the intelligence bill through intense turf battles. "You enjoyed it because the old bulls couldn't push her around," Rockefeller said.

Despite such achievements by Collins and other women senators, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., doesn't buy the notion that they are fully integrated into the chamber. "It hasn't turned the corner," she said of the Senate. "I come from a state where half our Legislature is women, we have a woman governor, two women senators, and half our Supreme Court [are women]. We have a little different perspective."

Even today, women senators say they still confront what some see as condescension or sexism from prominent men, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And many women senators complain of a double standard in the media. Even in their daily routines, some still have unpleasant experiences that they say male senators would likely not encounter.

"The other day," Cantwell recalled, "I went into a [Senate] building, and I started to walk through and said, 'I am Senator Cantwell. Do you want me to show you ID?' And they said, 'Yes.' Now, I don't think that would happen to most male members. I don't think that they would say, 'Yes, I really want to see your ID.' I just can't imagine. That has happened to me more than once."

"We haven't cleared all the hurdles of stereotypes of what [people] think a senator is or who they should be," Cantwell added.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, noted in an interview with NJ in 2003, shortly after her arrival in the Senate, that even the facilities can be somewhat inhospitable.

"You walk into the ladies' room -- it's a broom closet. It was an afterthought," Murkowski said. "I have presided [over the Senate] for a couple of hours this morning. The chair is a huge man's chair. I was sitting on two pillows in order to be high enough. The only thing that is dainty or feminine at all in the entire Senate is the gavel.... They have this petite, dainty little gavel in the midst of all this maleness."

Setting Boundaries
In 1987, her first year in the Senate, Mikulski took what some observers still see as an important step in establishing boundaries in the treatment of women lawmakers. She took on a male colleague who had made her the punch line of an inappropriate joke.

The all-male Alfalfa Club was putting on its annual, invitation-only stag dinner. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., was speaking as a mock presidential candidate on the "Alfalfa" ticket and quipped: "Just like the singer Tom Jones, women often throw their panties at me when I speak. It happened again just yesterday. I just don't know what got into Senator Mikulski."

According to an account in Boxer's book, Mikulski called the remark "insulting" and asked for an apology. Domenici phoned her and said he was kidding, to which Mikulski replied, "If someone said that about your wife or daughter, wouldn't you be offended?" Domenici agreed, and Mikulski accepted his apology.

In the recent interview with NJ, Mikulski called the incident "a very important moment." She said she challenged Domenici because "I wasn't going to be the subject of smirks and backroom jokes." Mikulski added: "If I didn't stand up for myself, how could the women who supported me think that I was going to stand up for them? I stamped my Ferragamo, jiggled my earrings, and we got it all taken care of."

Mikulski said it was important that, instead of carrying a grudge, she readily accepted Domenici's apology. "It was just bad judgment [on his part]. So when he apologized, I accepted it immediately, and then I ended it," she said, adding that her stance proved that "Mikulski is not going to take any stuff, but she knows how to roll with the punches."

Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute, said that the move "took a lot of guts" on Mikulski's part. "She was the only Democratic woman in that club, and from then on, she became the mentor to other women as they came in," Walsh said.

Ellen Malcolm, the president of EMILY's List, a political action committee that raises money for Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights, agreed that it was a pivotal moment. "What happened from that incident is that the Senate agreed, collectively, that they would take women seriously and that they would be true senators in every sense of the word," Malcolm said.

Several years later, two women senators played key roles in challenging another male colleague in a case that rocked the Senate. After The Washington Post reported allegations by 10 women in November 1992 that Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., had sexually harassed them, some of his colleagues initially seemed to rally around him and to stress the importance of privacy.

The Senate Select Committee on Ethics began an investigation, and eventually, the number of Packwood's accusers grew to more than two dozen. In November 1993, when the Senate considered whether to compel Packwood to turn over his personal diaries to the committee, Murray made a forceful statement. To oppose the move "sends a clear message also to every woman in this country: 'If you are harassed, keep quiet, say nothing; the cards are stacked against your ever winning,' " she told the Senate.

When asked about that episode, Murray said some colleagues had urged her to act otherwise. "There was a lot of pressure in the backroom [hallways] to be quiet. 'Don't make waves,' ... 'You don't want to say anything,' " said Murray, who at the time had spent less than a year in the Senate. "I realized that somebody had to speak out, and that is what I came here for.... I think that earned the respect of the people around me."

Similarly, Boxer riled some of her colleagues by insisting on public hearings on the Packwood case. She even threatened to introduce a resolution to force all senators to vote on the issue. Then-Ethics Committee Chairman Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was furious at Boxer's maneuvers, which he saw as interfering with his panel's investigation. "He basically poked his finger at me and said, 'I am going after Ted Kennedy,' " Boxer told NJ in 1997. "I said, 'Look, if you have reason to bring a case against anybody in the Senate, do it, but don't threaten.' "

When asked about the episode in the recent interview, Boxer said: "It is important that we hold each other accountable to the rules of the Senate. Here we had 20-plus women who had come forward, and it didn't look like we were going to have a hearing." At the same time, Boxer said she did not think McConnell's actions had anything to do with her being a woman. "I think he would have done the same thing to anyone," she said. "He was just trying to get me to back off, bottom line."

In September 1995, the Ethics Committee unanimously recommended that Packwood -- by then, the chairman of the Finance Committee -- be expelled for his behavior and for obstructing the inquiry. He announced his resignation the next day.

Even as the number of women senators has grown over the past decade and as they have steadily increased their clout, they say they still feel slighted at times because of their gender.

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., for instance, said she was unhappy that President Bush did not initially respond after all of the women senators sent him a June 2002 letter urging him "to take up the cause of the nearly 100 American women and children who are being held against their will in Saudi Arabia" by raising the issue "at the highest levels [of] the Saudi government."

"I was appalled. I thought if he had gotten a letter signed by 13 men senators, he would have responded," said Lincoln, who has a constituent being held in Saudi Arabia. Only after Lincoln blocked Senate action on Bush's nomination of James Oberwetter to be Saudi ambassador did she get a response: In November 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell finally sent her a letter pledging that the issues would be "on the front burner."

Another woman senator was especially critical of Rumsfeld's attitude toward women. "I think his treatment of me is extraordinarily sexist," said the senator, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I do not think he would treat any male senator the way he treats me." Several other women senators said that Rumsfeld can be disdainful and condescending, but they did not view him as sexist.

Feinstein said she was frustrated during a recent Senate hearing when Rumsfeld was unresponsive to her questions about Muslim women who reportedly were raped while in U.S. detention. What "I was hoping to get was a full-hearted response from him that 'we won't tolerate this kind of behavior on the part of the American military, and I will make it a high-priority issue,' " she said.

"There is a disdain that Rumsfeld kind of brings with him, for many of us who might not agree with him," Feinstein added. "It is as if nobody has right on their side, except he does, because he knows much better. My own view is that that is a very dangerous position for a secretary to take."

Mikulski, who was also at that hearing, said she told Rumsfeld: "You don't understand what we wanted.... We wanted feeling. We wanted outrage. We wanted indignation." Still, Mikulski added that, in her view, "Rumsfeld is an equal-opportunity blow-off."

Picking Teams
In November, as retiring Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., gave his farewell speech to the Senate, he noted that when he arrived in 1966, the chamber had only one woman senator, Margaret Chase Smith, R-Maine, who was "outstanding, but ... outstandingly quiet."

"Now we have 14, and you can't shut them up," Hollings continued. "They keep on talking and talking and talking. If you get into a debate with Barbara Mikulski or Barbara Boxer, they will take your head off, I can tell you that. They know how to present a viewpoint, and that is very valuable."

Boxer chuckled when reminded of the comments by Hollings, who had chaired the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. "He always tells the story that he was scared to death because I wanted to get on his committee, and he didn't know what I would do," Boxer recalled. "Years later, he said, 'Please put her on my committee.' Fritz is someone who takes no prisoners in his debates.... I think he sees in Mikulski and me a little bit of himself."

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., also asked Hollings to put Boxer on the Commerce Committee. "I said, 'Look, she is my friend, she'll be strong and tough, and if she is on your committee, she will be loyal.' Finally, as a favor, he said, 'All right, damn it, all right,' " Biden recalled in an interview.

"After she got on the committee, I'll never forget, I was sitting next to him and he said, 'All right, I have her on committee, what do I do now?' And I said, 'What did you do with me when I got on your committee?' He said, 'I invited you over for a drink.' I said, 'Invite her over for a drink.' So he did, and about six months later, he said, 'Biden, you were right. She is solid.' "

Biden, who was first elected to the Senate in 1972, said that the chamber has "mostly turned the corner" from its days as a men's club. "One of the most significant things that has happened is that these women have put to rest the myth that women aren't as tough or as competent [as men senators], or the second myth that there are 'women's issues.' "

Unlike Hollings, Biden said that after the 1992 "Year of the Woman" elections, he was determined to recruit women to the Judiciary Committee that he chaired. "I got on a plane, drove out to see Carol Moseley Braun in Chicago," he recounted. "I flew out there, unannounced, and went to her apartment. She was moving. I physically had to pick up boxes, and I said, 'You've got to come on the committee.' She said, 'No, everybody tells me, don't do that.' " When he persisted, Moseley Braun relented.

That experience was an exception. Many of the women senators said they have had to struggle to attain coveted Senate posts.

For example, Lincoln unabashedly said she used gender as "part of my pitch" to gain a Finance Committee seat in her first term. "I went to [then-Minority Leader] Tom Daschle and said, 'There are no women on this Finance Committee. Look at the issues we are facing ... Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all of these things come through Finance. These have such a greater impact on women.' "

Another example came in November, when Sen. Elizabeth Dole, R-N.C., waged a tough battle against Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., for the chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and her GOP colleagues elected her by a single vote. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said that Dole's lifelong achievements in the Senate, previous Republican administrations, and the private sector underscore "the fact that women can compete on par with men."

Buck Raking
Dole's election as NRSC chairwoman is one of several indications in recent years that women senators are coming into their own in the competition with men for all-important campaign dollars. Murray, for her part, set a fundraising record when she chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 2001-2002. And Clinton, Boxer, Feinstein, and Hutchison are some of the best buck-raisers in the business these days.

But many of the women senators conceded that until now, women had lagged behind in the political money race. "What gave men an advantage is that they had a built-in network, through what they were doing in a previous life.... They had a natural network and Rolodex to tap into," Snowe said. "That might not have been the case for women. That has changed. Women are now in all spheres of professional life, so that they have their own ready-made network that they can tap into as well."

Dole noted that women have long been successful in charitable fundraising. "I am hoping that by being the first woman to chair the NRSC that I can reach out to them and say, 'Look, you can do this,' " she said.

Murray recalled that doubts surrounded her own ascension to the DSCC chairmanship. "People said, 'Wow, does she have the connections? Can she raise the money?' And I, obviously, raised a record amount of money," Murray said. "Women [candidates] had actually raised an incredible amount of money coming into the Senate. It should not have been a question."

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., recalled that when she ran for the Louisiana House in 1979 at the age of 23, fundraising was "a real problem.... Women weren't taken seriously." These days, however, she said it has been proved that "when women are incumbents, they basically can raise the same amount of money as male incumbents."

Murkowski, who served out the remaining two years of her father's term before facing the voters in 2004, said that fundraising for her was less onerous because her race against former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles was hotly contested -- with control of the Senate perhaps turning on its outcome -- and because she was an incumbent.

"If I had been an untested female candidate up against a good, strong Democratic opponent, it would have been more difficult," Murkowski said. "There was so much outside interest, and it was such a high-stakes race ... that I don't think [gender] made a difference."

Lincoln, however, said she still finds a gender disparity in campaign contributions. She explained that when she seeks to get the maximum contribution from donors, she has to "hammer 'em ... and when I talk to my male colleagues, they'll say, 'Yeah, they maxed out to me, right off the bat.' And I had to make 10 phone calls or something. That is definitely a challenge."

In 2000, Cantwell and Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., became the first women challengers for Senate seats to defeat elected incumbents. Cantwell was able to tap more than $10 million of her personal fortune as a high-tech executive to far outspend Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. But Stabenow was at a huge financial disadvantage in her campaign against Sen. Spencer Abraham, R-Mich. She credits the support of EMILY's List as being an equalizer.

"EMILY's List is the single most profound force in leveling the playing field for women running for higher office," Stabenow said. "It used to be, when I was in the state Legislature and women talked about running, the question was 'Could she get through the primaries?' -- because the institutional forces were either supporting the man or staying out.... With the advent of EMILY's List, and their coming in early for women, it took that away."

Double Standards
In January, Feinstein effusively praised Condoleezza Rice while formally introducing her to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which was holding a hearing on Rice's nomination to be secretary of State. Less than an hour later, Feinstein's California colleague, Boxer, ripped into Rice about her contradictory statements on the war in Iraq.

The episode demonstrated that the women senators are a diverse group, whose positions span the ideological spectrum. "The women senators are not a monolithic group -- that is always important to remember about women officeholders," said Walsh of the Center for American Women and Politics. "They are more nuanced. You can't just say, 'These are women officeholders, therefore they will think X or Y, or they will be together no matter what.' "

But the notion that two Democratic senators from the same state would take such differing views over a high-profile nominee got plenty of media attention. In fact, a number of the 14 women senators said they believe that reporters don't approach stories about women in the Senate in the same way that they report on male members.

Boxer is adamant that the press tries to turn policy differences between her and Feinstein into tales of personal animus. Reporters "just are not willing to accept the fact that we are going to be different, and we still respect each other and like each other and are friends," she said.

That comment echoes what Boxer wrote in her book about unbalanced press coverage of the 1992 campaign, in which both she and Feinstein were running for the Senate (Feinstein ran in a special election for a two-year term).

"Dianne and I had never been close. We had always moved within different coalitions within the Democratic Party in California. The press kept waiting for us to turn on each other," Boxer wrote. "They write stories comparing our poll ratings, which I've never seen done for two male senators from the same state; they write stories that treat us as though we are joined at the hip. And when we differ, they act like it's a big deal."

Feinstein agreed with Boxer's assessment. "That is really unfortunate," she said. "Men have different styles. Men vote differently [from their Senate colleague in their state], and yet there isn't this kind of [coverage].... Obviously, we are different. That doesn't mean that we are not colleagues or friends, or [don't] work together."

Murkowski noted that when Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., made an impassioned statement on the Senate floor blasting Rice for "lying," he attracted far less ink and airtime. "It really didn't get that much play, in contrast to the statements made by Barbara," Murkowski said. "You do just kind of make a mental note to yourself."

And Landrieu said that recently, when Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., sharply questioned Michael Chertoff during his nomination hearing to be Homeland Security secretary, that "never made the big headlines. It is just, 'Sen. Carl Levin says X.' Why couldn't it have been, 'Sen. Barbara Boxer says X'?" Landrieu added: "Because [Boxer] was a woman senator ... taking issue with a woman nominee, it became this big thing."

Collins, however, downplayed the notion that the media coverage was sexist in this case. "Barbara was first [to criticize], and she was on the committee. She was really hammering Condi personally, as opposed to Mark's [statement] in floor debate, where he was not lecturing the nominee face-to-face," she said. "When two senators of the same party from the same state disagree, that is a story. I am not sure that gender factors in."

That's not to say that Collins never finds sexism creeping into press coverage of women senators. "The only thing that I have ever noticed that I do think is a little bit sexist is, in profiles on women senators ... often, the reporter will have some comment about whether we are tough on staff," she said. "I'm not sure that that makes it into profiles on male senators."

Clinton agreed that there's still "something of a double standard" in coverage of women and men senators. "That's unfortunate, but it will only dissipate over time," she said. "So it is something that we all cope with."

Even as the women disagree on many issues, it is obvious that they hope to be role models. "I am pleased that we have made the progress we have, but I hope in the future that young women never question whether or not they can do this," Murray said.

Murkowski echoed that sentiment. "I am encouraged by the young girls that I see, those still in high school. They are really excited. They are almost giggly, movie-star excited -- 'Wow! You are a woman in the United States Senate!' You feel kind of silly, but you have to stop and think: This is something that they can look to and say, 'I could be there.' That is so incredibly important. They can visualize themselves here."