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This Representative Just Became The Longest Serving Woman In The House

by Lani Seelinger
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Marcy Kaptur was elected to the House in 1982, and five years later she wrote a bill that would lead to the creation of the World War II monument on the National Mall — but it wasn't actually created until 17 years after she wrote the original bill. With that anecdote, Kaptur, the longest serving woman in the House of Representatives, has a message for voters who may be impatient for change.

"I have it here to remind me how long it took us to do something the American people wanted," she told NPR, referring to a picture of the monument that she keeps on her desk. "I look at that and it reminds me how long it takes to do something good."

Kaptur officially became the longest serving female member in the House on Sunday, March 18, at 35 years, two months and 15 days — and, at 71 years old, no intention of slowing down. The record time for a woman serving in Congress overall is held by Barbara Mikulski, who spent 10 years in the House followed by 30 in the Senate.

The previous record holder for longest serving female member of the House of Representatives was Massachusetts Republican Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers, but Kaptur's intention to keep serving means that she will likely end up lengthening the record time for a woman in the House significantly.

She told NPR that she wouldn't be retiring yet because she's "not finished with what [she] started to do," so her spirit toward the WWII memorial evidently permeates her entire attitude towards work in Congress.

“I’m just one of those Americans who I think heard John Kennedy’s call to ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, and what together we can do for the freedom of humankind,” Kaptur said in the video that she posted to Twitter celebrating her achievement. Before she ran for Congress for the first time, though, she was having a hard time finding an institution that would allow her to exercise her full potential.

"I was rejected when I applied to the U.S. Air Force Academy, to Notre Dame University when I was first seeking to go to college, and to the FBI because I was a woman," Kaptur told NPR. The voters in her Ohio district, however, didn't see the same limitations — and now she's been in government long enough to see some significant changes, changes that could have pushed her own career in a much different direction.

"Now I'm able to appoint women to our service academies. Obviously I defend the FBI here, especially of late, I recognize how important they are to the country, and Notre Dame now accepts women," she told NPR. "So we've seen this change just in my lifetime, and it's a good thing."

But while those changes have come in her lifetime, they didn't come quickly — and there's still progress to be made. In Kaptur's 18 terms in office, for example, she estimated that she had served alongside over half of the women who have ever been in Congress. As she said in an address to her colleagues, only 288 women have ever served in the House — compared with more than 10,000 total representatives. On the other side of the legislative branch, the Senate currently has 22 female members — which is the highest total it's ever had.

However, the long fight for women's equal rights has begun to pay off, much like Kaptur's long push for a WWII memorial that was built many years later. In her interview with NPR, Kaptur emphasized that work in Capitol Hill is slow — but it does move forward. For anyone hoping for fast changes, this is a good reminder that fast change is not the only type of change. Sometimes achievements — like those of Marcy Kaptur — only come with time.