Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney’s exit from Washington at the end of the year coincides with a major victory in her decades-long fight to tell the stories of American women.
Maloney first began work on the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum in the late 1990s. She thought it would be a unifying project, one that would build consensus on a much bigger issue she aimed to tackle: ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
Fast forward to 2022, and Congress has still not voted to amend the Constitution to prohibit discrimination based on sex. And Maloney, after losing a primary race in a redrawn district that pitted her against fellow New York Democrat Jerrold Nadler, is leaving Congress after three decades in which she served at one point as co-chair of the Women’s Caucus, and most recently as chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
