May 13, 1971
The appointment of Senate pages is one of the Senate’s oldest traditions, dating to at least the 1824 appointment of 12-year-old James Tims. Nineteenth-century pages were typically boys, but from 1907 to 1926 the Senate employed female riding pages, who carried messages and packages from the Capitol to federal buildings throughout the District of Columbia. Though no Senate rule explicitly forbade the appointment of female pages, when teenage girls applied to be pages in the 1960s, the sergeant at arms, likely unaware of earlier female pages and influenced by prevailing attitudes about the appropriate roles of girls and women, rejected their applications. In a 1961 letter to senators, Sergeant at Arms Joseph C. Duke cited safety concerns and the physical demands of the job, which included carrying heavy materials, and walking and running all day, as reasons why he believed these duties precluded the appointment of female pages.
But some senators persisted in their demands that the Senate accept female pages. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in the workplace on the basis of sex, as well as a grassroots movement to end gender discrimination throughout society, the pressure to admit female Senate pages continued to build. In early 1971 the Senate Rules Committee held hearings to consider the issue.
Senators Jacob Javits of New York, Charles Percy of Illinois, and Fred Harris of Oklahoma testified on behalf of three young women they wished to sponsor. Noting that the Senate did not have a rule explicitly prohibiting the appointment of female pages, Senator Javits argued that the issue was a “question of fundamental human fairness.” Fred Harris explained, “I feel that in accepting girl pages to serve in the U.S. Senate, we would be taking a symbolic step.” The Senate should “end discriminatory hiring practices based on sex alone,” he urged, to “serve as an example [to] employers at all levels of American industry.”
After long debate and delay, on May 13, 1971, the Senate finally approved a resolution allowing senators to appoint women to a variety of patronage positions, including pages. Soon thereafter, Paulette Desell, Ellen McConnell, and Julie Price were sworn in as Senate pages.
