Congresswomen’s Mates Get Left Behind

Karan English will be fresh from her honeymoon when she leaves husband and family to take up her new job as Democratic congresswoman from Arizona.

English, like many of her women colleagues going to Congress for the first time, will be a long-distance commuter. She’ll try to fly home on weekends to be with her husband and their five children from previous marriages.

“They decided that the best thing was to have one stable parent,” said English’s aide Bronwyn Reynolds of her boss and Rob Elliot, who owns a white-water raft adventure company in Flagstaff.

Most of the 24 new women House members won’t be moving to Washington with spouses. Nine aren’t married, and the husbands of others are staying behind to tend to families or their own careers.

The percentages are likely to be the same for the four new women members of the Senate.

“Right from the start it was never a consideration,” said Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), whose husband will remain behind to run his real estate development firm.

“It was not a tough call,” said Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky (D-Pa.), who will try to spend Friday through Monday in her district near Philadelphia, where she lives with her husband Edward, an international trade attorney and former congressman from Iowa, and their 11 children.

Her district “needs a lot of constituent service,” she said. “At no point did we think about moving back to Washington.”

There are no precise figures on how many members of Congress, both men and women, leave their families back home when they come to Washington. Commuting is the common lot for most women in the House, said Andrea Camp, press spokeswoman for Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.).

Eva Clayton, the first black woman ever elected to Congress from North Carolina, will be making the 3 1/2-hour drive to her home in Littleton to be with her attorney husband Theaoseus. “At least initially she’ll be getting a lot of mileage on her car,” said aide Nancy Fish.

The Senate, with its six-year term and fewer constituency demands, tends to be better at keeping families together. Patty Murray, the Washington State Democrat who successfully ran as “a mom in tennis shoes,” will be moving to the capital with her husband and two teen-age children, said press secretary Jada Berteaux.

Husband Rob, a systems analyst in Seattle, is looking for a new job, she said.

Rep.-elect Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles), said her husband, who runs a consulting business with East Coast ties, also plans to accompany her to Washington, but anticipated travel expenses are “incredible” and the logistics of moving are proving difficult. “It’s not as easy as it seems when you’re just talking about it.”

Two men who said they gave up their House seats to spend more time with their families, Rep. John Miller (R-Wash.) and Rep. Dennis Eckart (D-Ohio), in October suggested ways Congress could become more family friendly, such as coordinating recesses with school vacations and convening House sessions at 9 a.m. instead of noon, to allow members to get home for dinner.

Among the new congresswomen bringing husbands, Karen Shepherd (D-Utah) said her spouse will help organize the office and work as her unpaid chief of staff. “We’re in the very fortunate position of being old” with grown children, said Shepherd, 52. Her husband Vincent is involved in investment activities he can do from Washington.

Elizabeth Furse (D-Ore.) also is hiring husband John Platt as her legislative director, said press secretary Mary Fetsch. She said Platt is taking a four-month leave of absence from the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, but might have to quit his job to avoid conflict of interest if Furse wins a seat on a committee dealing with fisheries or public works.