Democrats hit a new milestone: 100 women in the House

This story was originally reported by The 19th. 

Democrats are projected to win back the U.S. House — and hit a major milestone. For the first time ever, at least 100 Democratic women are expected to serve in the chamber simultaneously.

“Women made history because we showed up to vote, and then voted in more than 100 Democratic women to serve in the House,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez of New Mexico, the chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, said in a Wednesday statement.

She added: “Women have borne the brunt of the Trump administration’s recklessness and Republicans’ extremist agenda, and on Tuesday they made it clear they have had enough.”

Elect Democratic Women (EDW), the campaign arm of the House Democratic Women’s Caucus, has had its sights set on achieving that goal since the beginning of the cycle, several House Democratic women told The 19th last year. 

“We think 100 is a great number. It’s sort of a showcase number,” Rep. Lois Frankel of Florida, a founding member of EDW, said in 2025. “Of course, we would want more, but I think there’s something about hitting 100, right?”

The milestone is the culmination of decades’ worth of work recruiting and fundraising for Democratic women by groups like EDW and EMILY’S List, founded in the 1980s.

“This is a powerful testament to what happens when we bet on women and help them build winning campaigns,” EMILY’s List president Jessica Mackler said in a statement.

“Time and again, women have proven to be Democrats’ strongest path to building power in Congress,” she added.

In 2026, the House battleground was at gender parity: of the 40 House seats Decision Desk HQ projected Democrats would flip as of noon  on Wednesday, 18 of those districts were flipped by women candidates.

“When you get women candidates, they just tend to be really high-quality candidates who are highly motivated, highly educated, in it for the right reasons and have a drive to support their communities, and I think that that affects the qualities of races that they run,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico said last year.

They won in a variety of races, picking up seats in districts across the country in contests fueled by voter anger over rising prices and perceptions of corruption.

In some races, women candidates challenged Democratic incumbents. Rep.-elect Jasmine Clark of Georgia launched a campaign against the late Rep. David Scott before he died in April at 80. Reps.-elect Melat Kiros of Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York, both democratic socialists, unseated sitting House Democrats in their safe-blue districts.

Clark will be the first Black woman Ph.D. scientist in Congress, Kiros will be the first Black woman to represent Colorado and the first Gen Z woman in Congress.

Jeannette Rankin became the first woman to serve in Congress in 1917, three years before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote — a right that was still restricted for many women of color. Women are half of the U.S. population, but hold just 28 percent of the seats in Congress. Just 445 women have served in Congress, making up only 3.5 percent of all those who have served in either the House or Senate.

The House had segregated gyms until 1985, when then-Rep. Barbara Boxer led a successful effort to integrate the far-superior men’s gym. There wasn’t a women’s restroom off the Senate floor until 1993, and it took another 18 years for House women to get a designated restroom off of the House floor, in 2011. A bipartisan but ultimately unsuccessful effort last year to allow new mothers in the House to vote by proxy showed how the Capitol is, in many ways, still not caught up to the realities of mothers in the workforce. 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat in 2024 dashed, for the second time, the hopes of many to see the United States’ first woman in the Oval Office. But Stansbury believed 2026 would lay the groundwork to break that ultimate glass ceiling.

“I think this era that we’re living through, when we elect our first woman president, we’ll see that the work that we’re doing now is what made it possible for that to happen,” she said.