The young black woman with the gold sneakers, slacks, braided hair and Mickey Mouse watch stepped into the elevator in the Capitol.
"This elevator is for members only," the elevator operator said frostily."Yes, thank you," Cynthia McKinney replied, her glittering shoes planted firmly in place.
"This elevator is for members only," the woman running the elevator repeated, even more coldly.
"Yes, thank you," McKinney said, even more insistently.
"This elevator is for members only," the operator tried once more, before finally spotting the blue pin with the congressional seal, worn by members, hanging on a gold chain around McKinney's neck.
"The elevator lady was very apologetic, and I told her that it's wonderful now that members of Congress come in all shapes and hues," the freshman representative from Georgia said, recalling the recent standoff.
Cynthia McKinney is the startling new face of Congress: A 37-year-old former college professor and single mother from Atlanta with uncommon poise and a decidedly unpinstriped wardrobe.
The splotches of gold and pink and red brightening the monochromatic landscape of Capitol Hill are emblematic of far more dramatic changes in the nation's most famous old boy's club. In 1992, a year of domestic concerns and disgust with business as usual, historic numbers of women were propelled into the cloistered world long dominated by white middle-aged men. The percentage of women jumped 200 percent in the Senate and 68 percent in the House.
In actual numbers, women are still a distinct minority, holding only six out of 100 seats in the Senate and 48 out of 435 seats in the House. But in interviews with new and veteran female lawmakers, it is clear that Congress is going through a creaky adjustment.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the furor sparked by Anita Hill's appearance at the Clarence Thomas hearings and the problems of former Sen. Brock Adams of Washington and Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, most male lawmakers are treading carefully with their female colleagues.
"With so many new women and minorities, everyone's constrained to be politically correct," said the irrepressible Texas congressman, Charles Wilson. "I still try to irritate Pat Schroeder by calling her Babycakes, but that's about it."
Asked how he is adapting to the flock of new women, Wilson replied: "I love it. A couple of 'em are pretty cute."
Most male lawmakers are much edgier, and there has been a lot of "biting of tongues," as Rep. Constance A. Morella, R-Md., put it.
Rep. Susan Molinari, the 35-year-old Republican from New York who came to the House in 1990, said: "You can see that there is an insecurity as to what to call us, whether it is appropriate to compliment on our dress and our hair. For the first time, there's not that resentment against women members, that feeling of `To hell with them; they're too much work.' There's a growing attitude among the men that they want to do what's best."
But while they give the men high marks for trying harder to avoid inappropriate behavior, many of the women say they are discouraged at how far they have to go to penetrate the inner circles of power.
"Congress is still being run by the same people," Molinari said. "Women have hit a glass ceiling here."
When the Senate and House Democratic leadership planned their Inaugural Day lunch for Bill Clinton, they cut off the invitations at the whip level, thereby leaving out the only woman among them, the deputy House Whip, Barbara B. Kennelly of Connecticut. Pointing out that this president might like a little diversity, Kennelly successfully lobbied to be included.
KAREN SHEPHERD, a new Democrat from Utah, said she is appalled at the way the men have organized Congress so that all the hearings and meetings are scheduled simultaneously, making participation less prized than turf-building.
"The halls are running with testosterone," she said. "Very often on the floor, any debate we have speaks about substance for a short period of time and after that, all day long, it's a question of who's in charge here."
Women would not have organized it that way, the 52-year-old first-year representative said. "When you've done birthday parties for 20 two-year-olds all by yourself, that's actually harder than organizing Congress so that the hearings are scheduled coherently," she said.
Many male lawmakers are still getting accustomed to the sight of women huddling in the cloak room and on the floor. "Whenever there are three or four of us talking together, the guys get uneasy and come up and say, `What plot are you hatching here?' " said Louise Slaughter, a Democratic congresswoman from upstate New York.
If they could hear what the growing congressional sorority talks about, the men might be surprised. Sometimes, it is feminist impatience. Slaughter said that after a recent discussion of abortion rights in a hearing she suggested to two female colleagues that men might feel differently if, before they could have a vasectomy, they had to "get a good stern lecture and wait 48 hours and get the consent of everybody they know."
At other times, the talk is playful. At a recent dinner for Democratic women in the House and Senate at the Monocle, a restaurant on Capitol Hill that for many years had the air of a political stag party, the women looked around at the wall-to-wall framed pictures of male lawmakers and joked that some redecorating needed to be done.
And some freshmen women even rated the men in their class on "best buns." (Winners: Democrats Melvin Watt of North Carolina and Walter Tucker of California.)
THE MEN on the Hill took notice when Hillary Rodham Clinton met recently for two hours with the bipartisan congressional caucus on women's issues. Louise Slaughter told the powerful new first lady about the women's efforts to make sure that the budget was tailored enough to women's health issues, noting: "It's almost certainly the first time that these guys on the budget committee heard words like `cervix,' `ovaries' and `breasts' spoken out loud."
Hillary Clinton quipped: "At least in that context."
Many of the freshman women agreed that while their male colleagues had been collegial, some of the staff remained hidebound.
"The sort of women who finally get here are the sort of women who really don't like to be told `No,' " said Karan English, a 43-year-old freshman Democrat from Arizona who has been waging a one-woman battle for equality in exercise. When her scheduler called to find out about the hours for the House gym, a staff worker there replied that there was a women's gym in another part of the Rayburn building.
"This gym is for members," the worker said, to which English's scheduler replied: "But she is a member."
English checked out the gym for women but found that it did not have a pool or basketball court. She was told that if she insisted on using the main gym where the men worked out, she would have to call first, so that a male aide could meet her at the door and give disrobed congressmen a warning. (The sole locker room, which has the only access to an elevator directly down to the pool, is for men.)
Some of her male colleagues teased her, she said, insinuating that she just wanted "to check out the guys' bodies."
"What egos some guys have," English said, with an impish smile.
It finally became a matter of principle. "If the guys call before they come, I'll call," she said.
So at 7 one morning last week, she went to the gym, without advance notice, to shoot some hoops with Bart Stupack, a fellow freshman Democrat from Michigan. "I have to admit, I walked in fully prepared to cover my eyes," she said. But she saw nothing untoward.
LYNN SCHENK, 48, a new congresswoman from California, recalled her cultural collision with the man who runs the snack bar in the Democratic cloak room. Sidestepping the usual high-cholesterol fare of hot dogs and potato chips, Schenk pressed the culinary desire of many of the new women and asked for a piece of fruit.
"You must be from California," he said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.
Undaunted at her failure to get fruit, Schenk went back and asked the man at the counter to label a bin for recycling soda cans.
"You want a sign," he told her, "put up a sign." She got some poster paper and taped a sign on a bin: "Recycled cans only - no trash."
The women say they know that some of these battles seem small, but they want to chip away at the clinging image in Washington that power has a male face.
"Some people can look through you, and assume that if you're a woman, you're not a member," said Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, a freshman Democrat from Pennsylvania, who added that she, too, struggles with stereotypes: "There is that side of us, that little girl thing in us, that says we don't deserve it."
On the positive side, the women agree that they feel free now to offer a woman's point of view and to focus on subjects once pigeon-holed as "women's issues."
Patty Murray, the new Democratic senator from Washington who promoted herself during the campaign as "a mom in tennis shoes," said that many of her colleagues found it striking when, during the family leave discussion, she talked about having quit a secretarial job 16 years ago when she was pregnant with her first child.
"I think women do bring a personal conversation to legislation," she said.
Carrie Meek, a 66-year-old new Democrat from Florida, also brought a stunningly personal angle to her testimony at a recent subcommittee hearing on the subject of paying Social Security taxes for household help, offering credentials rare for that body: "I was once a domestic worker," she said. "My mother was a domestic worker. All my sisters were domestic workers."
Blanche Lambert, a 32-year-old freshman from rural Arkansas, has a political Cinderella story that suits the year of the woman: She upset Bill Alexander, the Democratic congressman for whom she had worked as a receptionist 10 years ago.
Lambert, for one, hopes that manners on Capitol Hill will not change too drastically as the sexes are slouching toward parity. "When you grow up in the South as a woman, you're used to men doing very nice things for you, like opening doors and standing up when you come to the table," she said. "I'll be very frank with you. I enjoy it. I don't want to lose that at all."