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House of Representatives, Qualifications
Article I, section 2, of the Constitution set few requirements for election to the U.S. House of Representatives: a member had to be at least twenty-five years of age, have been a U.S. citizen for seven years, and be an inhabitant of the state from which elected. Qualifications for Senate membership are similar. (See senate, electing; senate, qualifications.)
Besides age, citizenship, and residency, there were other de facto requirements for House election in the early days of the Republic. They included race, sex, and property. Since the Constitution left it to the states to determine who could vote, this in effect limited House membership to propertied white males.
At first, most states had some kind of property requirement for voting. But the democratic trend of the early nineteenth century swept away most property qualifications, producing practically universal white male suffrage by the 1830s. It would be about forty more years, however, before anyone other than a white male citizen could gain membership in the House.
Gradually, several changes in the Constitution broadened the franchise (the right to vote) in ways that affected House elections. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) extended the franchise to newly freed slaves; the Nineteenth Amendment (1920) granted women's suffrage; the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964) abolished the poll tax; and the Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971) broadened youth suffrage, lowering the voting age to eighteen from twenty-one. In 1965 Congress passed the voting rights act to remove barriers several states and localities had erected to keep blacks and other minorities from voting. Other laws and Supreme Court decisions affected black suffrage and racial redistricting.
House Characteristics
The average age of House members in the 112th Congress when it began in January 2011 was 56.7 years.
There are no legal limits on the number of terms House members can serve—intermittent efforts to impose such limits have failed—and some lawmakers have built prodigious careers. Mississippi Democrat Jamie L. Whitten held the record tenure of fifty-three years for more than a decade after his retirement in January 1995 at age 84. (He died nine months later.) But Michigan Democrat John D. Dingell, who was first elected in a December 1955 special election and was eighty years old when reelected in 2006, set a new tenure record in 2009.
The first black representative was Joseph H. Rainey, a South Carolina Republican, who served from 1870 to 1879. Another African American, John W. Menard of Louisiana, had won a seat in 1868, but the House excluded him because of an election dispute.
Jeannette Rankin, a Montana Republican, was the first woman elected to Congress. She served in the House twice, 1917–1919 and 1941–1943, and was the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars.
The first black woman in the House was Shirley Chisholm, a New York Democrat, who served from 1969 to 1983. The first Jewish woman in the House was Bella S. Abzug, a New York Democrat, who served three terms after being elected in 1970.
At the beginning of the 112th Congress seventy-two representatives were women, including a number of African Americans. In addition, three women were elected as nonvoting delegates from the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.
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