<SNIP>

... The most recent picture, taken last year, features 17 female senators -- five Republicans and 12 Democrats.

Mikulski remarks that there are more women in that photograph than had served in the Senate in all of American history when she arrived some three decades ago.

The Maryland senator knows a lot about the history of female lawmakers, and she should. She has made a lot of it herself: the first Democratic woman ever elected to the Senate in her own right; the first woman in the Senate Democratic leadership; and in late 2010 she became the longest-serving woman ever in the Senate.

On Saturday she will top that, becoming the longest-serving woman ever in the history of the U.S. Congress, surpassing Rep. Edith Norse Rogers of Massachusetts, who represented Massachusetts from 1925 to 1960.

<SNIP>

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/16/politics/mikulski-history/index.html