On this day in 1973, a week after her appointment, 18-year-old
Felda Looper took up her duties as the first woman to serve as a
House page. Speaker Carl Albert (D-Okla.) chose her after Looper
mounted a successful campaign that sought to admit girls to the
page program. “The practice of having only male pages in the
House is a form of discrimination that should be ended,” Albert
said. ”It was the first time in my life I ever felt
discriminated against as a woman and it made me furious,” Looper
said after she learned of the unspoken rule barring girls from
serving as pages. “Somebody was going to be first. It was going
to happen, and I was psyched it was me,” Looper later recalled.
“It was a really exciting time, and the letters I got from
people were indicative of the fact that people were paying
attention to that.” When Looper’s parents took her on a family
vacation trip to Washington in 1966, she questioned Albert, then
the Democratic whip, about the policy of hiring only young men
as congressional pages. A