At the Capitol’s maximum historical guy cave, as on a lot else, Nancy Pelosi has left her mark.

In her ultimate weeks because the country’s first feminine Space speaker, a reflective Pelosi has been web hosting small teams in a ground-floor hideaway tucked in a slim corridor off the overwhelmed trail, between two well-traveled corridors. It’s the Board of Training room — the identify is an insiders’ funny story relationship to Prohibition, when “Cactus Jack” Garner, the Space speaker from Texas, retreated there with appreciated friends for after-hours beverages. Any other Texas speaker, Sam Rayburn, renewed the observe during the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties; Vice President Harry Truman, a former senator, used to be within the Board of Training room when he were given phrase that President Franklin Roosevelt had died.

It used to be males simplest, in fact, as a result of that just about described Congress in the ones a long time: Ladies had been 1% to three% of the club.

“They’d say they’re going to the Training Committee, however in fact it intended they had been coming down right here to play playing cards and revel in no matter refreshments that they had been playing,” Pelosi informed me and a number of other different feminine reporters she’d invited for an alcohol-free lunch.

The history-maker revelled within the historical past of the room. Pelosi pointed to the state seal of Texas painted excessive on one wall — harking to her predecessors — and to a rendering of the pre-Civil Struggle Capitol, with out its later, better dome, at the reverse wall. (Long past is a portrait of Robert E. Lee.) Then she grew to become to her additions: two fresco-like artwork, one among her place of birth San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge and the opposite a scene of white-clad suffragettes marching outdoor the Capitol in 1919, when Congress handed the nineteenth Modification giving girls the precise to vote.

One can simplest believe what Cactus Jack and Mr. Sam would recall to mind this lady’s contact of their outdated clubhouse. However over the 80-minute lunch, right through which Pelosi did a lot of the speaking, she made it simple she’s been performing all the way through her barrier-breaking occupation with little regard for what high-ranking males assume.

Even now she says she feels occasional sexism: “One thousand nicks an afternoon, although folks would possibly not understand it or intend it.” Taking a look again, Pelosi recalled scraps with each the male hierarchy of the Catholic Church — her church — over homosexual rights, abortion, birth control and in vitro fertilization (“Deficient souls,” she mentioned), and with the lads of the Space, as soon as proof against her upward push (“Deficient small children”).

It used to be a girl, San Francisco Rep. Sala Burton, who driven Pelosi, then a fundraiser and organizer in Democratic politics and mom of 5 grown youngsters, to run for the Space. Burton used to be demise of most cancers when she tapped Pelosi to take her seat: “A lady asking some other lady, which used to be extremely atypical,” Pelosi mentioned.

“I by no means supposed to run for Congress. By no means,” she mentioned, and added, “I by no means supposed to run for management.”

However as Pelosi labored to elect extra girls and raised gobs of California cash for Democrats, girls and a few males recommended her to run, first for minority whip, in 2001. There used to be, on the other hand, a pecking order within the male-dominated establishment: “The blokes mentioned, ‘Who mentioned she may just run?’ ”

She mimicked an change of the time:

“Why don’t the ladies simply make a listing of the issues they’d like to peer accomplished and provides us the checklist?”

“Oh, in point of fact? Why don’t you are making a listing?”

“Neatly, it’s now not the time [for a woman in the leadership].”

“No? We’ve been ready over 200 years.”

Nonetheless, she mentioned, “I by no means concept that we might have a girl speaker. I believed, ‘The rustic is so a lot more in a position for a lady president than those guys are in a position for a lady speaker.’ ”

When Pelosi arrived in Washington in 1987, the 435-member Space integrated simply 23 girls, more or less cut up between the events. “I’d by no means were speaker if there hadn’t been many extra girls individuals,” Pelosi mentioned. Now the quantity is 122, three-fourths of them Democrats.

Amongst her maximum ambitious demanding situations over twenty years as Space Democratic whip, chief and speaker: contending with the Catholic hierarchy. She counts as her “largest unhappiness, the nearest I ever got here to tears,” the church’s lobbying to kill the Reasonably priced Care Act — the regulation Pelosi considers her maximum vital fulfillment — for the reason that bishops antagonistic its protection for birth control.

She mentioned she’d made her case to church emissaries “as a religious training Catholic,” simplest to learn, “You’re now not that religious.”

“Thank God for the nuns,” Pelosi mentioned, describing them as “fabulous,” “competitive” and “outspoken” in reinforce of birth control protection and of the healthcare regulation.

She and the American bishops battled for years over abortion rights. “I had 5 youngsters in six years and one week. That’s a ravishing factor for me. That are meant to now not be the usual I set for any one else,” Pelosi mentioned. “That is none of any one’s trade. It’s a girl’s proper to make her personal possible choices along with her circle of relatives, her God, her physician.”

Requested if she had any regrets over her 35 years in Congress, she temporarily spoke back no.

Not anything? “No. Not anything.”

However she does have tales to inform. Pelosi mentioned she would more than likely write a memoir “as a result of I’ve were given to set the document instantly about positive issues.”

As a backbencher within the new Congress beginning in January, she will have to have extra time to start that mission. Because the chief emerita, in all probability she may just make the Board of Training her writing room.

@jackiekcalmes