BOSTON — The election of seven new female state representatives this week is poised to boost women's representation on Beacon Hill to a new high next session.

Sixty-two women — a dozen in the Senate and 50 in the House — won their elections Tuesday, meaning that women are set to hold 31% of the Legislature's 200 seats when the new two-year term begins on Jan. 6, 2021.

Counting turnover that's occurred through special elections, next year's ranks of women lawmakers will be five more than the previous record of 57 at the start of this session in 2019, and 10 more than 52 seats held by women in 2017.

According to the Massachusetts Caucus of Women Legislators, a total of 213 women and more than 20,000 men have served in the Legislature. The first women elected to the Massachusetts House were Reps. Sylvia Donaldson of Brockton and Susan Fitzgerald of Jamaica Plain in 1923, and Sen. Sybil Holmes of Brookline was the first woman elected to the state Senate, 14 years later.

Women make up 51.5% of the Massachusetts population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Ninety-five years after Edith Nourse Rogers began her term as the first woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts, the state has a female senator, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and three of its nine members of Congress are women — Reps. Katherine Clark, Ayanna Pressley and Lori Trahan.

Clark, a Melrose Democrat, is vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus, making her the second highest-ranking woman in the U.S. House after Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has said she intends to run for assistant speaker, which would move her up two rungs on the House leadership ladder and into the fourth position from the top after speaker, majority leader and whip.

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Original story here.