Cursing was one way Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) tried to fit in when she worked in a male-dominated environment when she was younger.
“I had a problem for a while with how much I cussed,” McCaskill said during an interview with HuffPost Live.
“When I first came to the prosecutor's office, for a while I was the only woman on the staff. I was handling these felonies, in these rooms with all these cops, detectives and there wasn’t a female judge,” McCaskill said. “I was constantly trying to be kind of like one of them. One of the things that was just ubiquitous was the cursing… I kind of fell into that trap.”
Although McCaskill said she “later corrected course” and stopped cursing as much, she still felt like an outsider at her job.
In her new memoir, Plenty Ladylike, McCaskill recalls a time when then-Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives Bob Griffin asked her if she brought her “knee pads” when she was trying to get her first bill out of committee.
McCaskill told HPL that sexist comments such as Griffin’s made her “more determined to excel and succeed and win because it’s a pretty competitive environment in politics.”
Watch the video above.