OLYMPIA — In Washington politics, women rule.

Never before has a state had a woman in the governor's mansion and both U.S. Senate seats. Also, all of the state Senate's leadership positions are held by women.

This is a state where female politicians' voices are clearly heard.

"The barriers and the hang-ups just aren't there," said state Sen. Margarita Prentice, a Seattle Democrat and the Senate's new budget chairwoman. In Washington politics, "we've always said that the edge is for the woman."

The numbers have backed that up for more than a decade. Beginning in 1993, the state had the highest percentage of female legislators in the United States, though after the November election their share dropped from 40 to 33 percent.

Maryland has become the new leader, followed by Delaware, and Washington has fallen into a third-place tie with Arizona, Nevada and Vermont, said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

But even while losing numbers, women in the Evergreen State increased their power in the state Senate and now hold all five leadership positions, including that of majority leader. Democrat Christine Gregoire was elected governor after three counts in an excruciatingly close contest that is still being fought in the courts.

Gregoire joins Democratic U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell as the highest-profile politicians in the state, something Walsh called a "landmark moment."

"Little girls can look in the newspaper and see a picture of what the governor looks like, what a United States senator looks like," Walsh said. "It looks like them."

Washington women charged onto the scene in 1992, joining other women nationally in what came to be called the Year of the Woman — when the number of women in Congress jumped from 28 to 42. Murray was elected, Gregoire became the state's first female attorney general, and Republican Jennifer Dunn went to Congress.

"Washingtonians dislike the classical, old-style, heavily partisan [leadership style]," said state Senate Minority Leader Bill Finkbeiner, a Republican. "In the early '90s, women began to be seen as an alternative to that."

Walsh said the state's populist culture has created a political system that "lets all people in."

Lisa Brown, a Spokane Democrat who became the state Senate majority leader this year, said she thinks Washington's frontier past plays a part in the can-do mentality of women in the state.

"Women were pretty used to doing whatever they had to do. ... They hunted, they fished, they got involved," Brown said. "I think it was a natural outgrowth to run for office."

Gregoire, who on Jan. 22 delivered the Democrats' response to President Bush's first weekly radio address of his second term, said that during her run for attorney general, she encountered the attitude on the campaign trial that "that's a man's job."

"The question always to me was: 'Can you be tough enough to be attorney general?' " she said.

But in her run for governor last year, Gregoire said, no one ever questioned whether she could do the job because she was a woman.

"In 2004 there was not a uniqueness," she said. "In terms of going out on the campaign trail, gender wasn't an issue."

Associated Press political writer David Ammons contributed to this report.