“I’ve been in that battle a very long time,” the 15-term congresswoman mentioned. “We take a step ahead, they push us again.”

However as she and others took turns talking, the attendees — together with leaders from Feminist Majority and the Nationwide Group for Ladies — discovered themselves grappling with one other, extra quick disaster, as properly: the chance that Ms. Maloney, probably the most highly effective girls in Congress, may very well be turned out of workplace this month after three many years.

Only a week earlier than New York’s Aug. 23 primaries, Ms. Maloney is nearing the endgame of an unwelcome, wide-open and more and more vicious main battle in opposition to her longtime congressional neighbor, Consultant Jerrold Nadler, after a New York courtroom unexpectedly mixed their Manhattan districts this spring.

With overwhelmingly comparable views, the candidates have toiled via the summer time to distinguish themselves. Mr. Nadler, 75, has tried to assert the progressive mantle and highlighted his standing as the town’s final remaining Jewish congressman. An upstart challenger, Suraj Patel, a 38-year-old lawyer, is concentrating on youthful voters, stressing the necessity for generational change in opposition to two septuagenarians first elected within the 1990s.

For Ms. Maloney, 76, and her allies, although, the race has more and more centered on girls — each their electoral potential to sway the result and the significance of defending one among their very own at a second when the Supreme Courtroom and Republican-led states are rolling again reproductive rights secured half a century in the past.

The congresswoman has lent the marketing campaign $900,000 of her personal fortune, and is spending a large chunk of it on a tv advert reinforcing the message: “You can’t ship a person to do a girl’s job,” she tells New Yorkers.

“He perhaps can communicate higher than me,” Ms. Maloney mentioned in an interview after the occasion, referring to Mr. Nadler. “Males usually tend to be trusted. However I’m a fighter. Ladies battle for girls.”

A fixture of the rarefied Higher East Aspect and the again rooms of Congress, Ms. Maloney is just not a family identify nationally or a very famous orator. However few girls have ever collected extra affect in Washington, or used it with such intense focus, to push for the Equal Rights Modification, paid household go away, a nationwide girls’s historical past museum and combating gender-based violence.

“I’m not right here to talk in opposition to Jerry Nadler,” mentioned Gloria Steinem, a founding father of Ms. Journal and a number one spokeswoman for the ladies’s motion, who lives within the district. “It’s simply to my thoughts saying that Carolyn Maloney is probably the most wanted, probably the most trusted and probably the most skilled, and we must always ship her again to Washington.”

Ms. Maloney, a tenacious politician recognized for five a.m. chilly calls and arm-twisting campaigns that may drag on for years, has been much less delicate.

Within the interview, she mentioned flatly that Mr. Nadler didn’t work as laborious as she did, significantly on native points; accused him of taking credit score for a lady’s work and mentioned residents of one of many nation’s wealthiest, most liberal districts wanted her — not him or Mr. Patel.

The tack has prompted Mr. Nadler’s supporters to bristle, significantly after she attacked him for highlighting his Jewish id. She had earlier insisted that she would by no means ask girls to vote for her primarily based on her gender.

Ms. Maloney’s lengthy profession in public life — which started as a instructor in East Harlem within the 1970s after an auto accident practically took her life and ended her aspirations as a ballerina — and her marketing campaign messaging have undoubtedly been extra different than simply that.

She donned an F.D.N.Y. jacket for years combating for medical advantages for 9/11 first responders. She helped convey dwelling billions of {dollars} in assist for the Second Avenue Subway and just lately overhauled the Postal Service, accomplishments she eagerly touts on the marketing campaign path.

The present marketing campaign has additionally been dogged by the resurfacing of laws, letters and statements Ms. Maloney made years in the past questioning whether or not there was a connection between vaccines and autism in kids, that her opponents say successfully lent a trusted voice to probably the most widespread — and debunked — claims of vaccine skeptics.

Ms. Maloney mentioned she “regrets” asking questions concerning the subject in any respect and has sought consideration for her efforts in Covid vaccine distribution. However that has not stopped Mr. Patel and Mr. Nadler from skewering her, or deterred a shadowy anti-Maloney tremendous PAC from reserving greater than $200,000 in 11th-hour adverts amplifying the assault. (Ms. Maloney known as the darkish cash advert dishonest and “simply one other instance of the New York politics outdated boys community making an attempt to take down a strong lady by any means obligatory.”)

Ms. Maloney’s marketing campaign used comparable framing in dismissing Senator Chuck Schumer’s endorsement of Mr. Nadler on Monday, contending that Ms. Maloney was the higher selection at a “time when girls’s rights are on the chopping block.”

Certainly, few priorities have been extra intently related together with her profession because the work of the ladies’s motion. She declared her candidacy for Congress on the day of the Supreme Courtroom’s Deliberate Parenthood v. Casey determination limiting abortion rights. She upset a longtime male congressman in 1992, when there have been solely about 28 girls within the Home; she fought to go payments cracking down on human trafficking and increasing paid household go away.

Her as but unsuccessful work to go the stalled Equal Rights Modification (written by Alice Paul, a relative of her late husband) has been so encompassing that Ms. Maloney attended the Met Gala final yr decked out in a yellow, inexperienced and purple costume calling for its passage. Enshrining girls within the Structure, she believes, is “the reply” to lots of the efforts to curtail reproductive rights and discriminate in opposition to girls.

Alongside the best way, Ms. Maloney has damaged limitations for girls at practically each stage of her profession — turning into the primary individual to offer beginning whereas on the Metropolis Council (“It was, like, nationwide information,” she laughed) and, extra just lately, the primary lady to guide the highly effective Home Oversight Committee.

Some political strategists and students watching the race, although, imagine that the attraction could also be extra restricted than Ms. Maloney needs — significantly given Mr. Nadler’s personal monitor report combating for lots of the identical points.

His crew has been fast to level out that Ms. Maloney has no monopoly on feminine voters. The marketing campaign shortly put collectively a Nadler girls’s group led by Gale Brewer and Ruth W. Messinger, widespread former Manhattan borough presidents. “America can’t afford to lose him,” Senator Elizabeth Warren says in Mr. Nadler’s TV advert. (Deliberate Parenthood and NARAL have endorsed each incumbents.)

“I’m of very happy with my report supporting an important array of ladies leaders for elective workplace,” mentioned Cynthia Nixon, a Nadler supporter and actor who ran for governor of New York in 2018. “Carolyn’s report merely doesn’t maintain a candle to Jerry’s report of passing essential civil rights laws — actually main on each main piece of L.G.B.T. civil rights laws for the final 20-plus years — and casting principled and brave votes like voting ‘no’ on the Iraq Warfare and the Patriot Act.”

Mr. Patel, for his half, mentioned the bickering between the 2 incumbents over who deserves credit score for what was extra telling.

“We’re working a race targeted on the long run, and they’re each working a race, frankly, carping at one another concerning the previous,” he mentioned, stating he agrees with their positions.

However Ms. Maloney’s supporters insist there’s a distinction between holding the correct positions on girls’s points and making them a centerpiece of your congressional work.

“Nonetheless a lot male lawmakers imagine in a girl’s proper to decide on, I haven’t had any of them name me and provoke me to motion,” mentioned Sonia Ossorio, the president of the New York chapter of the Nationwide Group for Ladies.

Ms. Ossorio feels so strongly she has been handing out copies of a letter she wrote supporting Ms. Maloney to residents in her East Aspect constructing. “She places girls in the beginning when she makes selections,” she mentioned.

Sitting throughout from a portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt the opposite day, Ms. Maloney put an identical body on the competition with Mr. Patel and her outdated ally, Mr. Nadler.

“That is the girl’s hour,” Ms. Maloney mentioned. “That is the time that we want our most skilled and hardest leaders to be in Washington combating for girls’s rights and reversing this.”