PROVIDENCE, R.I. --A female lawmaker in Rhode Island is demanding her colleagues name a bridge for an outspoken woman who helped found the state, a gesture resisted in a House chamber so dominated by men it lacked a women's bathroom until last month.

Lawmakers here routinely crank out honorifics with little fanfare, let alone debate. Not this time.

Critics of Rep. Amy Rice have rewritten her bill and attempted to scuttle it over a plan to name a new bridge spanning the Sakonnet River for Anne Hutchinson, a religious dissident who led hundreds of followers to Rhode Island in 1638 after Puritan zealots banished her from Boston.