I remember Senator Dianne Feinstein’s election to the Senate as a part of the “Year of the Woman” in 1992 where four women won Senate seats. That this was such a big deal speaks to how poor women’s descriptive and substantive representation was in Congress — but two of 100 Senators were female and none were on the Judiciary Committee. So, at the time, the election of four additional female Senators was, to borrow a phrase, a big f*cking deal to this teenage feminist who loved politics and social policy while living in a very conservative Ohio town.
I was the President of my high school’s Democrats club at the time (easy win as there were eight of us in a school of over 2k) and all our posters for the mock Presidential election got torn down. No surprise we lost the election in ways even Walter Mond
ale would find shocking. My psych teacher told the class how women regretted abortions and pro-choice people were constantly coming to the pro-life side. Our fieldtrip to the state house in Columbus featured our state senator telling the girls that if we got bored with all the politics there was a mall next door for shopping. He asked too if any of our dad’s owned a business (I raised my hand and said that my mother owned a business. …She did not). No class Presidents were girls at my high school and my political socialization to that point was all Reagan and Bush I.
And then, nationally, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Carol Moseley Brown, and Patty Murray won Senate seats as Democratic women immediately following the horrific Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearing. It felt hopeful — that government and the electorate could embrace women like I wanted to be.
That’s how I’ll remember Dianne Feinstein. She made me feel like politics was for girls like me. The “too loud” girls. The “too opinionated” girls. The girls who didn’t make ourselves small. The girls high school boys found just too much.
Thank you Senator Feinstein.