Dianne Feinstein

née Dianne Emiel Goldman (born 1933)

“Are you ready to make history?”

Years in political office: 1970–present

Position: US senator from California, 1992–present; mayor of San Francisco, 1978–1988; member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 1970–1978

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: San Francisco, California

Top causes: gun control, LGBTQ rights, and labor issues

Life Story

Dianne Feinstein was born to a Russian Orthodox surgeon dad and fashion model mom in San Francisco. Her grandparents were immigrants from Poland and Russia. Feinstein went to Stanford University and got a history degree before she entered San Francisco politics. She was elected to the town’s board of supervisors in 1969 and within nine years had become its first woman president.

Tragedy struck on November 27, 1978, when a conservative supervisor walked into city hall and shot and killed San Francisco mayor George Moscone and Feinstein’s fellow supervisor Harvey Milk—one of the country’s first openly gay politicians elected to public office. The killer, who Feinstein counted as a friend, had recently resigned from his position on the board. That morning Feinstein was the first to discover Moscone, and it fell to her to try, in vain, to staunch his bullet wounds.

As board president, she was next in command, and on the day of the killings, she was sworn in as the first woman mayor of her hometown. The city was devastated, but with her stick-with-it, middle-of-the-road tendencies, Feinstein was able to pull San Francisco through what could have been a time of absolute fracture. She recalls showing up on the scene of every fire in town hoping to portray strength, especially to those who doubted that a woman was fit for the mayor’s office. Feinstein was mayor for ten years, carrying out a vital renovation of the city’s historic cable car system and hosting the 1984 National Democratic Convention.

In 1991 President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to associate Supreme Court justice. A law professor, Anita Hill, claimed that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she had served as his attorney-adviser. The Senate Judicial Committee interviewed Hill about her allegations. Feinstein remembers seeing two hundred people gathered around the TV at Heathrow International Airport, watching Hill’s testimony and subsequent berating by an all-male panel of senators.

“It was a silent crowd, but it was a big crowd, and that said something,” Feinstein remembers. The message she received was that despite her own successes in challenging gender norms, in many ways society still did not take women’s concerns seriously. “It moved me to action, yes, and the action was to run [for office],” she said.

She was not the only one who heeded the call to campaign for a higher office. Politically, 1992 is remembered in the United States as the Year of the Woman because a record-breaking four were elected to the US Senate. That may not sound like a lot, but before those elections, only two women served as senators! The phrase “Year of the Woman” was used again in 2018 when fifteen women were elected to the Senate, and 102 made it to the House. Again, a judge’s alleged sexual misconduct had set the stage. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed a month before the country’s fall elections, despite accusations of sexual assault by several women.

What’s on Her Agenda

DiFi is the longest-serving woman senator, and the pragmatic politician continues to crush her opposition during reelection campaigns. Her peers know her as a moderate willing to work across the aisle on issues, though those centrist tendencies have brought her under fire at times, notably from left-wing groups in her California constituency who would rather she prioritize progressive initiatives than compromise with conservatives.

Constituency

A group of voters, usually geographically based, who elect a politician to office

The US Senate is built around rewarding seniority with power, and Feinstein, as its oldest member, illustrates the influence that long-serving senators can wield when they play their cards correctly. During her first year in the Senate, she became one of the first two women on the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose members she had watched belittle Anita Hill. Decades later, Feinstein became the committee’s ranking member and, in 2009, its first woman chair.

As she’s gotten older, many of her views have shifted. Though she supported capital punishment early in her career, Feinstein officially declared herself in opposition to the death penalty in 2018. At the time, she was running a tighter-than-usual reelection campaign against a Southern California progressive (she still wound up getting four times as many votes as him in the primaries). “It became crystal clear to me that the risk of unequal application [of the death penalty] is high, and its effect on deterrence is low,” she explained.

Other crusades have been more consistent. The horror of the 1978 Milk and Moscone killings never left Feinstein, and she has been one of the country’s staunchest advocates for gun control for decades. She wrote successful pieces of 1994 legislation limiting the sale and possession of assault weapons, and encouraged a zero-tolerance firearm policy on school campuses. In 2019 she cosponsored legislation that would further curtail high-capacity ammunition weapons. “If we’re going to put a stop to mass shootings and protect our children, we need to get these weapons of war off our streets,” she said.

Awesome Achievements

Quotables

“What I do is I really try to bring people together, try to work out problems.”

“Basically, my life is government.”

“We women have been saying it for a long time; if we were in power, we would do it differently.”