Jeanne Shaheen
née Cynthia Jeanne Bowers (born 1947)
“I think women are often better about worrying less about who takes credit for things and more about how do we get something done.”
Years in political office: 1992–present
Position: senior US senator from New Hampshire, 2009–present; former governor of New Hampshire, 1997–2003; former New Hampshire state senator, 1992–1996
Party affiliation: Democrat
Hometown: Saint Charles, Missouri
Top causes: health-care reform, reproductive rights, equal pay for women, and education
Life Story
Shaheen was born on January 28, 1947, to a suburban church secretary mother and a father who managed a shoe factory. She attended Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and got married one year before receiving her master’s degree in political science from the University of Mississippi. Shaheen remembers that watching TV coverage of the student protests against the Vietnam War inspired her to consider her own politics. She started teaching at a Mississippi high school, and then she opened a jewelry business with her husband, Bill Shaheen, with whom she has three kids and seven grandkids.
She became active in elections through work for other candidates. The first politician Shaheen put her weight behind was Jimmy Carter, working on his successful presidential campaign in 1976. She was also Gary Hart’s New Hampshire campaign manager in 1984.
In her electoral politics debut, Shaheen served four years on the senate of the Granite State (that’s New Hampshire’s nickname) before she became state governor. She did important work on energy efficiency programs to make New Hampshire families and businesses more environmentally friendly. She served two terms before running for the US Senate. Here’s where her career hit a rare snag: she was defeated by her Republican opponent John Sununu. Later, Republican consultants confessed to jamming the phone lines at Shaheen’s campaign office, possibly costing her the election. Funny business or not, the loss stuck and it stung.
Left without an elected position, she worked on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and as the director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. But she wasn’t ready to give up on her dream of working in the Senate. “I remember wondering how I would respond to my grandchildren if I decided not to try and run for the Senate for a second time,” she says. Convinced that her country needed her, she challenged Sununu again for the Senate seat—and won.
What’s on Her Agenda
Want peace? Get women involved, says Shaheen. The sole representative of her gender on the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, Shaheen has pushed for women to be at the forefront in global peacemaking processes, such as those between the United States and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2017 she spearheaded the passage of the Women, Peace, and Security Act, which requires that the United States seek women’s voices in international efforts toward conflict resolution.
Her other career highlights include working to eliminate tax cuts to industries that are harming our country’s environmental future, and bolstering relations between the US and the important international alliance NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). She is also one of the advocates in the long-standing fight to get civil rights leader Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill. She managed to get a commitment from the Obama-era Treasury Department, but the Trump administration has yet to make the shift.
As a long-standing politician, Shaheen is able to reevaluate her positions over time. Though she was against marriage equality as governor of New Hampshire, she reconsidered her position and sponsored legislation in 2009 that would have made same-sex unions legal across the country. (Such unions weren’t actually legalized until 2015, with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges verdict.) She also voted in favor of throwing out the homophobic Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell military policy.
One of Shaheen’s top priorities is defending reproductive rights. In 2019 a wave of state-level legislation was passed that severely restricted access to abortions. She delivered remarks on the Senate floor admonishing the legislators who had passed the laws, calling the bills “draconian” and describing them as part of a national plan to dial back rights that had been won with the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.
Awesome Achievements
- Shaheen was the first woman elected governor of New Hampshire.
- Out of the twenty-one senators who sit on the committee on foreign relations, Shaheen is the only woman. (The lack of parity is not awesome, but it’s nice that she’s up there representing.)
- One of Obama’s first acts as president was to sign into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which Shaheen cosponsored. It gave women more tools in the fight against bosses who pay them less than men.
- She can trace her lineage back to Pocahontas, the Powhatan woman best known for her work as a go-between for the colonists and her tribe.
Quotables
“Moments of sympathy are just not enough. This Senate, this Congress, needs to pass common sense gun safety legislation supported by nine out of ten Americans.”
“If we continued at the same rate that we had been electing women to Congress, it will take us one hundred years to reach parity. So I’m not willing to wait that long.”
“I think it’s important to remind people that if half the population doesn’t have the same access to opportunities, everybody is worse for that.”
“Democracy only works as well as those who participate, and if young people are turned off, then it’s not going to be good for the next generation.”