In This Issue:

Books

One pleasure of A Fighting Chance and Off the Sidelines lies in the telling of each woman's path to the United States Senate.  Warren announced her plan to apply to law school only to be met with the critical response of her mother: "Stay at home, have more children, and do not become one of those crazy women libbers." Gillibrand relates how a male senator walked up to her after she had succeeded in losing weight gained in pregnancy and said "Don't lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby." 

Reviewed by Jill Norgren

Off the Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change the World

By Kirsten Gillibrand; c. 2014

Foreward by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Published by Ballantine Books. Hardcover; ebook; audiobook; 194 pp.

and

A Fighting Chance

By Elizabeth Warren

Published by Macmillan. Hardcover; ebook; 384 pp.

Political candidate bios are a genre onto themselves, an honorable act among politicians with shape shifting aspirations. They are, first and foremost, advertisements that articulate personal values, policy positions, and the positive side of politicos’ rough and tumble partisan competition. In selling themselves, these politicians lower the wall of privacy surrounding their personal lives and share professional stories not yet in the hands of journalists and political pundits. They search for ways to promote themselves as real folks capable of forward-looking and intelligent policy decisions. The ideal candidate-book informs in an upbeat, engaging manner, sometimes with a soupçon of titillating insider gossip.  Congressman Paul Ryan's The Way Forward has just been published as have United States senators Kirsten Gillibrand's Off the Sidelines and Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance.

In the history of our Republic forty-four women have served in the United States Senate. Georgia activist Rebecca Latimer Felton broke the previous all-male barrier with her appointment in 1922. She served one day. A decade later Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas filled the vacancy caused by the death of her husband, going on to win election, and re-election, on her own.

Kirsten Gillibrand, junior senator from New York State, and Elizabeth Warren, senior senator representing Massachusetts, are two of twenty women currently members of the US Senate. Warren, a Democrat who has taken on corporate America, remains the choice for US president of progressives who perceive Hillary Clinton as a centrist. Gillibrand, a Democrat who sought out and is mentored by Hillary Clinton, has, like Warren, sponsored major legislative proposals, seldom fails to attract media attention, and surely has congressional leadership or higher office aspirations.  These are women to admire — active, accomplished, and deeply committed to public service.

Warren and Gillibrand are lawyers. They are married, Warren twice, and each has two children. Warren, born into working class circumstances in 1949 in Oklahoma, attended George Washington University on a full debate scholarship. She married at the age of nineteen and had two children while in her twenties.  Gillibrand, born in 1966 in Albany, New York, took honors while at Dartmouth, shipped off to China for a semester to learn Mandarin, attended law school, and remained single until she was thirty-five. She first son was born two years later. She delivered her second son in 2008 while serving as a member of the US House of Representatives.

Elizabeth Warren has described her young self as "contrary." Nearly a generation older than Gillibrand, she writes convincingly about her search for a true calling. She trained as a speech pathologist but, during a visit home, socialized with old debate team guy-friends, now lawyers, who told the young mother that she ought to be a member of their profession. Seizing upon the idea of law as a means of serving others, Warren announced her plan to apply to law school only to be met with the critical response of her mother: "Stay at home, have more children, and do not become one of those crazy women libbers."

The women of Gillibrand's family thought otherwise. Both her grandmother, Polly Noonan, a leader of the Albany, N.Y. Democratic Women's Club, and her mother, a lawyer, had careers, were active in their communities, and raised families. Gillibrand honors these women, writing that they created her "frame of reference for women and work."

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