If you enjoyed listening to Elizabeth Warren during the 2019/20 Presidential debates or if you applauded her on the campaign trail, you will love this book.  It’s one very long campaign speech.  In six chapters she entertains readers with stories of her youth, her family, her dog, her plans, her policy proposals, and a few insights.

 

You don’t learn a lot about her life.  For example, in the chapter on being “A Mother” she describes being fired from her job as a third-grade teacher when the principle finds out she’s pregnant.  The rest of the chapter is on the importance of child care and how to pay for it.  (Solution: The Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act, which Warren introduced into Congress in 2019).

 

In the next chapter, on being “A Teacher” she talks about teaching at Harvard Law School.  We never learn how she got from one to the other. We do learn a bit about her teaching style and her students, as well as the need for more federal money for education – at all levels. (Solution: a two-cent tax on all wealth over 50 million dollars.  That’s campaign-speak for a two-percent tax per year.  How you determine total wealth of people who already hire experts to game the tax system is a little unclear).

 

If we didn’t already know that “I have a plan for that,” we certainly find out in the chapter on being “A Planner.”  But we find out more about her birth family, where her father was her “plan partner” and her brother was a conservative Republican who had a long career in the Air Force.  If Warren ever planned to become to become a Harvard law professor or a progressive Democratic Senator, she doesn’t tell us here, or later in the book.

 

She shifts into describing her Presidential campaign in “A Fighter.”  There were lots of fights.  One of her favorite targets was former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  This leads to a discussion of how “money is choking our democracy.”  If she were running the world, billionaires like Bloomberg would not be able to use their own money to finance their campaigns.  Warren favors lots of small donations.   Instead of spending precious time asking the wealthy for donations, she met lots of ordinary people in her “selfie lines.” The people who waited hours to take a photo with her also donated money.

 

The chapter on being “A Learner” covers some of what she learned about why people go bankrupt.  Statistically, the largest group is women with children, regardless of race, education or other variables.  She did learn something about race from her studies but doesn’t tell us what it was.  Another lesson came from attacks she received for saying she had some Native American ancestry.

 

Even as her poll numbers rose on the Presidential campaign trail, she still heard people say “Was this really the time to take a chance on a woman? Wouldn’t a man be safer.” All those progressives who wanted desperately to beat Trump were thinking about how he had beat Hillary (but not all those men in the Republican primaries).  It wasn’t just progressives.  The Democratic voters in the Massachusetts primary only gave her third place among the Democratic candidates, whereas all the voters had elected her to the Senate twice.  

 

As her final story, Warren writes about a little girl she met on the selfie line in St. Paul Minnesota, in 2019.  That girl told her “You better win...  I’ve been waiting for a girl president since.... since... since kindergarten.”  

 

Warren didn’t make the final round, but after she withdrew in March 2020, someone chalked a message on her sidewalk.  It said:

 

                                                                                  PERSIST

 

ElizabethForMA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Warren speaking at St. Patrick's Day breakfast in Boston's South Boston neighborhood, March 17, 2018

 

©2021 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com