Honoring Their Legacy in Government
During March, we like to honor Women’s History by writing about notable women who have left their mark on society. This year we’re remembering three women trailblazers whom we lost last year.
Patricia Schroeder, a Harvard-trained lawyer, was a 32-year-old mother of two when she was first elected to Congress from Colorado in 1972, where she ultimately served 12 terms. She arrived in congress during a time when there were only 14 women in the House of Representatives, and was an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, family matters and military policy.
She co-chaired the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, a bipartisan group of lawmakers devoted to advancing legislation on reproductive rights, women’s equity, and workplace flexibility for parents. We can only wonder what she was thinking about these issues at the time of her death. Her legislative issues involvement included the National Child Protection Act which established criminal background checks for child-care providers, the Violence Against Women Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
Schroeder was the first woman to serve on the House Armed Services Committee, where she often questioned the military brass about their spending habits. She believed she helped to create “a political climate of meaningful reform.”
Dianne Feinstein entered the national spotlight in November 1978 amid the tragic shooting deaths of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. She became one of the first female mayors of a major U.S. city, where she served for nine years guiding San Francisco with compassion, dignity, and skill, and responding early and effectively to the AIDS epidemic.
In 1992, she and four other women entered the U. S. Senate, joining only two other female senators.
A determined supporter of the assault weapons ban signed into law in 1994 by President Clinton, she responded to a more senior senator who questioned her experience on gun issues by reminding him that she had become mayor of San Francisco as a result of a double assassination. “I know something about what firearms can do.”
Feinstein was the first woman to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee and served on the Senate Judiciary Committee. President Biden, who recruited her to the Senate Judiciary Committee, called her a pioneering American.
Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female U.S. Supreme Court justice, was an independent thinker on a court often ideologically divided, making her the pivotal vote in numerous closely contested cases and one of the most powerful women of her era. Yet, she understood that self-restraint and civility would make her more, not less, powerful.
In 1945, at the age of 15, she witnessed an enormous ball of fire in the distance from her family’s southeastern Arizona Ranch that stretched to southwestern New Mexico. That dark cloud was the first atomic bomb test in Alamogordo, N.M.
Though appointed as a conservative, Justice O’Connor was more of a centrist on the Court. She rejected the idea of eliminating the right to abortion, wrote an opinion justifying race-conscious admissions in law schools, supported traditional boundaries between church and state, and had little tolerance for state laws that trampled on equality. Later in life she privately lamented to a friend, “Everything I stood for is being undone.”
Each of these women left a strong legacy and lived to see women’s representation grow in these institutions. Today women make up 29% of the House of Representatives, 25% of the Senate, and almost half of the Supreme Court.