Dianne Feinstein defied the odds in a male-dominated field

In 1969, soon after Dianne Feinstein first made history, a San Francisco newspaper published a bemused feature on her marriage. Headlined “The Big Man in Dianne’s Life,” it centered on her husband, Bert Feinstein, a prominent local surgeon, and began:

“When Mama is in politics, there’s many an unkind query heard about who wears the pants in the family. Such is the fearsome image of a lady politico.”

The fearsome Mrs. Feinstein had recently shocked the town, finishing first in a crowded race for the Board of Supervisors. She was the first woman elected to the city’s legislative body in a half-century — and only the second ever. Capturing the top vote total positioned her to become board president, San Francisco’s second-most influential municipal office after mayor.

For the newspaper, this raised a crucial question:

“Did Dr. Feinstein feel humbled or intimidated now that the little lady was occupying the limelight?”

Oy.

This anachronistic specimen of cringeworthy sexism (and journalistic fatuity) reads today as an artifact of cultural anthropology, a reminder of the mores that Feinstein (and her then-husband, who declared himself neither humbled nor intimidated) confronted as she began her pioneering career.

Feinstein has died at the age of 90. In political time, her demise seems far more than the end of a mere era — more like the passing of an eon.

As politician, policymaker and uncommonly private public figure, Feinstein for six decades modeled attitudes, behavior and values that have become increasingly rare. Reliably favoring civility over churlishness, she preferred independent judgment to ideology, pragmatism to partisanship, problem-solving to power-seeking.

“Dianne wasn’t in politics, she was in government,” former Democratic congressman John Burton, her San Francisco contemporary, once said of her, with faint disdain.

Many tributes for California’s longest-serving U.S. senator will no doubt highlight Washington achievements. But any assessment of her historical influence begins with the generations of women who followed her into national and state politics, passing through doorways she was the first to breach: women such as Vice President Harris, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and former senator Barbara Boxer, to name three from Feinstein’s home area alone.

Among the milestones and high-profile achievements, it’s easy to overlook the long years when Feinstein paid her dues in relative obscurity. From the early 1960s until she became mayor, she persisted through recurring defeats, private anguish and countless petty slights — the prologue to a remarkable career shaped by determination to defy the odds in a field perpetually dominated by men.

It is commonplace for politicians to set forth self-regarding narratives of tribulation overcome, but Feinstein eschewed personal revelation and confession — although she had plenty of authentic material for both. Though raised in privilege, she and her two sisters were physically and emotionally abused by their mentally ill, alcoholic mother. The family’s painful secrets were not discussed outside their fashionable Presidio Terrace home; behind closed doors, Dianne bore the brunt of her mother’s eruptions and struggled, as the eldest, to protect her siblings.

In the early 1960s, she ended a disastrous first marriage; as a divorced single mother, when both still carried a whiff of social scandal, she gained a foothold in politics via an appointment to the California Women’s Board of Terms and Parole. For 10 days every month, for nearly five years, she left her little girl with a babysitter to travel to the women’s state prison at Chino. During her term, the board there adjudicated nearly 5,000 cases of female prisoners — abortionists, arsonists and burglars, murderers, swindlers and thieves — plunging Feinstein into the core of the criminal justice system.