Can it be said that it all started on the night of Nov. 3, 1992? That’s when Barbara Boxer, who’d served on the Marin County Board of Supervisors from 1978 to 1982 — and was its first female president — was elected a U.S. Senator from California. Re-elected on that night was Dianne Feinstein, who had previously served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — and in 1970 was its first female president. Then in 1978, following the assassination of George Moscone, Feinstein was named mayor of San Francisco, the first female to ever hold that office. After losing a race to become California’s first female governor, in a special election early in 1992, Feinstein was elected to become California’s first female U.S. senator. And in the above Marin Independent Journal photo both Feinstein and Boxer appear, as they became the first pair of female senators representing any state at the same time in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, a Bay Area political novice named Nancy Pelosi had been rising through the ranks of Democratic politics, and in 1987 she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Her rise continued, and in 2001 she was elected House minority whip and, in 2002, House minority leader: becoming the first woman in either party to hold these posts in either chamber of the U.S. Congress.
Then in 2006, to no one’s surprise, Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House, U.S. history’s first female to hold that office and, as a result, she became second in the presidential line of succession; the first female to ever attain that ranking along with being the highest ranking female in U.S. history. Speaker Pelosi held such lofty status until 2024; that’s when another Bay Area female politician, Oakland-born Kamala Harris, displaced Pelosi by being elected not only the nation’s first female vice president, which is first in the presidential line of succession, but also becoming the first African American and first Asian American vice president and the highest ranking female official in U.S. history. And wouldn’t you know that prior to serving as America’s first female vice president, Harris had been elected the first female and first African American attorney general in California’s history.
Now Harris is the Democratic candidate for president with polls showing she has a 50/50 chance of becoming the first woman president of the United States of America. So think about it; did that impressive progression of firsts attained by Bay Area female politicians start in the early 1980s when Barbara Boxer was elected the first female president of the Marin County Board of Supervisors?
