Born in 1949, Elizabeth Warren grew up in a middle- class Oklahoma City family with three older brothers. At age 13, young Elizabeth started waiting tables to help her parents out after her father had a heart attack. A star member of her high school debate team, she won the title of “Oklahoma’s top high school debater.” This took her to George Washington University on a debate scholarship, but two years later she left to marry Jim Warren, her high school sweetheart. The couple moved to Texas when he found a job as an engineer at NASA, and Elizabeth graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 with a degree in speech pathology and audiology. She taught disabled children at a Texas school for a year before again relocating for her husband’s work, this time to New Jersey.
After the arrival of daughter Amelia, Elizabeth enrolled at Rutgers School of Law–Newark when her daughter turned two. Shortly before receiving her J.D. in 1976, she became pregnant with their second child. After passing the bar, Elizabeth worked from home, specializing in real estate closings and wills in her new law practice. They divorced in 1978; Elizabeth later remarried but kept her surname (under which she was practicing law at that time).
Warren lectured at Rutgers School of Law–Newark for a couple of years, then moved to the University of Houston Law Center where she became the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in 1980. In 1987 she became a fulltime professor at U. Penn’s law school, where she obtained an endowed chair in 1990. She became the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 1995; by 2011, she was the only tenured professor of law there who had gone to law school at a public university in the U.S. Warren assumed an advisory role at the National Bankruptcy Review Commission in 1995, and with others worked to oppose proposed laws which would severely limit consumers’ rights to file for bankruptcy, efforts which in the end did not prove successful. From 2006-2010, she was on the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion. Warren is also a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference, an independent group which advises Congress on bankruptcy law. Her work in academia and as an advocate spurred the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011, the year that she declared her intention to seek nomination as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2012; she won the nomination and the election, and became the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.
While campaigning, Warren made a speech at Andover that went viral; she replied to a charge that asking the rich to pay more taxes is “class warfare” by pointing out that no one becomes wealthy in the U.S. without the benefit of infrastructure funded by the taxpayers: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. …You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work that the rest of us paid for. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay it forward for the next kid who comes along.”
This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media
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