Barbara Boxer

Barbara Boxer (born November 11, 1940, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American politician whose ardent support for myriad progressive causes, including environmentalism and reproductive rights, while representing California as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives (1983–93) and Senate (1993–2017) contributed to her reputation as one of Congress’s most stalwart liberal voices.

Levy was born to a Jewish couple and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Brooklyn College, where she received a B.A. in economics in 1962; she married Stewart Boxer the same year. After graduation Barbara looked for work as a stockbroker but encountered resistance from potential employers because she was a woman; only after negotiating the stockbrokers’ exam on her own was she able to secure a job on Wall Street. In 1965 the Boxers moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where Barbara raised their two children.

While living in Brooklyn, she had organized her apartment complex against an obstinate landlord, and in California the burgeoning movement in protest of the Vietnam War politicized her further. Beginning in the late 1960s, she helped lead several grassroots initiatives in Marin county, including an independent program to assist high-school dropouts that was later co-opted by the local school system.

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After mounting an unsuccessful campaign for the Marin County Board of Supervisors in 1972, Boxer worked for a local newspaper for two years and then as an aide to Democratic U.S. Rep. John Burton. In 1976 she ran again for the county board, and she won, eventually serving as its first woman president. When Burton chose to retire from Congress, Boxer was elected to his seat, and in 1983 she began serving the first of five successive terms in the House. In Congress Boxer quickly gained prominence for her tenacity, memorably denouncing excessive military spending by publicizing the Pentagon’s purchase of a $7,622 coffee pot. She also advanced a number of legislative measures pertaining to women’s rights, and in 1991, during the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee (later Justice) Clarence Thomas, she led a march on the Senate in support of law professor Anita Hill, who had accused Thomas of sexual harassment.

Galvanized by the Thomas imbroglio, which had highlighted the paucity of female representation in Congress’s upper house—there were only two women senators at the time, and neither served on the judiciary committee that interviewed Hill—Boxer launched a senatorial bid. Her defeat of conservative commentator Bruce Herschensohn in the 1992 general election, along with victories in other races, brought the number of women senators to six. In the Senate Boxer maintained her fiercely liberal credentials, advocating for an array of environmental reforms and social programs and, in 2002, voting against the use of force in Iraq. In 2005 she became the Senate Democrats’ chief deputy whip and later chaired the Senate committee on the environment and public works, as well as the ethics committee. Though Boxer’s detractors claimed that her staunch views presented a barrier to bipartisanship, in 2004 she was reelected with nearly seven million votes, more than any U.S. senatorial candidate in history. In her 2010 reelection campaign, Boxer overcame a formidable challenge from Republican candidate Carly Fiorina to win the general election.

Boxer later lent her support to such notable legislation as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010). She also cosponsored a bill to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), a policy concerning the service of homosexuals in the U.S. military; DADT ended in 2011. In 2015 Boxer announced that she would not seek reelection the following year. During the 2016 presidential race, she was a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost to Donald Trump, though she won the popular vote. Shortly before leaving office in 2017, Boxer introduced legislation to abolish the electoral college.

Boxer cowrote (with Mary-Rose Hayes) the novels A Time to Run (2005) and Blind Trust (2009). Her memoir, The Art of Tough: Fearlessly Facing Politics and Life, was published in 2016.

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