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There have been 57 women serve in the Senate in the history of the United States. The first female in the Senate, Rebecca Latimer Felton, took her oath on November 21, 1922 in the state of Georgia after filling the vacancy left when the previous senator, Thomas E. Watson, died. Rebecca wasn’t technically voted in, but she led the way and since then women have continued to fill Senate seats across the county.
Following the 2018 elections, we were blessed with 26 women voted to serve in the Senate, the most we have seen in history. It is major and we can only hope to see more come this November. Below you will find the women serving who have defied the odds and represented their communities and their families as single mothers
Dianne and Jack Berman eloped in 1956 when she was twenty-three. Dianne’s middle sister Yvonne Banks described the marriage as her “way out.” The two had a daughter, Katherine, in 1957 and were divorced when she was nine months old.
After living as a single mother for a year and a half, she met Bertram Feinstein whom she married in 1962. He was so enamoured with Dianne he apparently asked her to marry him over coffee, but she refused his proposal for another year. After they were married, Feinstein supported Dianne’s political dreams until his passing from colon cancer in 1978.
Dianne has one granddaughter, Eileen Feinstein Mariano.
Many people didn’t know much about Elizabeth Warren in 2014 when A Fighting Chance was released. She was Senator of Massachusetts by then and up for re-election in 2018, but it was her intimate revelations that got voters to view her in a different light. In her book, Warren opened up about being a single mother for the first time.
According to her memoir, Warren first attended college on scholarship before dropping out at age nineteen to marry her high school boyfriend Jim Warren. She eventually moved to New Jersey and finished school before becoming a special needs teacher and having her daughter, Amelia, at the age of twenty-one. Her dreams of going to law school were almost crushed by her need for child care (she potty trained her daughter in five days) and by the end of her third year at Rutgers Law School was expecting her son, Alex.
She divorced in 1978 and struggled after graduating to get a job at a law firm. When she was finally able to get a job teaching law, child care was again a struggle and she almost quit. It was with the help of her Aunt Bee, who moved from Oklahoma, that Warren was able to make it through tough times. “I’m a United States Senator today in part because my Aunt Bee rescued me on that Thursday in 1979. Without child care, I was a goner. And I know how lucky I was because so many working moms don’t have an Aunt Bee who can fly in and help out,” Warren shared at the National Women’s Law Center 45th Anniversary Gala.
Warren is now grandmother to three thanks to her daughter Amelia.
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