Our Elizabeth Warren biography is now live.
The Democrat is the newly-elected junior senator from Massachusetts, having just defeated incumbent Scott Brown for the job. The seat had been held by Democratic icon Ted Kennedy from 1962 through his death in 2009.
Perhaps Kennedy’s long run makes it a little less surprising that Elizabeth Warren is the first woman senator ever from Massachusetts.
Warren was investigating consumer rights and bankruptcy long before the 2008 crash. Her first book on the topic came out in 1989: As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America. She was a law professor at Penn at the time, a few years before she moved on up to Harvard Law School.
Elizabeth Warren summed up her consumer-rights philosophy on banks and credit card companies in 2009:
We cannot have a country whose principal business model for certain large financial institutions is tricking and trapping their customers. That can’t be right.
She’s also a strong advocate of female common sense:
Women tend to vote the economic interests of their families and to speak out on family economic issues. For men, there’s often much more focus on the idea of personal failure: “If I’m not winning this great economic game, it must be my fault.”Women are more likely to look around and say, “No, the whole system is broken.” I don’t want to overstate the gender difference. But women are more sensitized to the way that larger issues affect their pocketbooks, like pay equality or cost of living changes.
