The publisher distributed copies of Pelosi by Molly Ball to members of a feminist group on Goodreads who are discussing it this month. I'm late to the discussion though I read the book early because my computer died in late July and I only got a new one on August 3rd. At that point I had to work on a blog tour review first, and put writing about Pelosi aside. Better late with this review than never. I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Net Galley.
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When someone writes a political biography, particularly in these partisan times, we need to be wary of bias. I feel that Molly Ball is inclined to portray Nancy Pelosi in a positive light, though she doesn't omit controversies and discusses the reasons why Pelosi has opponents among progressives.
As a Bay Area resident, I knew that the very progressive San Francisco Bay Guardian has always endorsed a primary opponent of Nancy Pelosi every time she has run, but I didn't know why. I learned from Ball's biography that Pelosi had made certain that a former military base in San Francisco become a park rather than allowing it to be converted into public housing. San Francisco community activists and San Francisco politicians were all opposed to Pelosi's decision at the time. In retrospect, I feel that this was a serious error on Pelosi's part. It didn't do any lasting damage to Pelosi's career, but I think it did do lasting damage to San Francisco's racial and economic diversity.
I was interested in Ball's claim that the approval of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice despite the accusation of sexual harassment leveled by Anita Hill, led to the election of a record number of women in 1992. This wasn't something that I noticed at the time. I suspected that the improvement in women's representation was much more modest than what occurred in 2018. So I examined the Congressional election results for 1992 on Wikipedia. I found four new woman Senators including both California Senators. California became the first state to be represented in the Senate by two women. This was the year that Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer first became Senators. I also counted 22 new woman members of the House of Representatives. These are indeed noteworthy results even though that record was smashed in 2018, the election soon after Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice under similar circumstances.
The phrase about women having a "seat at the table" in the title of this review comes from a passage in Pelosi's memoir, Know Your Power which Ball quotes in her end notes. Pelosi tells us in that memoir that she envisioned suffragettes and others in American history who had worked for the cause of women saying about her becoming the Speaker of the House that "At last we have a seat at the table."
There is no doubt in my mind that Pelosi has had a feminist impact. I didn't really need to read Ball's biography to be persuaded on that point. What surprised me in this book was Pelosi's long period of hesitation about running for office. It seems to me that Nancy Pelosi had to grow into the feminist role that she eventually played. Looking back on how much Pelosi has accomplished for women through the pages of Molly Ball's biography felt very worthwhile to me. It will be a strong candidate for the best biography I read in 2020.
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