Will the real Elizabeth Warren history please stand up?
On the 2020 presidential trail Warren has made it a habit to claim she was fired from her job teaching special needs children because she was pregnant. At a townhall event she claimed, “By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days. Wish me luck and hire someone else for the job.”
As recently as this week Warren tweeted:
When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience millions of women will recognize. By June I was visibly pregnant—and the principal told me the job I'd already been promised for the next year would go to someone else.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 8, 2019
This was 1971, years before Congress outlawed pregnancy discrimination—but we know it still happens in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We can fight back by telling our stories. I tell mine on the campaign trail, and I hope to hear yours.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 8, 2019
Warren’s story started to unravel this week, when The Washington Free Beacon reported:
The Riverdale Board of Education approved a second-year teaching contract for a young Elizabeth Warren, documents show, contradicting the Democratic presidential candidate’s repeated claims that she was asked not to return to teaching after a single year because she was “visibly pregnant.” Minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a “2nd year” contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was “accepted with regret.”
Additionally, in 2007, in an interview with Harry Kreisler for the program “Conversations with History,” Warren never mentioned pregnancy discrimination causing her to be fired, and only told Kreisler that she didn’t have the courses necessary to keep the job fired, as The Washington Examiner noted. She stated:
I was married at 19 and then graduated from college [at the University of Houston], actually, after I’d married. And my first year post-graduation, I worked — it was in a public school system, but I worked with the children with disabilities. And I did that for a year, and then that summer, I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate,” it was called. And I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” And I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, “What am I going to do?” And my husband’s view of it was, “Stay home. We have children. We’ll have more children. You’ll love this.” And I was very restless about it. So I went back home to Oklahoma, by this point we were living in New Jersey because of his job, I went back home to Oklahoma for Christmas and saw a bunch of the boys that I’d been in high school debate with and they’d all gone on to law school. And they said, “You should go to law school. You’ll love it.”
As Mediaite points out, “Some of Warren’s defenders have surmised that she may not have felt comfortable discussing the subject in 2007, but feels comfortable doing so now, a premise that Warren herself reinforced in a statement about the controversy, writing, ‘After becoming a public figure I opened up more about different pieces in my life and this was one of them.’”
But Mediaite also found a 2011 interview in which Warren seemed perfectly comfortable mentioning pregnancy discrimination but still never mentioned being fired because of it. She stated to Rutgers Law Professor Paul Tractenberg,“I was married at 19 to a boy I had dated since my freshman year in high school. I had a baby, he was transferred to New Jersey, I was going to be a public school teacher and, a whole series of quick events, and I had been a high school debater, and the boys in high school debate back in Oklahoma had said ‘You should think about law school.’ And so I read up, found out there was a law school in Newark, drove in, looked around and thought ‘I could give it a try.’”
Warren told Tractenberg, “I graduated from law school 9 months pregnant, and Amy’s getting a little bigger at that point, and I thought I’d stepped off the train. You know, hard enough to get a job for a woman then, I was about to have a baby and nobody was interested in me. And with that law degree from Rutgers, I hung out a shingle.”
Mediaite also noted that in her 2014 book, “A Fighting Chance,” Warren recounted the history of her going to law school but somehow elided the part about encouragement from her debate team, writing:
My first choice was to go back to teaching, but I never even asked Jim. I knew he would say that a demanding full-time job was out of the question. So somewhere between diapers and breast-feeding, I hatched the idea of going to school. At first Jim resisted, but finally he agreed. School would be okay.
Suddenly the world opened up. It was kid-in-the-candy-store time. At first I thought about graduate school in speech pathology. I also got the applications for engineering school. And then I thought of law school. I knew next to nothing about being a lawyer, but on television lawyers were always fighting to defend good people who needed help.