March 1, 2022 • 29 mins
This week, Chelsea is sitting down with Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin to look at women in public office – what it means to be the first, the progress we’ve made toward equality, and what needs to happen next.
When Tammy Baldwin was elected to the House in 1998, she became Wisconsin’s first female member of Congress and the first openly LGBTQ person to run for and win a Congressional seat. In 2012, she became the state’s first female Senator and the first openly LGBTQ member of the Senate. And in 2018, she was re-elected with more than 55% of the vote. Throughout her career, she has championed reforms in healthcare—including mental health—infrastructure, manufacturing, and education. And she’s proved to little girls and boys alike that women and members of the LGBTQ community more than belong at every level of government.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton. And this season on in fact,
we're celebrating Women's History Month. I'll be talking with trailblazing
women across a variety of industries about their personal journeys,
the progress women have made, and how far we still
(00:21):
have to go. Today. It's my great honor to be
discussing women in public service with someone who was accomplished
many firsts in her career, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin. It
can be easy to forget how recently women were barely
visible at the highest levels of our government. Just thirty
(00:42):
years ago was dubbed quote the Year of the Woman
for the record breaking number of women elected to Congress.
And how many was that? Twenty four representatives out of
four hundred and thirty five and four senators out of
a hundred, which brought the total number of women in
the Senate to seven. That was record breaking. Granted, we've
(01:05):
made some progress since then. Women now make up of
the House and nearly of the Senate. That's a far
cry from equal representation. Plus, seventeen states have never had
a woman senator, nineteen have never had a woman governor.
Many congressional districts have never been represented by a woman.
Many cities have never had a woman mayor, and out
(01:27):
of the forty five people who served as president, not
a single one has been a woman. Many voters still
have a hard time imagining a woman in public office,
and that's just one barrier women running for office space.
They're also explicit and implicit sexist attacks, and as multiple
studies have shown, the media cover women candidates differently than
(01:48):
their male counterparts, something we've certainly seen in my family,
and it's equally baneful when I see it happened to
anyone anywhere and when in office, women historically have been excluded,
sometimes officially, from the dinners, country clubs, and back rooms
where their male counterparts broker and execute power. And yet
(02:08):
record numbers of women are running for office at every level.
So while there are many glass ceilings yet to be broken,
I'm happy to say my guest today has shattered quite
a few. When Tammy Baldwin was elected to the House
in she became Wisconsin's first female member of Congress and
the first openly LGBTQ person to run for and win
(02:31):
a Congressional seat. Then she became the state's first female
Senator and the first openly lgbt Q member of the Senate.
She was re elected in with more than fifty of
the vote, a rarity and a state used to raise
her thin margins. Throughout her career, she's championed reforms in healthcare,
(02:51):
including mental health, and infrastructure, manufacturing, and education. And she's
proved little girls and little boys alike that women and
members of the LGBTQ community more than belong in every
level of government. Center but one, thank you for your
(03:13):
time today. I'm really excited for a conversation about women
in public service. And you're someone I've just so long
admired and so thankful to have you in conversation today.
It might just be a good place to start at
the beginning, and if you could share what drew you
to public service, and is this where you'd always imagined
(03:35):
you would wind up. I'll start with the second question
and the answer is no. But then I'll journey backwards
and and take you to how it did happen. I
think there's sort of two major motivating factors for me.
One was just a life experience. When I was nine,
I had a very serious childhood illness. I was raised
(03:57):
by my maternal grandparents, and I had to be hospitalized
for your listeners. I would describe it as similar to
spinal meningitis, but that wasn't the exact diagnosis. And so
I was in the hospital and then fully recovered, and
my grandmother visited me every day, and they would have
(04:18):
never dreamed of burdening me as a child with their
insurance or financial worries, but as family lare goes, their
family insurance didn't cover me because I wasn't a dependent.
I was a grandchild, not a child legally, And then
they weren't able to find insurance that would cover me
(04:39):
after I was fully recovered, and so I spent a
lot of my youth without insurance until I was actually
in college and could get into a group plan because
I was viewed as unensurable. Actuaries would look at my
serious illness and long term hospitalizations say we don't want
to touch her with a ten foot pole, and so that,
(05:00):
and then witnessing other health care struggles that other families
had really created a passion for wanting to change that.
I just felt what happened in our family's situation was
wrong and it needed to be changed. The other youthful
experience for me was more exposing myself to the idea
(05:21):
of elective office as a place where change could occur
and this sort of wrong could be right it if
you will. And so that was middle school student council,
I really believe it or not. So what role did
you have on your middle school student council? I was
(05:42):
on the student council and then the student government vice president,
and we took on all these projects that made me realize,
as a very young person that we could make a
difference collectively and individually. So it's trite, but I'll give
you a couple of examples. I think the college expression
for this is town gown issues. But we wondered how
(06:05):
the neighbors of our middle school experienced being neighbors to
a middle school, and so we surveyed them and what
did you find? Well, we found that the fact that
there was no muffler on the industrial arts or exchanger
really annoyed a woman whose house was adjacent to that.
We had another person who had a corner lot and
(06:27):
kids would cut the corner instead of sticking to the
sidewalk and damage her tulips, et cetera. There was one
area where houses backed up to a sidewalk that approached
the school, and some of the older middle schoolers would
smoke during recess. And so what did you do? Which
of these did you think merited your attention, and what
did you do to try to help your school? We
(06:48):
fixed all of it. You fixed all of it. So
we um lobbied the school board to say, we need
a muffler for this er exchanger. We then found some
fairly inexpens of knee high fencing to put at the
corner so you could still walk over it, but you'd
have to be making a big effort to trample over
(07:10):
the tulips, a conscious choice to be a tulip destroyer. Yeah,
And then we had a monitor who had a steep
decrease in the smoking activity, let's put it that way.
But in any event, then we invited everybody in the
neighborhood to come over for cookies and milk or something
after school one day and just sort of said we're
here and keep in communication. So that was one example,
(07:32):
and then the other one. Our city, Madison, had a
sister city relationship with Managua, Nicaragua, and I think during
my middle school years there was a natural disaster and
so we raised money for a school to be able
to replace damaged books and other things through a fundraising activity,
(07:56):
and then I remember getting thank you notes in Spanish
for um the students at the school, just expressing their
appreciation that children so far away cared and did something
and it felt good. And I never really occurred to
me as a middle schooler that I could do this
like as a career, but when I kind of figured
(08:18):
that out, it was just amazing. And yet, when you
were in middle school, Tammy, there weren't many women in
visible elected offices. I mean not not in Madison, but
not in most places. Were you aware of that as
a kid that, like, you may want to have this career,
(08:39):
but there weren't a lot of people that look like you.
I think I was very aware of that, but also
aware of some of those, at least local glass ceilings
being chattered. I remember one of the first, well two
of the first women to serve in the state legislature
in my area were considered pioneers, and boy did they
(09:04):
champion things that impacted women. So I was a little
bit aware of that. And I also will add that
I ended up after high school attending a women's college
Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where at that age every
leadership position on campus was helped by a woman. And
(09:24):
a strange fact about me, but I was a double
major in government and math. And at the time, nationally
one percent of math faculty were women, but at Smith College,
fifty of the math faculty were women. Not a butift
and so I think some of those experiences helped increase
(09:47):
confidence that I could do this job. And did you
have any women public servants, politicians as mentors who really
helped you decide to run for office for the first
time and then and towards you while you were in office. Yes,
my first job out of college my return to my
hometown of Madison, I did an internship at the Governor's
(10:09):
office with the governor's advisor on women's issues. And it
was at a time when the state was undertaking a
pay equity study of the state, because we already had
equal pay for equal work laws, but we didn't have
laws that helped close the gap when you're talking about
(10:31):
a female dominated profession, where within that profession there's going
to be equal pay for equal work, but compared to
a male dominated profession, there was going to be a
pay gap. So this would be in the mid nineteen eighties,
so you would have teachers and nurses who were usually
public employees, or meant not usually, but many of them were.
(10:54):
But then you would have in say the parks and recreation,
highway divisions, etcetera. Now there's a big pay gap between
those male and female dominated professions. But how do you
compare them to figure out what piece of that differential
is gender inequity? Yeah, and we figured out a methodology
(11:18):
to do it. That's where the being a math major helps.
You can look at, you know, what is the consequence
of making a mistake on the job. It's a nurse,
somebody might die. If it's a pilot, somebody might die
if it's making a mistake, and other professionals kind of
have a lot lower risks. You can look at how
many people do you supervise, what is the educational background
(11:40):
required in order to be certified? You know, to do
this so you can look at all these comparables and
figure out what remains that can only be explained by
gender inequities. So you did this work and you're like, oh,
I can use my math in government. Yeah. And then
at the same time, the city and the county were
(12:01):
beginning to look at their own workforces figuring out the
same things. And I started monitoring their meetings as they
were having these debates on pay equity, which is a
ridiculously nerdy thing to do. I didn't have cable TV
at home, so I just would go and sit in
the public gallery. I think one of the county board
(12:21):
supervisors thought I was a reporter, and at some point
I listened to their debate and thought, I'm as smart
as anybody in this room. And so after my gap
year and I started law school, and then in my
first semester, my county board supervisor said she was retiring.
And you know, at one of my law school classes
(12:42):
as a small group class, and the rest of them
were big lectures. So I went up to my small
group professor, who kind of as a mentor. He looked
at me really sternly, and he said, you know, miss Baldwin,
if you really applied yourself, you could be a great lawyer.
And then a twinkle burst into his twinkle in his eyes,
and he said, but if you insist on this political thing,
(13:03):
you'll have my full support. So he was one of
my supporters and encouragers, and you know, I was able
to start writing laws at the same time I was
studying them. It was so amazing, much to the chagrin
of the corporation Council, who's supposed to do the drafting
of all the ordinance amendments for the county, and I
would come in with my legal notepad and you know,
section whatever should be amended. He's like, that's my job.
(13:26):
I learned so much there. But the women on the
county board, many of whom had been on the county
board for a long time, really became mentors. And when
the next opportunity opened up, which was stated Assembly, oh boy,
I just had this team ready to ready to help.
It's such an amazing story, I think because there's clearly
(13:47):
this through line from middle school to today. And I
wanted to be on the county board because they back
then it's no longer the case in Wisconsin, but they
worked on healthcare policies. They had a program for indigent
individual rules who didn't have health insurance that would help
in the event of a hospitalization. But I found so
many inequities in that program that I was really able
(14:08):
to work on health care policy as a County Board supervisor.
So back to the second question where I said, no,
I couldn't have imagined that I would be in the U. S.
Senate when I was in middle school or whatever, although
some of my college friends would tell you otherwise. But
I don't remember having that path in my mind. But
(14:28):
these opportunities to have a greater reach have been extraordinary.
We'll be right back to stay with us. When you
(14:50):
were elected to Congress from Wisconsin and you were the
first woman to be a representative from the whole state
of Wisconsin. Yeah, earlier that yor, we had celebrated the
state's Sesqui centennial. Try that five times past. Okay. I
remember when we celebrated Arkansas Sessuis centennial when I was
a little girl, and I actually remember repeating the word
(15:12):
over and over and over again until I could finally
pronounce it correctly. That's right. So we had statehood in
eighteen forty eight, and I ran for and won the
House seat in nine the year of Wisconsin sessquiest centennial.
I remember a couple of things vividly about that juxtaposition.
(15:33):
You know, it took us a hundred and fifty years
to elect our first woman to Congress. But I also
remember attending a celebratory event on the day of our
Susquo Centennial at the old Territorial Capital, which is not
in Madison, and we were asked to come in period costume.
What did you dress up? Though, well, there would not
(15:55):
have been any women in the state legislatures as it
convened in eighteen forty eight. But I remember doing a
radio interview from the area and saying, you'll have to
wait while I removed my bonnet. That was a first
for radio. And did you feel any additional pressure either
in that race or when you got to Congress because
(16:18):
you were now the first? That's interesting, you know, I've
been a first in several areas of the first out
lgbt Q member of the Senate, and certainly in terms
of the House, I was the first non incumbent out
person to get elected. Everyone else who had been out
in the House before had come out in office. You know,
(16:40):
until it's done, people haven't been done right, it's never
been done. It's never been done, and it can be done.
And so I remember the pressure of of that. There's
a lot of well meaning friends who said, don't know
if the voters are ready, we really need the seat
in my house seat. It was a pick up from
a moderate Republican who had retired. You know, might have
(17:02):
not been the first choice of those who were recruiting candidates,
but yet we showed it could be done. I think
the other thing, both as a woman and as a
member of the LGBTQ community, is the way you interact
with the media. So even when I was running for
the state legislature, which the year of the woman in politics,
(17:24):
do you remember, I definitely remember, people would ask me,
you know, what is your woman's agenda? What is your
gay agenda? And I would quickly remind folks that I
was running to represent everybody in the district that I
would represent, and that I had all people's concerns and
challenges in my mind, and that it's important to elect women.
(17:45):
We would bring our life experiences with us to the
job and it informs what we do. But I am
running for the opportunity to represent everyone. I want to
speak to the top issues of concern, including health care,
which has always been a top issue of concern among
my instituency. And I kept getting asked over and over again,
and what I realized Finally, that was a little bit empowering.
(18:06):
Is at least at the local level. You have the
same reporters from the local media covering the race from
the beginning to the end. And I would have the
opportunity to say, you know, you can, you can write
you know, kind of woman win, kind of lgbt person,
you know win. But you only get to write it
once it's newsworthy. But you can't write it every time
you're covering my candidacy and the other candidates in the race.
(18:30):
That was a challenge in all my races. And do
you think that challenge has gotten better or worse for
you and other women and out LGBTQ candidates who are
running for public office. I'm a numbers person as a
math major. As the numbers grow, it becomes less and
less of an issue. Sometimes you try and you don't succeed.
(18:52):
Sometimes you try again and you do. But the more
and more people can look and see somebody like themselves,
the more and more of those barriers come down. So
no one can say after an election and re election
to the US Senate, where I won my re election
race with just shy of eleven percentage points in Wisconsin,
(19:14):
that doesn't decide any races with more than one right
one percentage point. It seems no one can say it
can't be done right. It's been done twice. Yes, wow.
And I do wonder though, for young people in the
LGBTQ community who have lived through, you know, not just watch,
but lived through the last handful of years in which
(19:37):
there often has been quite pointed an ugly rhetoric about
women and about members of the LGBTQ community, including from
the last administration, kind of amplified from the White House,
originating sometimes from the White House. How the conversations I
know you must have had with young people thinking about
running for office changed. Well. I think that there was
(19:57):
a view during the years prior to the Trump administration,
a view and a reality that a lot of progress
had been made, both through administrative actions and through passage
of laws. And I think I find among women I know,
(20:18):
and among members of the LGBTQ community that we can't
take that progress for granted, and we can't take progress
as victory. And so as hard as those years have been,
those Trump years and the legacy of what's been stirred up,
I think for some it has shown that it's even
(20:41):
more important than ever to get out there and defend
the progress that has been made and seek to make more.
And that's been inspiring and the honor that I have
to be able to It's often referred to a symbolism,
but it is so important for a young person to
(21:04):
be able to look and say, I didn't think I
might be able to achieve my goals or even should
strive for them, and this gives me hope that I can.
And when you hear somebody come back to you with
that story, boy, it's an amazing, amazing opportunity. But it
sounds like you're optimistic even after the last years in
(21:28):
which gender and race and religion and sex identity and
so much else was often weaponized by the right, arguably
of backlash to the progress that had been made. That
young people are still stepping forward and running for county
boards and state legislatures and school boards as well as
(21:49):
to be your colleague in Washington. It is happening, and
that's very inspiring. But I will also say, as hopeful
a person as I am, I share in so many
people's fears and concerns about where we are as a
nation right now, and for our very democracy, So we
have to redouble our efforts. We have to we're taking
(22:14):
a quick break. Stay with us. We've talked so much
already in this conversation about your health care experience as
being one of the reasons why you wanted to go
(22:35):
into and why you've stayed in public service. And you know,
here we are now more than two years into COVID nineteen,
and I wonder if you could just share what you've
been working on that relates to the pandemic. What would
you like people to know about what you're working on?
Let me mention a few. I want to just put
a bookmark on one. I think very proud achievement. When
I was in the House on healthcare, very much informed
(22:58):
by my family story and so many others. When I
served on one of the committees that put together elements
of the Affordable Care Act, I sponsored the amendment that
allows young people to stay on their parents health insurance
until their twenty six and I knew that that was
the most uninsured age group age range. There's all sorts
(23:20):
of other indicators of how likely you are to be uninsured,
relating to race, relating to income, etcetera. But if you
look at just age demographics high school to mid twenties.
People tend to be uninsured and that changed overnight thanks
to you. Yeah, but I was so proud of that,
and it was so anticlimactic. It happened like at two am,
(23:43):
we finally had the votes on the committee to get
it through. Did you call anyone at two am? Did
you call like a friend or family member? You're like,
who do I call? To celebrate? It's two am. Henry
Waxmon was chair of the committee, and I was like,
I'm ready to give my speech about my amend basic
you're not giving a speech. And your amendment it's in
the manager's amendment. We're voting on it, we're getting it out.
(24:04):
We've got to do this. That was the magic moment,
so so anti climactic, but I just remember years later,
especially when I'm visiting college campuses, I would say, raise
your hand if you're on your parents health insurance, and
almost every hand would go up, And that made up
for all the anti clapmactic nature of what was happening
in the committee room at two am. This was like,
(24:26):
oh my god. So today, Wisconsin sadly is one of
those states that has never expanded Medicaid under the Affordable
Care Act, and so I'm joining with our two New
Georgia senators, who also represent a state that has never
expanded Medicaid, to try to create a direct federal program
(24:47):
in order to allow those very low income individuals to
have the sort of comprehensive insurance benefits you would have
if you lived in a state that had expanded Medicaid.
And that is pandemic related, but it would outlast the
pandemic in terms of its importance. We've always had health
disparities based on a number of different factors, as I
(25:09):
just mentioned, but they were just brought to everybody's attention
during the pandemic in very visible and powerful ways. And
I think that we can't let this moment of recognition
pass without addressing it in a robust way. That would
(25:29):
be one example. But I'll tell you I'm still working
on a lot of healthcare related issues because there's just
always so much more to do. Yes, I do want
to ask, especially because your math major, if there is
one statistic about women in politics that either really continues
to inspire you directly or maybe enrages you and then
(25:53):
inspires you through that anger to try to ensure that
there are more women in more physicians of power to
do more good for more people and more places across
our country. There's a lot, but let me you said one, Well,
it can be more than one. Right now, I'm thinking
a lot about the Supreme Court, and I believe that
(26:14):
there have been a hundred and fifteen justices since the
beginning of the Supreme Court, and five of those have
been women. Zero percent have been black women. And uh,
I'm both angered and frustrated by that, but also inspired
(26:37):
that it might change, and it might change very soon. Yes,
and I have been aghast at the volume of rhetoric
emerging from people that it somehow isn't important to actually
have a black women justice on the Supreme Court, when
clearly it is, and there are certainly many, many, many
(26:59):
black women. You are incredibly qualified to sit on that bench.
I go back to that thought of nobody checks their
life experience at the door when they enter a room,
like it was a co check. Here. My life experience
stays out there then I walk into the room. It's
always with us and it informs our approach to all
(27:21):
the things we do in our work, and it's why
it's so important that we have a much more reflective
set of life experiences and greater diversity in all of
our governmental institutions as well as not deffermental institutions for
that matter. You have so often been the first in
(27:43):
so many ways a local, state, national level. What do
you think we need to do to ensure that the
first in anyway is not the only. I think that's
gradually happening. One might be the only for a while,
but hopefully that time is what is it More's law
and computing right, the half life of that is getting
(28:04):
shorter and shorter. So I was only in the Senate
for six years before there were two, and so who
knows what happens next. But if you don't try it,
it never happens. When you try it and you succeed,
there's one. And then once that glass ceiling is broken,
we make change. We make change. Hopefully then we preserve
(28:26):
the change that's right, and don't get complacent about the progress,
and don't mistake progress for success. Senator, thank you so
much for everything, including your time today. Thank you so much.
This has been a pure delight speaking with you. You
can keep up with Senator Baldwin on Twitter at Tammy
(28:47):
Baldwin or on Instagram at Senator Baldwin. In Fact is
brought to you by I Heart Radio. We are produced
by a mighty group of women and an amazing man,
Erica Goodmanson, Mart Harr, Sarah Horowitz, Jessmine Molly, and Justin Wright,
with help from Lindsay Hoffman, Barry Laurie Joy, Sakuban, Julie Supran,
(29:11):
Mike Taylor, and Emily Young. Original music is by Justin Wright.
If you like this episode of In Fact, please make
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Hi, I'm Chelsea Clinton. And this season on in fact,
we're celebrating Women's History Month. I'll be talking with trailblazing
women across a variety of industries about their personal journeys,
the progress women have made, and how far we still
(00:21):
have to go. Today. It's my great honor to be
discussing women in public service with someone who was accomplished
many firsts in her career, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin. It
can be easy to forget how recently women were barely
visible at the highest levels of our government. Just thirty
(00:42):
years ago was dubbed quote the Year of the Woman
for the record breaking number of women elected to Congress.
And how many was that? Twenty four representatives out of
four hundred and thirty five and four senators out of
a hundred, which brought the total number of women in
the Senate to seven. That was record breaking. Granted, we've
(01:05):
made some progress since then. Women now make up of
the House and nearly of the Senate. That's a far
cry from equal representation. Plus, seventeen states have never had
a woman senator, nineteen have never had a woman governor.
Many congressional districts have never been represented by a woman.
Many cities have never had a woman mayor, and out
(01:27):
of the forty five people who served as president, not
a single one has been a woman. Many voters still
have a hard time imagining a woman in public office,
and that's just one barrier women running for office space.
They're also explicit and implicit sexist attacks, and as multiple
studies have shown, the media cover women candidates differently than
(01:48):
their male counterparts, something we've certainly seen in my family,
and it's equally baneful when I see it happened to
anyone anywhere and when in office, women historically have been excluded,
sometimes officially, from the dinners, country clubs, and back rooms
where their male counterparts broker and execute power. And yet
(02:08):
record numbers of women are running for office at every level.
So while there are many glass ceilings yet to be broken,
I'm happy to say my guest today has shattered quite
a few. When Tammy Baldwin was elected to the House
in she became Wisconsin's first female member of Congress and
the first openly LGBTQ person to run for and win
(02:31):
a Congressional seat. Then she became the state's first female
Senator and the first openly lgbt Q member of the Senate.
She was re elected in with more than fifty of
the vote, a rarity and a state used to raise
her thin margins. Throughout her career, she's championed reforms in healthcare,
(02:51):
including mental health, and infrastructure, manufacturing, and education. And she's
proved little girls and little boys alike that women and
members of the LGBTQ community more than belong in every
level of government. Center but one, thank you for your
(03:13):
time today. I'm really excited for a conversation about women
in public service. And you're someone I've just so long
admired and so thankful to have you in conversation today.
It might just be a good place to start at
the beginning, and if you could share what drew you
to public service, and is this where you'd always imagined
(03:35):
you would wind up. I'll start with the second question
and the answer is no. But then I'll journey backwards
and and take you to how it did happen. I
think there's sort of two major motivating factors for me.
One was just a life experience. When I was nine,
I had a very serious childhood illness. I was raised
(03:57):
by my maternal grandparents, and I had to be hospitalized
for your listeners. I would describe it as similar to
spinal meningitis, but that wasn't the exact diagnosis. And so
I was in the hospital and then fully recovered, and
my grandmother visited me every day, and they would have
(04:18):
never dreamed of burdening me as a child with their
insurance or financial worries, but as family lare goes, their
family insurance didn't cover me because I wasn't a dependent.
I was a grandchild, not a child legally, And then
they weren't able to find insurance that would cover me
(04:39):
after I was fully recovered, and so I spent a
lot of my youth without insurance until I was actually
in college and could get into a group plan because
I was viewed as unensurable. Actuaries would look at my
serious illness and long term hospitalizations say we don't want
to touch her with a ten foot pole, and so that,
(05:00):
and then witnessing other health care struggles that other families
had really created a passion for wanting to change that.
I just felt what happened in our family's situation was
wrong and it needed to be changed. The other youthful
experience for me was more exposing myself to the idea
(05:21):
of elective office as a place where change could occur
and this sort of wrong could be right it if
you will. And so that was middle school student council,
I really believe it or not. So what role did
you have on your middle school student council? I was
(05:42):
on the student council and then the student government vice president,
and we took on all these projects that made me realize,
as a very young person that we could make a
difference collectively and individually. So it's trite, but I'll give
you a couple of examples. I think the college expression
for this is town gown issues. But we wondered how
(06:05):
the neighbors of our middle school experienced being neighbors to
a middle school, and so we surveyed them and what
did you find? Well, we found that the fact that
there was no muffler on the industrial arts or exchanger
really annoyed a woman whose house was adjacent to that.
We had another person who had a corner lot and
(06:27):
kids would cut the corner instead of sticking to the
sidewalk and damage her tulips, et cetera. There was one
area where houses backed up to a sidewalk that approached
the school, and some of the older middle schoolers would
smoke during recess. And so what did you do? Which
of these did you think merited your attention, and what
did you do to try to help your school? We
(06:48):
fixed all of it. You fixed all of it. So
we um lobbied the school board to say, we need
a muffler for this er exchanger. We then found some
fairly inexpens of knee high fencing to put at the
corner so you could still walk over it, but you'd
have to be making a big effort to trample over
(07:10):
the tulips, a conscious choice to be a tulip destroyer. Yeah,
And then we had a monitor who had a steep
decrease in the smoking activity, let's put it that way.
But in any event, then we invited everybody in the
neighborhood to come over for cookies and milk or something
after school one day and just sort of said we're
here and keep in communication. So that was one example,
(07:32):
and then the other one. Our city, Madison, had a
sister city relationship with Managua, Nicaragua, and I think during
my middle school years there was a natural disaster and
so we raised money for a school to be able
to replace damaged books and other things through a fundraising activity,
(07:56):
and then I remember getting thank you notes in Spanish
for um the students at the school, just expressing their
appreciation that children so far away cared and did something
and it felt good. And I never really occurred to
me as a middle schooler that I could do this
like as a career, but when I kind of figured
(08:18):
that out, it was just amazing. And yet, when you
were in middle school, Tammy, there weren't many women in
visible elected offices. I mean not not in Madison, but
not in most places. Were you aware of that as
a kid that, like, you may want to have this career,
(08:39):
but there weren't a lot of people that look like you.
I think I was very aware of that, but also
aware of some of those, at least local glass ceilings
being chattered. I remember one of the first, well two
of the first women to serve in the state legislature
in my area were considered pioneers, and boy did they
(09:04):
champion things that impacted women. So I was a little
bit aware of that. And I also will add that
I ended up after high school attending a women's college
Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where at that age every
leadership position on campus was helped by a woman. And
(09:24):
a strange fact about me, but I was a double
major in government and math. And at the time, nationally
one percent of math faculty were women, but at Smith College,
fifty of the math faculty were women. Not a butift
and so I think some of those experiences helped increase
(09:47):
confidence that I could do this job. And did you
have any women public servants, politicians as mentors who really
helped you decide to run for office for the first
time and then and towards you while you were in office. Yes,
my first job out of college my return to my
hometown of Madison, I did an internship at the Governor's
(10:09):
office with the governor's advisor on women's issues. And it
was at a time when the state was undertaking a
pay equity study of the state, because we already had
equal pay for equal work laws, but we didn't have
laws that helped close the gap when you're talking about
(10:31):
a female dominated profession, where within that profession there's going
to be equal pay for equal work, but compared to
a male dominated profession, there was going to be a
pay gap. So this would be in the mid nineteen eighties,
so you would have teachers and nurses who were usually
public employees, or meant not usually, but many of them were.
(10:54):
But then you would have in say the parks and recreation,
highway divisions, etcetera. Now there's a big pay gap between
those male and female dominated professions. But how do you
compare them to figure out what piece of that differential
is gender inequity? Yeah, and we figured out a methodology
(11:18):
to do it. That's where the being a math major helps.
You can look at, you know, what is the consequence
of making a mistake on the job. It's a nurse,
somebody might die. If it's a pilot, somebody might die
if it's making a mistake, and other professionals kind of
have a lot lower risks. You can look at how
many people do you supervise, what is the educational background
(11:40):
required in order to be certified? You know, to do
this so you can look at all these comparables and
figure out what remains that can only be explained by
gender inequities. So you did this work and you're like, oh,
I can use my math in government. Yeah. And then
at the same time, the city and the county were
(12:01):
beginning to look at their own workforces figuring out the
same things. And I started monitoring their meetings as they
were having these debates on pay equity, which is a
ridiculously nerdy thing to do. I didn't have cable TV
at home, so I just would go and sit in
the public gallery. I think one of the county board
(12:21):
supervisors thought I was a reporter, and at some point
I listened to their debate and thought, I'm as smart
as anybody in this room. And so after my gap
year and I started law school, and then in my
first semester, my county board supervisor said she was retiring.
And you know, at one of my law school classes
(12:42):
as a small group class, and the rest of them
were big lectures. So I went up to my small
group professor, who kind of as a mentor. He looked
at me really sternly, and he said, you know, miss Baldwin,
if you really applied yourself, you could be a great lawyer.
And then a twinkle burst into his twinkle in his eyes,
and he said, but if you insist on this political thing,
(13:03):
you'll have my full support. So he was one of
my supporters and encouragers, and you know, I was able
to start writing laws at the same time I was
studying them. It was so amazing, much to the chagrin
of the corporation Council, who's supposed to do the drafting
of all the ordinance amendments for the county, and I
would come in with my legal notepad and you know,
section whatever should be amended. He's like, that's my job.
(13:26):
I learned so much there. But the women on the
county board, many of whom had been on the county
board for a long time, really became mentors. And when
the next opportunity opened up, which was stated Assembly, oh boy,
I just had this team ready to ready to help.
It's such an amazing story, I think because there's clearly
(13:47):
this through line from middle school to today. And I
wanted to be on the county board because they back
then it's no longer the case in Wisconsin, but they
worked on healthcare policies. They had a program for indigent
individual rules who didn't have health insurance that would help
in the event of a hospitalization. But I found so
many inequities in that program that I was really able
(14:08):
to work on health care policy as a County Board supervisor.
So back to the second question where I said, no,
I couldn't have imagined that I would be in the U. S.
Senate when I was in middle school or whatever, although
some of my college friends would tell you otherwise. But
I don't remember having that path in my mind. But
(14:28):
these opportunities to have a greater reach have been extraordinary.
We'll be right back to stay with us. When you
(14:50):
were elected to Congress from Wisconsin and you were the
first woman to be a representative from the whole state
of Wisconsin. Yeah, earlier that yor, we had celebrated the
state's Sesqui centennial. Try that five times past. Okay. I
remember when we celebrated Arkansas Sessuis centennial when I was
a little girl, and I actually remember repeating the word
(15:12):
over and over and over again until I could finally
pronounce it correctly. That's right. So we had statehood in
eighteen forty eight, and I ran for and won the
House seat in nine the year of Wisconsin sessquiest centennial.
I remember a couple of things vividly about that juxtaposition.
(15:33):
You know, it took us a hundred and fifty years
to elect our first woman to Congress. But I also
remember attending a celebratory event on the day of our
Susquo Centennial at the old Territorial Capital, which is not
in Madison, and we were asked to come in period costume.
What did you dress up? Though, well, there would not
(15:55):
have been any women in the state legislatures as it
convened in eighteen forty eight. But I remember doing a
radio interview from the area and saying, you'll have to
wait while I removed my bonnet. That was a first
for radio. And did you feel any additional pressure either
in that race or when you got to Congress because
(16:18):
you were now the first? That's interesting, you know, I've
been a first in several areas of the first out
lgbt Q member of the Senate, and certainly in terms
of the House, I was the first non incumbent out
person to get elected. Everyone else who had been out
in the House before had come out in office. You know,
(16:40):
until it's done, people haven't been done right, it's never
been done. It's never been done, and it can be done.
And so I remember the pressure of of that. There's
a lot of well meaning friends who said, don't know
if the voters are ready, we really need the seat
in my house seat. It was a pick up from
a moderate Republican who had retired. You know, might have
(17:02):
not been the first choice of those who were recruiting candidates,
but yet we showed it could be done. I think
the other thing, both as a woman and as a
member of the LGBTQ community, is the way you interact
with the media. So even when I was running for
the state legislature, which the year of the woman in politics,
(17:24):
do you remember, I definitely remember, people would ask me,
you know, what is your woman's agenda? What is your
gay agenda? And I would quickly remind folks that I
was running to represent everybody in the district that I
would represent, and that I had all people's concerns and
challenges in my mind, and that it's important to elect women.
(17:45):
We would bring our life experiences with us to the
job and it informs what we do. But I am
running for the opportunity to represent everyone. I want to
speak to the top issues of concern, including health care,
which has always been a top issue of concern among
my instituency. And I kept getting asked over and over again,
and what I realized Finally, that was a little bit empowering.
(18:06):
Is at least at the local level. You have the
same reporters from the local media covering the race from
the beginning to the end. And I would have the
opportunity to say, you know, you can, you can write
you know, kind of woman win, kind of lgbt person,
you know win. But you only get to write it
once it's newsworthy. But you can't write it every time
you're covering my candidacy and the other candidates in the race.
(18:30):
That was a challenge in all my races. And do
you think that challenge has gotten better or worse for
you and other women and out LGBTQ candidates who are
running for public office. I'm a numbers person as a
math major. As the numbers grow, it becomes less and
less of an issue. Sometimes you try and you don't succeed.
(18:52):
Sometimes you try again and you do. But the more
and more people can look and see somebody like themselves,
the more and more of those barriers come down. So
no one can say after an election and re election
to the US Senate, where I won my re election
race with just shy of eleven percentage points in Wisconsin,
(19:14):
that doesn't decide any races with more than one right
one percentage point. It seems no one can say it
can't be done right. It's been done twice. Yes, wow.
And I do wonder though, for young people in the
LGBTQ community who have lived through, you know, not just watch,
but lived through the last handful of years in which
(19:37):
there often has been quite pointed an ugly rhetoric about
women and about members of the LGBTQ community, including from
the last administration, kind of amplified from the White House,
originating sometimes from the White House. How the conversations I
know you must have had with young people thinking about
running for office changed. Well. I think that there was
(19:57):
a view during the years prior to the Trump administration,
a view and a reality that a lot of progress
had been made, both through administrative actions and through passage
of laws. And I think I find among women I know,
(20:18):
and among members of the LGBTQ community that we can't
take that progress for granted, and we can't take progress
as victory. And so as hard as those years have been,
those Trump years and the legacy of what's been stirred up,
I think for some it has shown that it's even
(20:41):
more important than ever to get out there and defend
the progress that has been made and seek to make more.
And that's been inspiring and the honor that I have
to be able to It's often referred to a symbolism,
but it is so important for a young person to
(21:04):
be able to look and say, I didn't think I
might be able to achieve my goals or even should
strive for them, and this gives me hope that I can.
And when you hear somebody come back to you with
that story, boy, it's an amazing, amazing opportunity. But it
sounds like you're optimistic even after the last years in
(21:28):
which gender and race and religion and sex identity and
so much else was often weaponized by the right, arguably
of backlash to the progress that had been made. That
young people are still stepping forward and running for county
boards and state legislatures and school boards as well as
(21:49):
to be your colleague in Washington. It is happening, and
that's very inspiring. But I will also say, as hopeful
a person as I am, I share in so many
people's fears and concerns about where we are as a
nation right now, and for our very democracy, So we
have to redouble our efforts. We have to we're taking
(22:14):
a quick break. Stay with us. We've talked so much
already in this conversation about your health care experience as
being one of the reasons why you wanted to go
(22:35):
into and why you've stayed in public service. And you know,
here we are now more than two years into COVID nineteen,
and I wonder if you could just share what you've
been working on that relates to the pandemic. What would
you like people to know about what you're working on?
Let me mention a few. I want to just put
a bookmark on one. I think very proud achievement. When
I was in the House on healthcare, very much informed
(22:58):
by my family story and so many others. When I
served on one of the committees that put together elements
of the Affordable Care Act, I sponsored the amendment that
allows young people to stay on their parents health insurance
until their twenty six and I knew that that was
the most uninsured age group age range. There's all sorts
(23:20):
of other indicators of how likely you are to be uninsured,
relating to race, relating to income, etcetera. But if you
look at just age demographics high school to mid twenties.
People tend to be uninsured and that changed overnight thanks
to you. Yeah, but I was so proud of that,
and it was so anticlimactic. It happened like at two am,
(23:43):
we finally had the votes on the committee to get
it through. Did you call anyone at two am? Did
you call like a friend or family member? You're like,
who do I call? To celebrate? It's two am. Henry
Waxmon was chair of the committee, and I was like,
I'm ready to give my speech about my amend basic
you're not giving a speech. And your amendment it's in
the manager's amendment. We're voting on it, we're getting it out.
(24:04):
We've got to do this. That was the magic moment,
so so anti climactic, but I just remember years later,
especially when I'm visiting college campuses, I would say, raise
your hand if you're on your parents health insurance, and
almost every hand would go up, And that made up
for all the anti clapmactic nature of what was happening
in the committee room at two am. This was like,
(24:26):
oh my god. So today, Wisconsin sadly is one of
those states that has never expanded Medicaid under the Affordable
Care Act, and so I'm joining with our two New
Georgia senators, who also represent a state that has never
expanded Medicaid, to try to create a direct federal program
(24:47):
in order to allow those very low income individuals to
have the sort of comprehensive insurance benefits you would have
if you lived in a state that had expanded Medicaid.
And that is pandemic related, but it would outlast the
pandemic in terms of its importance. We've always had health
disparities based on a number of different factors, as I
(25:09):
just mentioned, but they were just brought to everybody's attention
during the pandemic in very visible and powerful ways. And
I think that we can't let this moment of recognition
pass without addressing it in a robust way. That would
(25:29):
be one example. But I'll tell you I'm still working
on a lot of healthcare related issues because there's just
always so much more to do. Yes, I do want
to ask, especially because your math major, if there is
one statistic about women in politics that either really continues
to inspire you directly or maybe enrages you and then
(25:53):
inspires you through that anger to try to ensure that
there are more women in more physicians of power to
do more good for more people and more places across
our country. There's a lot, but let me you said one, Well,
it can be more than one. Right now, I'm thinking
a lot about the Supreme Court, and I believe that
(26:14):
there have been a hundred and fifteen justices since the
beginning of the Supreme Court, and five of those have
been women. Zero percent have been black women. And uh,
I'm both angered and frustrated by that, but also inspired
(26:37):
that it might change, and it might change very soon. Yes,
and I have been aghast at the volume of rhetoric
emerging from people that it somehow isn't important to actually
have a black women justice on the Supreme Court, when
clearly it is, and there are certainly many, many, many
(26:59):
black women. You are incredibly qualified to sit on that bench.
I go back to that thought of nobody checks their
life experience at the door when they enter a room,
like it was a co check. Here. My life experience
stays out there then I walk into the room. It's
always with us and it informs our approach to all
(27:21):
the things we do in our work, and it's why
it's so important that we have a much more reflective
set of life experiences and greater diversity in all of
our governmental institutions as well as not deffermental institutions for
that matter. You have so often been the first in
(27:43):
so many ways a local, state, national level. What do
you think we need to do to ensure that the
first in anyway is not the only. I think that's
gradually happening. One might be the only for a while,
but hopefully that time is what is it More's law
and computing right, the half life of that is getting
(28:04):
shorter and shorter. So I was only in the Senate
for six years before there were two, and so who
knows what happens next. But if you don't try it,
it never happens. When you try it and you succeed,
there's one. And then once that glass ceiling is broken,
we make change. We make change. Hopefully then we preserve
(28:26):
the change that's right, and don't get complacent about the progress,
and don't mistake progress for success. Senator, thank you so
much for everything, including your time today. Thank you so much.
This has been a pure delight speaking with you. You
can keep up with Senator Baldwin on Twitter at Tammy
(28:47):
Baldwin or on Instagram at Senator Baldwin. In Fact is
brought to you by I Heart Radio. We are produced
by a mighty group of women and an amazing man,
Erica Goodmanson, Mart Harr, Sarah Horowitz, Jessmine Molly, and Justin Wright,
with help from Lindsay Hoffman, Barry Laurie Joy, Sakuban, Julie Supran,
(29:11):
Mike Taylor, and Emily Young. Original music is by Justin Wright.
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