Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren married her high-school sweetheart, NASA mathematician Jim Warren, at 19. They had two children, daughter Amelia and son Alex, before divorcing in 1978.

In 1980, Warren married Harvard legal scholar Bruce Mann. They met while both were law professors, and Warren proposed to him after watching him teach. The couple moved among several universities during her academic career before settling at Harvard in 1995.

Warren grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, in a family that faced severe financial pressure after her father suffered a heart attack. Her mother, Pauline, took a minimum-wage job at Sears to help save the family home, while Warren began waiting tables at her aunt's restaurant at 13. Warren became a state debate champion and graduated from high school at 16.

She attended George Washington University on a debate scholarship, left college to marry, and later completed her degree in speech pathology at the University of Houston. She worked as a public school special education teacher before enrolling at Rutgers Law School. After earning her J.D. in 1976, she practiced law from her living room and began teaching law.

Warren taught at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School. Her academic work focused on bankruptcy and commercial law, especially the financial pressures facing families, women, older people, and working-class communities. In 1995, she became a chief adviser to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission and testified against efforts to make consumer bankruptcy more difficult.

Warren wrote about middle-class financial insecurity in books including The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt and The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke. Her research examined how job losses, medical bills, divorce, predatory lending, and other financial shocks pushed families toward bankruptcy.

In 2008, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid selected Warren to chair the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. She led investigations into the bank bailout, conducted public hearings, interviewed government officials, and submitted monthly reports on the financial institutions receiving assistance. The Boston Globe named her Bostonian of the Year in 2009.

President Barack Obama appointed Warren in 2010 as assistant to the president and special adviser to the secretary of the Treasury on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She helped design and build the agency under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The bureau was created to police credit lenders and protect consumers from deceptive or risky financial products, but Warren was not selected as its permanent director.

Warren announced her candidacy for the Massachusetts Senate seat in 2011, challenging Republican incumbent Scott Brown. A speech in which she argued that businesses benefit from public roads, schools, and public safety became popular online and helped define her appeal as a defender of the middle class.

She defeated Brown in November 2012 and took office in January 2013 as the first woman elected to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. She joined the Senate Banking Committee, where she worked on financial regulation, and introduced the Bank on Student Loans Fairness Act, which proposed giving students access to federal loan interest rates comparable to those available to banks. She later sponsored the Truth in Settlements Act, which addressed financial transparency in government legal settlements.

Warren won reelection in 2018. During her Senate career, she advanced proposals involving student debt, child care, corporate taxation, banking regulation, reproductive rights, climate policy, and public integrity. Her Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act included restrictions on individual stock ownership by senior government officials and proposed greater disclosure of candidates' tax returns.

Warren endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and delivered the keynote address on the first night of the Democratic National Convention. After Donald Trump won the presidency, Warren opposed his travel ban and challenged several cabinet nominees, including Jeff Sessions and Betsy DeVos.

In 2017, Warren was silenced in the Senate while reading a letter from civil rights activist Coretta Scott King opposing Sessions's nomination to a federal judgeship. Warren later read the letter aloud in a Facebook video that was viewed millions of times. She also introduced proposals to reduce the influence of money in federal government and continued her criticism of corporate power.

Warren formed a presidential exploratory committee in December 2018 and formally announced her 2020 campaign on February 9, 2019. Her platform included plans for tuition-free public college, student-loan cancellation, expanded health care, and measures to regulate corporations and financial markets. She ended her campaign on March 5, 2020, after the Democratic primaries.