Dianne Feinstein, the first woman to represent California in the Senate, dies at 90

Dianne Feinstein, who surmounted an abusive childhood and early political failures to become the first woman to represent California in the Senate and a central figure in the rise of women to national political power, has died.

The Associated Press and other media outlets reported the longtime senator’s death.

Feinstein, 90, was a towering political figure for decades. She was the oldest member of the U.S. Senate when she died, and questions about her mental capacity shadowed her final years in office, blemishing her reputation and forcing her to repeatedly fend off calls to resign.

“I’d put my record up against anyone’s,” Feinstein said in a statement as she neared her 89th birthday in April 2022, after a series of news accounts that questioned her ability to do her job.

She ultimately bowed to age and political reality, announcing in February that she would not seek reelection in 2024 to a sixth full term. By then, the race to succeed her was already underway.

After two unsuccessful attempts to be elected mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein stepped into the job under dire circumstances following the 1978 assassination of her predecessor, George Moscone, and Supervisor Harvey Milk by a political colleague.

From that unanticipated perch, she was considered for a Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1984, and six years later became the first woman nominated by a major party for governor of California.

She lost, but rebounded two years later to claim the Senate seat that she would hold for over three decades.

Feinstein’s Senate career was marked by hard-fought accomplishments, including a landmark 1994 bill banning certain semiautomatic firearms, an issue she continued to press after its expiration 10 years later. While generally liberal, she hewed to a flinty pragmatism even when that grew increasingly out of fashion in her party as it moved to the left.

She won her Senate seat in 1992’s “Year of the Woman” election, an accomplishment that masked Feinstein’s ambivalence toward gender politics. She was the first woman to serve on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence. But with isolated exceptions, she avoided rhetorical barricades in favor of negotiation and compromise.

“That’s what we need — people who understand working together isn’t a bad word and achieving together isn’t a bad word,” she told a Los Angeles crowd in 2017. “We do need to compromise and that is not a bad word.”

She could seem imperious and regal in public, but as mayor carried a firefighter’s coat in her trunk to wear in emergencies. She was the target of two assassination attempts and a mayoral recall