Early Career
As a citizen-lobbyist for environmental and educational issues, she says she was once told by a state representative that she couldn't make a difference because she was just a "mom in tennis shoes". The phrase stuck, and she later used it in her successful campaigns for Shoreline School District Board of Directors (1985–1989), Washington State Senate (1989–1993), and United States Senate (1993 – present). Murray was successful in gathering grassroots support to strike down proposed preschool program budget cuts.
Her 1988 State Senate campaign was successful and she unseated incumbent Republican Bill Kiskadden.
Read more about this topic: Patty Murray
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)