Family
Speier was born in 1950 in San Francisco and grew up in an apolitical, working-class family. Her mother, Nancy (née Kanchelian), was Armenian American, and her father, Fred Speier, was the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Speier took Jacqueline as her confirmation name after Jackie Kennedy. She is a graduate of Mercy High School in Burlingame, which is where her daughter attended as a freshman in the 2008–2009 school year. She earned a B.A. from the University of California, Davis, and a J.D. from the University of California Hastings College of the Law in 1976.
Speier's first husband, Dr. Steve Sierra, died in a car accident in 1994 at the age of 53. At the time, she was two months pregnant with their second child, a daughter named Stephanie. They also had a son, Jackson Kent, to whom Speier gave birth in 1988 while she was serving as a member of the California State Assembly, the first woman in that legislature to do so. Speier then supported her children as a widowed single mother before marrying Barry Dennis, an investment consultant, in 2001.
Read more about this topic: Jackie Speier
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.”
—Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969)
“Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)