She applied her family management approach to Parliament
Nancy Pelosi is a first-class housewife... tough with her children
Pelosi is in frank machinations with Trump.
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Pelosi makes way for a new generation of Democratic leaders.
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Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced her intention to step down from her leadership role, ending 20 years of leading Democrats in the House of Representatives with an iron fist, with which she broke barriers as the first woman to hold such a position.
"It is time for a new generation to take over," said Pelosi, who will remain a member of the House.
Pelosi is considered a historical figure. When she assumed the position of Speaker of the House in 2007, she became the most powerful woman elected to this position in the history of the United States, and then repeated this achievement again in 2019, after spending a long period in the minority, an advantage she still enjoys.
Who is this iron woman?
political family
Pelosi never thought of entering the political arena, and considered herself a first-rate housewife taking care of her children and preparing them for the future.
"I never thought that I would one day go from housewife to speaker, and in fact, I never intended to run for public office," Pelosi says, recalling the day she entered the Capitol for the first time.
Pelosi grew up in a political family, the youngest of seven children, in Baltimore, Maryland, on the east coast, where her father was mayor.
She went to college in Washington, where she met and eventually married financier Paul Pelosi.
The two moved first to Manhattan, then to San Francisco, where she began her family life as a housewife.
She had five children - four girls and a boy - whom she had in the span of six years.
Unique housewife
Indeed, she was just a housewife raising her five children in San Francisco, and says she created an unofficial family motto for her children: "Proper preparation prevents poor performance." But that doesn't mean things were always under control in the Pelosi household.
Once, a young California governor, Jerry Brown, who is friends with the family, asked her, "What's your cat's name?"
Up until that point, Pelosi was not aware that they had a cat at home, nor did she know that her children were keeping a cat somewhere.
"Some days I didn't even have time to wash my face," she says of her memories of that period dominated by the demands of infants and young children.
When she drove her children to school in the morning, she would sometimes wear a coat over her nightgown while driving.
strict military regime for her sons
Years after the cat incident, she and her husband discovered, alarmingly, that their teenage daughter, Alexandra, had been sneaking out of the house late at night to play.
That is why Pelosi imposed almost military order in her home, telling her children to make their beds every morning, encouraging them to clean their rooms, before going down to breakfast.
She prepared assembly-line school lunches, and did not cater to any special requests for her children, and the food included wheat bread, lunch meat, apples, and pastries.
The girls were standing in line to plait their hair, so much so that one of them forgot the comb in her hair and took it to school, and when it was time for dinner, Pelosi would ring a huge brass bell on the porch to alert her children.
Her daughter, Christine, spoke about her mother at that time, saying: “She was always planning for the future,” and she goes on, “She was very organized and focused. Before bed, my mother insisted that my sisters and I wear the Catholic school uniform before we went to school, and we were responsible for polishing our white school shoes.” She adds, “My mother used to collect the laundry, pull the clothes out of the drying machine, and make us fold them and count them.”
Even when her children take off their school uniforms, she often makes them wear the same colors to make it easier for her to track them down.
"My mother says, 'Well, everybody should wear white pants and a yellow turtleneck,'" says daughter Christine.
When she ran for office, Pelosi discovered that the essential organizational skills she had adopted in planning her family were also relevant.
Pelosi says, "This was a comment from a friend of mine about me once when he came to my house, and saw these little kids rolling up their clothes and putting them in piles!"
Oddities
Pelosi was stern, and she also had an eccentric side that only those very close to her could see.
Christine says that her mother often danced to the tune of disco music.
One of her habits is that she sleeps very little, does not drink coffee, prefers hot water with lemon, does a New York Times crossword puzzle every day, and often eats New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream for breakfast.
Applying the home approach to work
Pelosi has always been aware of the similarities between being a stay-at-home mom and Speaker of the House.
She says, "Nothing helped me to become Speaker of Parliament more than values, discipline, diplomacy, interpersonal skills, and mastery of catering management, which is what I used to do at home to raise my children and take care of them."
This is the method it also follows when recruiting women to run for Congress, especially those who say they have no experience other than working as housewives, and believe that they are not qualified to run for office.
She would tell them that the skills that made her an adept legislator were the ability to manage chaos and motivate her children, skills she had honed as a mother.
It is through this role that I understand what requirements each individual needs.
Her children also discovered similarities between the two styles.
Her daughter Nancy Corinne Pelosi says she was sure of this when she witnessed the early confrontations between her mother and former President Donald Trump, when the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives: “I knew the similarity.”
The expression on her face during her confrontation with Trump was similar to the expression that Nancy Korine and her siblings used to watch on their mother's face when they neglected their housework, or sneaked out to watch a movie, "as if her face was saying, You children did not do your homework."
Nobody bets on Pelosi
Pelosi revealed that face in the first Oval Office meeting after the 2018 midterm elections, a session in which Trump signaled to Pelosi that she was in a weak position politically.
"Mr. President, you don't realize how strong I feel at this meeting," she replied.
In an interview on CNN afterward, anchor John Berman asked Alexandra how her mother dealt with the president during the meetings. She replied, "You can cut your head off without knowing you're bleeding." Alexandra adds, "That's all you need to know. He can't." Nobody would ever bet on Nancy Pelosi.
• She devised an unofficial family motto and applied it to her children: “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.” However, this does not mean that things were always under control in the Pelosi household.
• When she ran for office, Pelosi discovered that the critical organizational skills she had adopted in planning her family were also relevant.
Stations in Pelosi's life
Pelosi attended her first Democratic National Convention at the age of twelve.
She witnessed the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy at the age of twenty.
In 1976, she worked on the presidential campaign of California Governor Jerry Brown, and by 1981, she was the chair of the California Democratic Party, working behind the scenes to recruit candidates and fundraise in the left-leaning state.
At the age of 47, after her youngest child left for college, Pelosi received a call from a dying congresswoman, asking her to run for her seat.
Pelosi organized 100 house parties, recruited 4,000 volunteers, and raised $1 million in seven weeks.
She was able to win one of the most difficult and prestigious seats, and in June 1978 she was sworn in with her father at her side.
In 2002, Pelosi gained the highest office in the House of Representatives when Dick Gephardt stepped down as Minority Leader, becoming the first woman to lead a party in Congress.
In 2010, the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, and Pelosi handed the gavel to Republican John Boehner.
But despite her shrinking role, Pelosi remains a major power player in D.C., after spending a decade as the top Democrat in the House of Representatives.
In 2016, Representative Tim Ryan challenged Pelosi's seat, but lost.
The president's biggest critic
As the House Minority Leader, Pelosi has become a vocal critic of the former President, Donald Trump.
And in 2017, she led the House impeachment against Trump's decision to shut down the Deferred Action Program for Child Arrivals.
Pelosi was sworn in as Speaker of the House for the second time during the third week of the government shutdown.
She promised Democrats to prepare legislation to reopen the government, which finally happened on January 25, 2019.
Pelosi presided over the House of Representatives, which impeached Trump twice - the first for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over the Ukraine scandal, and the second after his supporters stormed the Capitol and tried to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's presidential victory.
The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him both times.
Pelosi was re-elected again to serve as Speaker of the House of Representatives at the 117th meeting of Congress on January 3, 2021.
Trump disagreed with Pelosi, which affected the work of Congress and twice brought the president to trial. Reuters
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