WOOLSEY, Lynn C.

As a working single mother, Lynn Woolsey spent several years receiving public assistance to help get by while she raised three small children. “I know what it means to have a safety net when you need help getting back on your feet,” Woolsey recalled. “I can go to Washington and say, ‘I’ve been there.’”¹ Describing herself as the “first former welfare mom to serve in Congress,” Woolsey focused on issues facing children and families during her 20-year career in the House of Representatives.²

Lynn Woolsey was born Lynn Carol Robinson in Seattle, Washington, on November 3, 1937, to John Linn and Virginia Elizabeth Robinson. Woolsey and her older sister Joan spent their adolescence in Seattle. A graduate of Seattle’s Lincoln High School, Woolsey attended the University of Washington from 1955 to 1957. She left school to marry Terry J. Critchett in 1958. His success as a stockbroker enabled the couple to settle in northern California’s Marin County. They had three children— Joseph, Ed, and Amy—before they divorced in 1967. Following her divorce, Woolsey found a secretarial job at a local technology company and applied for welfare assistance to help get by. She eventually became a human resources manager at the company and, in 1980, opened a personnel services firm. She married David C. Woolsey in 1971 and raised another child, Michael, but that marriage also ended in divorce. Woolsey returned to college and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of San Francisco in 1980.³

Woolsey first entered politics in 1984 when she won a seat on the Petaluma city council Sonoma County. She served on the city council until 1992 and was vice mayor for the last year of her tenure.⁴

In 1992, when five-term incumbent California Representative Barbara Boxer decided to run for the United States Senate, Woolsey entered the race to succeed her. The district encompassed the two counties just north of the Golden Gate Bridge—Marin and most of Sonoma—one of the nation’s most affluent areas. She finished ahead of eight opponents in the Democratic primary with 26 percent of the vote. In the general election against Republican Bill Filante, a California assemblyman, Woolsey ran on a platform that emphasized her experiences as a single mother, businesswoman, and local council member. “That identified me as somebody who had walked her talk,” she recalled. Voters, she continued, “really respected the fact that I’d struggled and prevailed and knew what I was talking about.”⁵ Woolsey held a sizeable lead throughout the race, and Filante suspended his campaign in September 1992 following complications from a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his brain. Woolsey won the election with 65 percent of the vote. Re-elected in 1994 with 58 percent of the vote, Woolsey won the next seven elections by comfortable margins. In 2010 she was elected to the 112th Congress (2011–2013) with 66 percent of the vote.⁶

When Woolsey claimed her seat in the House at the start of the 103rd Congress (1993–1995), she received assignments on three committees: Budget; Government Operations; and Education and Labor (later renamed Education and the Workforce). In the 104th Congress (1995–1997), she left Government Operations and, in the 106th Congress (1999–2001), was reassigned from the Budget Committee to the Science Committee. By the 108th Congress (2003–2005), she was the Ranking Member on the Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Education Reform. When the Democrats took control of the House in the 110th and 111th Congresses (2007–2011), Woolsey served as chair of the Education and Labor Committee’s Workforce Protections Subcommittee, and served as Ranking Member of the subcommittee in the 112th Congress (2011–2013) after returning to the House minority.⁷

As subcommittee chair, Woolsey’s measure to provide job-protected leave for family members of injured soldiers was incorporated into the 2008 defense authorization bill. Upon its inclusion, Woolsey commented, “Military families shouldn’t have to risk losing their jobs in order to meet the needs of their loved ones, and with this bill, we are one step closer to fulfilling our promise to them.”⁸

From her seat on the Education and Workforce Committee, Woolsey used her personal experience on government assistance to shape how House Democrats approached the welfare-reform debates of the 1990s. She was sharply critical of legislation that reduced the scope of and imposed lifetime benefit limits for many programs. Woolsey advocated expanding childcare programs and supported paid parental-leave policies.⁹ She introduced several bills to make school breakfast programs available to all children and to make teenagers eligible for after school snack programs. Her provisions were included in a child nutrition reauthorization bill in the 105th Congress (1997– 1999). In the 107th Congress, she sponsored a measure that required the Internal Revenue Service to help enforce child support payments.¹⁰

She also worked to support students interested in the STEM fields. In the 106th and 107th Congresses (1999–2003), she introduced “Go, Girl” legislation to encourage young girls to study science and math.¹¹ In the 111th Congress (2009–2011), Woolsey submitted an amendment to a research and development bill to increase the involvement of women and minorities in the sectors of network and information technology by promoting computer science programs for elementary, middle, and high school students. Woolsey argued that this would make “more students exposed to innovative, engaging, and rigorous computer science curriculum at the K–12 level.”¹²

A prominent member of the Out of Iraq Caucus, Woolsey criticized the George W. Bush administration’s prosecution of the war, voted consistently to suspend funding for the war, and introduced a bill to redirect $60 billion in Pentagon funds toward domestic civilian programs. Woolsey sponsored the Iraq War Powers Repeal Act of 2006 to negate Congress’s authorization of military force in Iraq, but the bill died in committee.¹³

Throughout her House career, Woolsey petitioned the Bush and Barack Obama administrations to adopt the Sensible, Multilateral American Response to Terrorism (“SMART”) security strategy. Woolsey advocated for a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and called for military leaders to address “the root causes of terrorism by engaging our international partners and humanitarian community.”¹⁴ At the start of the Obama administration, Woolsey supported the President’s efforts to draw down troops and end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She later objected to President Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2011.¹⁵

Woolsey sponsored legislation that helped military families with combat injuries and their readjustment to civilian life. “It was so clear that veterans were coming back, and they needed a lot of help,” she said. “And I was not for the wars, ever, but I certainly was for veterans.”¹⁶ During the 110th Congress, she sponsored the Support for Injured Servicemembers Act which provided six months of unpaid, job-protected leave to the relatives of service members who were injured in the line of duty. The bill became law in January 2008 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. For Woolsey, the bill “sends a message to our wounded men and women that we will stand beside them as they deal with the physical and mental wounds of war, an obligation that we must honor for as long as they live.”¹⁷

Woolsey served as a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus during the 111th Congress. The caucus sought to “show that there was a left edge to the Democrats,” Woolsey said, and it proposed a “People’s Budget” as an alternative spending plan that, she later said, “shows that you can tame the deficit without shredding the safety net, without destroying Medicare, without giving the back of the hand treatment to the middle class.”¹⁸

Throughout her congressional career, Woolsey tended to her northern California district. She delivered hundreds of millions of dollars back home for a variety of capital intensive projects, including $9 million for a Petaluma River flood control project and $52 million for a seismic retrofit of the Golden Gate Bridge.¹⁹

After 20 years of service, Woolsey announced her retirement from the House at the end of the 112th Congress.²⁰ In her farewell speech, Woolsey addressed critics who accused her of “wanting a ‘perfect world.’ But I consider that a compliment . . . . I’m absolutely certain that if we don’t work toward a perfect world, we won’t ever come close to providing a safe, healthy, and secure world for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.”²¹

View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress

Sonoma State University Library
Special Collection & University Archives

• House Committee - Budget
• House Committee - Economic and Educational Opportunities
• House Committee - Education and Labor
  • Workforce Protections - Chair
• House Committee - Education and the Workforce
• House Committee - Foreign Affairs
• House Committee - Government Operations
• House Committee - Science
• House Committee - Science and Technology
• House Committee - Science, Space, and Technology