Jane Harman

Jane Margaret Lakes Harman ( born June 28, 1945 in New York City ) is an American politician of the Democratic Party. She represented the state of California for the first time from 1993 to 1999 in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she was again starting in January 2001. On 8 February 2011 she announced that she wants to resign from the mandate to become director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. On 28 February 2011, the resignation was legally binding.

Life

Harman is the daughter of Lucille Geier and Adolph N. Lakes. Her father had studied medicine in Nazi Germany and returned in 1935 to New York. After her high school graduation in 1962 Jane studied at Smith College, which she left in 1966 with a bachelor's degree. She was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa academic association. Then she graduated from Harvard Law School, graduating in 1969. After that, she worked for Senator John V. Tunney.

In 1980 she got a divorce from her husband Richard Frank, with whom she has two children, and married in the same year the entrepreneur Sidney Harman († 2011), with whom she also had two children.

In January 1999, she retired the first time out of the Congress in order to compete for their party's nomination for the gubernatorial elections in California. However, it was defeated Gray Davis. In the following midterm elections, she defeated Republican Steven T. Kuykendall, who had started her successor.