That Nancy Pelosi face—elongated, but with the same thin nose, round eyes, and ample eyelids—stares out from a shoulder-length mane of dark brown hair. Christine Pelosi, the second of Madam Speaker’s five children, is taller than her mother and less camera-ready, but otherwise the resemblance is striking. On this brisk November evening, she is dressed like her mother, too, in a chic power pantsuit and black heels, as she holds court in Delancey Street’s Crossroads Cafe, surrounded by copies of her just published book, Campaign Boot Camp: Basic Training for Future Leaders, and clusters of well-wishers.

Christine has been helping Mom win elections, for other people as well as for herself, since she was a kid stuffing envelopes on their Pac Heights living-room floor. These days, she heads the platform committee of the California Democratic Party, the same organization Nancy once chaired. Inside its battleship-gray cover, her book—nuts-and-bolts writing, nitty-gritty advice—is threaded with references to her mother and the political lessons learned at her knee, like “friendraising before fundraising,” and a 10-point checklist for holding a successful press conference. There’s even a copy of Nancy’s handwritten countdown calendar for the 1987 special election that eked her into Congress, including planning sessions for neighborhood meetings (120 in six weeks!) and absentee-vote targets for her Ironing Board Brigade of grassroots volunteers.

All of which might lead one to assume the book is just a loyal daughter’s attempt to burnish the Nancy Pelosi brand. But at 41, Christine Pelosi is a political powerhouse in her own right, with plenty of her own hard-won knowledge to share. A lawyer by training who’s worked for both the city attorney’s and district attorney’s offices in San Francisco, she left her job on Capitol Hill in 2005 to run a boot camp for congressional candidates funded by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Her efforts—so under the radar that not even the politics-obsessed Washington Post wrote about them—helped elect 12 new Democrats to the House of Representatives, or about two-thirds of the additional seats the party needed to recapture the House from the GOP. It’s really no exaggeration to say that without Christine Pelosi, the Democrats might not have pulled off their stunning reversal of 2006—and her mother would not be two impeachments away from the presidency.

Nancy, back in D.C. between trips home to investigate the San Francisco Bay oil spill, calls and tells her daughter to sell a lot of books and “don’t talk too much.” Recounting the story, Christine gets a big laugh from the audience; everyone who knows her knows she likes to talk. Between signing books and posing for photos, she’s chewing on the latest political gossip—this week, liberal Dems are going ballistic over Senator Dianne Feinstein’s unwillingness to block various Bush programs and nominees—and opining on the rules of modern politics (blog or be blogged). She talks so quickly, about so many topics, that even her friends have trouble keeping up.

One thing that Christine does not like to discuss, though, is her own political future. Lots of people think she would make a terrific candidate. There’s been speculation for years that she might run for something, and her recent move back to the city—she just announced her engagement to San Francisco filmmaker Peter Kaufman, collaborator with his father, Philip, on such projects as Henry & June and Quills—has set some hearts fluttering again. “If Speaker Pelosi retires, it would thrill me to vote for another Pelosi,” says columnist/raconteur P.J. Corkery, fresh from his editing duties on Willie Brown’s memoir, leaning on a barstool and sipping a sugar-free Italian soda.

 Not surprisingly, given whose daughter she is, Christine Pelosi is emphatic that women should hold elected office. Women have superior skills in networking and coalition building, she says. They have a deep-in-the-gut understanding of the problems that threaten children, families, and communities, and of the need for big-picture, long-term solutions. Though her book (like the boot camp) is not targeted at women, per se—or, surprisingly, even at Democrats—it quotes plenty of successful female candidates and strategists. And the timing of its launch, barely six weeks before the start of the 2008 primary season and Hillary Clinton’s historic run for the White House, seems intended to encourage a new generation of largely female activists to identify their call to service, build their leadership teams, and run for school board, city council, state legislature—maybe, someday, even speaker or president.

Yet this daughter of a pioneering politico is equally emphatic that she’s not running for anything. “I’ve found other ways to serve,” she tells me before the book launch. She’s got a wedding to plan and (maybe) a family to start. “I don’t look at that as giving up on politics,” Christine says. “I love politics. But I can do more as a child of the political establishment reaching out to people who are not in the establishment than if I was elected to office myself.”

Christine Pelosi seems so happy with her new life, who can blame her for not wanting to run for, say, the Board of Supervisors? Besides, “There are more ways for women to be powerful than to run for office,” declares her longtime friend and Delancey Street founder Mimi Silbert, who ought to know. “Christine will always be working for change in a strong way.”

Yet it’s also hard not to feel a little alarmed by the trend the younger Pelosi is part of. A simple fact: in the Bay Area and throughout California, young women aren’t running for office at the rates needed to sustain the gains of the past, much less to build on them. And no matter how much people like Pelosi do behind the scenes to try to address the problem, the scarcity of talented female candidates may only get worse.

Fifteen years after the Year of the Woman, with Nancy Pelosi running the House of Representatives and Hillary Clinton running for president, you’d expect young women, especially in the Bay Area, to be thronging into elected politics. For decades, this place—progressive, affluent, with an openness and fluidity as fundamental to its character as its climate and hills—has been home to some of the most politically engaged women on the planet, from Susan Faludi to Condoleezza Rice. San Franciscans elected the first two congresswomen from California: Mae Ella Nolan in 1923 and Florence Kahn in 1925. In the South Bay, where clean-government movements toppled the male-dominated political machines, and PhD-holding newcomers to Silicon Valley brought brainy wives eager to get involved in their new communities, San Jose became the first big U.S. city to elect a woman mayor ( Janet Gray Hayes in 1975). Five years later, with female majorities on the City Council and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors as well, people were calling it the “feminist capital of the world.”

A generation later, those pioneers have blazed a trail straight to Capitol Hill, where Bay Area women hold eight seats in the House and Senate. Nancy Pelosi isn’t the only one wielding a gavel; Dianne Feinstein is chair of three important Senate panels, including the Committee on Rules and Administration, responsible for campaign finance and ethics reform; and the judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology, and homeland security. Barbara Boxer heads the Committee on Environment and Public Works, grappling with the most critical issue of our time, global warming. In the House, San Jose’s Zoe Lofgren is chair of the judiciary subcommittee weighing such hot-button issues as immigration and border security; even the Peninsula’s Anna Eschoo, a longtime Pelosi confidant with no committee to oversee, has gained new clout as BFF of one of the most powerful women in the world.

All of which explains the reaction of Andrea Dew Steele when she arrived in the Bay Area a few years ago, fresh from jobs with the Democratic National Committee and on Capitol Hill, to head up Susie Tompkins Buell’s foundation, advising the FOBAH (friend of Bill and Hillary) on her donations to political causes and programs supporting women and girls. Steele was dismayed to discover that only 2 of San Francisco’s 11 supervisors were female (after last September’s appointment of a woman to replace the scandal-ridden Ed Jew, the number edged up to 3). By contrast, in 1997, the Board of Supervisors had five women. “I thought, ‘Wait, we have Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein…how could this be? We’re the most leftist place in the world!’ To me that was shocking.”

 In the South Bay, too, the “feminist capital” days are long gone. As of the 2006 election, only 2 of 5 county supervisors and 4 of 10 San Jose city council members are women. Two Silicon Valley cities have all-male councils, another five have a single female member, and only one—Saratoga—has a female majority.

The story is the same around much of the state. According to the nonpartisan California Elected Women’s Association for Education and Research (CEWAER), women held 37 of the 120 seats in the state legislature in 2005, but hold only 34 today—less than 30 percent of the total. Three years ago, 83 women were serving on county Boards of Supervisors; today, there are 70—a decline of 15 percent. These are the pipeline positions where future Feinsteins and Boxers hone their legislative and executive skills. “When you look at two women senators and the first woman speaker of the house, the perception is that it’s great to be a woman in California politics. But when you look downward, that’s just not the case,” says Rachel Michelin, CEWAER’s executive director.

Why is this happening—and here, of all places? In many ways, the stunning gains of 1992, when Feinstein and Boxer were elected to the Senate and the number of women jumped 69 percent in Congress and 27 percent in Sacramento, were a historical fluke. The factors that led to the Year of the Woman—a nationwide redistricting and House banking scandal that opened up 93 congressional seats, versus 29 in 2006; a collective feminist rage fueled by the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings and Susan Faludi’s Backlash—were never to be repeated. It didn’t take long before the I-Am-Woman-Hear-Me-Roar energy dissipated, and reality set in. In California, a pioneering voter initiative that was supposed to help more women achieve elected office instead wound up erecting a new hurdle and discouraging many from running. The poisonous partisanship of recent years has made many women back away from elected politics and look for some other way to serve. Especially in the Bay Area, there is no shortage of more appealing ways to help save the world. Says California Senator Carole Migden, who’s facing her own very tough challenge by Assemblyman Mark Leno in the June primary, “The issue for us as policymakers and political leaders is to shape the environment so that young women find it compatible.”

So what does it matter if a generation of young women, after pondering the realities of a life in politics, decide: thanks, but no thanks? For one thing, female lawmakers have been leaders on many of the issues that matter most to the Bay Area, from protecting the environment to fighting for AIDS research to getting junk food out of public schools. Just last year, it was San Francisco Assemblywoman Fiona Ma who pushed through a landmark ban on toxic chemicals in toys. According to a 2002 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C., states with higher numbers of female representatives also have more women-friendly policies—think strong reproductive rights and family leave—with Hawaii, Vermont, Washington, and California topping the list. Jackie Speier, the first California assemblywoman to have a baby while in office, says younger mothers bring an especially important perspective to the political process. “There are very few members of the legislature with young children,” she says, “and that’s a disservice to families.”

It’s not just what female lawmakers accomplish that makes a difference, but how they get things done. “Women are problem-solvers, more so than men—more patient,” asserts Susan Kennedy, a former press aide to Feinstein, state Democratic Party chair, and now chief of staff for Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The collegiality and the comity that women bring to the legislative process are on a level that is qualitatively different. It’s palpable when there’s a healthy number of women in office.” Zoe Lofgren notices the difference in Congress as well. She recalls “a contentious meeting over a topic of enormous importance,” presided over by then House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt. “I was the only one who knew much about it, and all of a sudden I realized that no one was hearing me until a man repeated what I said. That would never happen with Nancy Pelosi. I don’t need a male colleague to empower me with the speaker.”

To make it to those upper ranks, women have to start their political careers young. “Pelosi used to say that one of the reasons women haven’t been advancing is because the system for congressional leadership is based on seniority,” says Marc Sandalow, the Chronicle’s former D.C. bureau chief, whose biography, Madam Speaker, is due out this spring. “In their 30s and 40s, women tend to be taking care of families. They tend to get into politics 10 years behind men. In a system based on seniority, that’s a problem.”

Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez, CEO and president of Goodwill Industries of San Francisco, understands the run/don’t run dilemma better than most; in the 1980s, she turned down an appointment to the Board of Supervisors. But she also fears what might happen if too many young women make the same choice she did. “If we all sit it out,” she warns, “this city is in big trouble, this state is in big trouble, this country is in big trouble.”

Next month, on the same day California voters will decide between Hillary and Barack or Rudy and Mitt, they’ll also have a chance to reform the state’s 17-year-old term-limits law. Proponents of the ballot initiative (Proposition 93, written by Democrats) tick off a variety of arguments for change. Yet one of the most compelling—the current law’s unforeseen effects on female lawmakers—is all but overlooked. “I will tell you vehemently that term limits are a real problem for women,” says Ellen Malcolm, founder and president of Emily’s List.

Case in point: the involuntary retirement, after 24 years in public office, of Peninsula dynamo Jackie Speier. If it weren’t for term limits, she’d probably still be in the state Senate, grappling with the prison crisis or healthcare reform or global warming. Instead, one summer day, we are streaming in her red Camaro convertible through unusually light rush-hour traffic over the Golden Gate, on our way to the Marin chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus, where she’s plugging the book she cowrote last year with three of her friends, This Is Not the Life I Ordered: 50 Ways to Keep Your Head Above Water When Life Keeps Dragging You Down.

“This is my midlife-crisis car,” the 57-year-old former senator and assemblywoman jokes. “I bought this for parades.”

Later that afternoon, as I listen to Speier tell her amazing life story, it’s clear why voters—and not just women—find her so inspiring. She starts with her survival of the 1978 Jonestown ambush of the congressional delegation of her boss, Representative Leo Ryan. He died in the attack, while Speier, shot five times and left for dead, spent 22 hours wounded on the tarmac because it was too dangerous for rescue planes to land. She skips forward a decade, talking about her failed attempts to have a second child with her husband, Dr. Steven Sierra. How they adopted a baby girl, only to have the birth mother take the child back. Then, three months after Speier discovered she was miraculously pregnant, Sierra was killed in a car accident. Deciding to take him off life support was the hardest thing she’s ever done, she tells her rapt audience.

What elevates Speier’s tale from mere Oprah fodder is the parallel story of her political achievements. After losing her first race, to replace Ryan in Congress, she became the youngest person ever elected to the San Mateo Board of Supervisors (she was 29). To get to the Assembly, in 1986, she had to withstand the wrath of then speaker Willie Brown, who backed someone else in the primary and spent $750,000 trying to defeat her (she squeaked to victory by a few hundred votes). During her time in Sacramento, she wrote or sponsored more than 300 new laws—a remarkable record for any state legislator, and even more impressive when you consider that Republican governors controlled the veto pen for all but 5 of her 18 years there. Those laws touch on virtually every major consumer, women’s, and family issue of her day, from the nation’s first consumer financial privacy law to her final bill, the Maternal and Child Health Advancement Act of 2006.

But at the height of her firepower, after 10 years in the Assembly and eight in the Senate, Speier ran out of time. She competed for lieutenant governor in 2006 against another termed-out female senator, Fremont’s Liz Figueroa, and Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, who won the primary and the election. Now Speier is considering a challenge to longtime San Mateo Democrat Tom Lantos, who holds Leo Ryan’s old congressional seat. He’s pushing 80, but she would still have an uphill battle. “What I liked about Jackie Speier is that she takes no prisoners. She’s just fearless,” says up-and-comer Alix Rosenthal, who tried, and failed, to oust Bevan Dufty from the Board of Supervisors last year. “We’re losing many spectacular female legislators.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in 1990, when California voters ushered in term limits (San Francisco’s version of the law passed that year, too), supporters argued that forcing out entrenched male incumbents would open up elected government to women, minorities, and other outsiders.

Indeed, that has happened—to a point. From 1996, when the law finally took effect, to 2001, the number of women in the legislature jumped 40 percent, then more or less flatlined. Meanwhile, in Congress, where there are no term limits, the ranks of women have climbed slowly but steadily from 57 in 1996 to 86 today. In the Bay Area, women have won virtually all of the congressional seats that have changed hands since 1992, and now make up 60 percent of the region’s delegation to the House.

Of course, male lawmakers also face the problem of being termed out prematurely; that’s why Mark Leno is taking on Carole Migden. But there’s no shortage of other men in the pipeline, waiting their turn. Not so with women. “We can’t replace them fast enough,” Malcolm says. “We can’t keep up with the women being forced out.”

This has proved to be a serious problem around the country. In a study of 10 states with term limits, including California, the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University found that nearly 75 percent of term-limited statehouse seats held by women were filled by men after the 1998 election, and 71 percent in the 2000 election. “If there’s not extra energy and effort put into recruiting women when openings occur, you don’t see the gains,” says the center’s director, Debbie Walsh. Still, California’s problems could be worse; when Michigan’s term-limits law kicked in, half the female lawmakers there lost their jobs. “That’s a lot of recruiting just to keep the same gains,” Walsh says.

According to numerous studies, one of the biggest problems in recruiting women is that they tend not to think they’re qualified. But Speiers believes term limits are themselves a deterrent. “In the legislature,” she laments, “you get a pink slip as soon as you get there. You can’t delve into policy areas and details and become an expert because you’re not there long enough.”

“Women oftentimes are very security-conscious,” she adds, “and if you’re going to take time out of your career to serve, it’s six or eight years in which you won’t be contributing to your pension or moving up the professional ladder. There’s a real cost associated with it.”

Susan Kennedy is in the seat of power—literally. She’s in the smoking tent that dominates the lawn in front of the governor’s office, lighting up a fat cigar and sitting in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chair. It’s 96 degrees, balmy for a Sacramento summer afternoon, and the enormous canvas tent, flaps drawn, with big wooden tables and an abundance of cane, feels like something the Dutch traders would have pitched in the jungles of Indonesia. Shortly after we begin our interview, she looks up and says, “My boss is coming. I have to give him his chair.” The Governator himself wanders out in shirtsleeves. He’s polite, but clearly looking to have a peaceful smoke and not to make small talk with a reporter. Kennedy puts out the cigar and moves the interview to her office, a few steps away.

Inside, she says that until I brought it up, she hadn’t really noticed a drop in the number of elected women. She agrees the figures aren’t what they should be, but adds: “I have two women senators and a woman speaker of the house in my backyard. It’s impossible for me to be concerned unless I’m an academic looking at demographic trends down the road. I don’t see an end to the pipeline.”

In fact, she sees it being filled with women in appointed positions, like Margaret Fortune, Schwarzenegger’s education advisor, and Mary Nichols, his pick for chair of the California Air Resources Board, charged with implementing the state’s far-reaching greenhouse gas–reduction policies. Former governor Gray Davis’s office, where Kennedy was deputy chief of staff, was mostly run by what one disgruntled male staffer called “the cabal of powerful women.”

“Those are great role models,” Kennedy says—and she expects some of them to end up running for office someday.

Does that mean Kennedy will run? I ask.

No way. “I have the best job in politics,” she says without hesitation. “I’m not willing to give up my personal privacy and my personal time.”

Therein lies another huge challenge in recruiting female candidates: young women want lives. They want kids and families and a semblance of normalcy; they don’t want to be trapped in a fishbowl.

“The thing that dissuades me the most from running for any kind of public office is that you really lose a degree of anonymity,” says Katherine Feinstein, Di-Fi’s 50-year-old daughter, a San Francisco judge who has a teenage daughter of her own. Katherine has brushed aside many suggestions that she follow in her mother’s footsteps: “I can’t think of a single time I’ve had lunch or dinner with my mom in the last 20 years where someone hasn’t come up to our table. You lose the ability to throw on sweatpants and tennis shoes on a Saturday morning and go out and explore. To me, that’s one of the joys of living in the city, something I don’t want to give up.”

The low pay and other financial sacrifices make the idea even more unattractive, Jackie Speier says. “Women who are smart and talented and might find public office appealing as a means to create change are turned off by the practicalities of it.”

In 1992, at least, female candidates could count on the support—political, financial, emotional—of other women. But sisterhood is no longer so powerful as it seemed back then—just look at the ambivalence Hillary Clinton evokes. Women in elected office aren’t seen as thrilling novelties anymore; they’re just politicians, and female voters have been known to judge them harshly. “Part of it, honestly, is that as women we’ve always been more critical of each other,” says CEWAER’s Rachel Michelin, “starting from when we’re teenagers. We grow up with it, and it comes out in politics. I don’t know how to get around it.”

Other female pols aren’t automatic allies, either. Democratic consultant Gale Kaufman notes that when women become part of the political establishment, they build coalitions and maneuver regardless of gender—the same as men do. Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher of Walnut Creek backed a man over Pelosi for the house leadership. In 2003, Pelosi endorsed incumbent District Attorney Terence Hallinan over his successful challenger, Kamala Harris. Boxer called John Van de Kamp, Feinstein’s Democratic primary opponent in her unsuccessful 1990 gubernatorial campaign, “the best feminist in the race.” And the candidate now being mentored by Pelosi and Feinstein is none other than alpha male Gavin Newsom.

Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that many female political appointees move not to elected office, but to the private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors. In the Bay Area, home to the highest percentage of female executives outside D.C., there’s an almost endless number of options that allow women to contribute to the public good while earning a decent salary—and getting home in time for dinner.

Goodwill CEO Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez can reel off the names of a dozen other women like her, oriented toward public service, seized by the Bay Area’s entrepreneurial spirit (“There’s a freedom to explore and push the boundaries on ideas and problem solving. There’s a feeling that if I can solve a problem here, I can do it anywhere—it’s a great laboratory”), who choose philanthropy over politics as the way to create lasting change. The nonprofit world has its own craziness, of course, yet listening to Alvarez-Rodriguez talk, there’s also something about it that seems almost...nice. She and her high-powered female peers “all work together,” she says. “We’re extraordinarily respectful of each other. There’s a level of collegiality that’s really quite profound.”

No one, on the other hand, would ever describe elected politics around here as “collegial.” Given the rise of Pelosi, Feinstein, and Boxer, one might assume that, despite all the negatives, the Bay Area—and especially San Francisco—is a uniquely welcoming place for women to run. Yet the truth, as Marjan Philhour and her peers have discovered, in the opposite.

Philhour is exactly the kind of woman you’d want representing your interests at city hall or the statehouse. At 33, she is smart, engaging, and straightforward. Half Filipina, half Iranian, she represents the demographic shift in California’s population and voter rolls, which increasingly include children of immigrants and people of color. She got the bug for elected office in the sixth grade when, as a way to immerse herself in a new school, she ran for class president and won. She discovered that she loved talking to people and building consensus. After studying political science at UC Berkeley, she worked for Democrats on Capitol Hill, then for Gray Davis in Sacramento, where she found a mentor in Lynn Schenk, a former San Diego congresswoman who was Davis’s chief of staff. “When you see women leaders as a young woman, you realize it’s not just a dream, it’s something you should aspire to. You think, ‘This is something I could do one day.’”

Philhour recently graduated from Emerge California, a Bay Area–based program along the lines of Christine Pelosi’s political “boot camp” that aims to get promising young women into local office. These days, she does campaign consulting work at her dining room of the Richmond district home she and her husband, Byron, recently bought. She loves the place, a classic 1920s-style stucco with an inviting, open kitchen, an atrium, and bedrooms to spare for an expanding family (her first son, Joey, is eight months old). But as she thinks about running in the next three to five years, she’s pretty sure she’ll have to move—maybe to San Diego, where, Schenk tells her, the system is more open to political novices.

It seems crazy that a conservative place like San Diego would be more congenial to a liberal newcomer than feminist, progressive San Francisco. But the fact is, this city’s political glass ceiling has always been surprisingly thick—you might even say it took Dan White’s bullets to shatter it. These days, Dianne Feinstein is seen as proof that women can do anything. (The crises she faced in just her first term as mayor—the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk; riots after White was convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder; the budget fiasco unleashed by the Proposition 13 property-tax cap; the AIDS epidemic—make Gavin Newsom’s sex-and–Chris Daly problems seem almost laughable.) But after cruising to victory in her first race for supervisor in 1969, at age 36—her stunning good looks got nearly as much attention as her ideas—Feinstein ran twice for mayor and lost. On the very day in November 1978 she hinted to reporters that she planned to quit politics when her term ended in 1981, Moscone and Milk were slain. The seemingly washed-up president of the Board of Supervisors suddenly found herself running the city as Moscone’s successor.

Like Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi (the daughter of one Baltimore mayor and the sister of another) and Barbara Boxer showed remarkable promise as politicians back in the ’70s, organizing successful grassroots efforts and raising vast amounts of money for other candidates. Yet here, too, fate had to intervene before they got their chance at national office. If legendary congressman Phil Burton and his wife and brief successor, Sala, hadn’t died, “Nancy wouldn’t have run,” declares John Burton, who served alongside his brother in the House for eight years. “If I hadn’t quit Congress”—because of drug and alcohol problems, in 1982—“Barbara wouldn’t have run” (at least not then, which means she might have lost her chance at the Senate 10 years later).

The stories of Feinstein’s, Pelosi’s, and Boxer’s respective roads to power are epic in scope, and many insiders wonder whether it’s realistic to expect any Bay Area politician, male or female, to climb so high so fast ever again—though Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris could prove them wrong. Once given the chance, each woman proved herself extraordinarily skillful and driven. But even accepting that they were freakish political talents, none had to worry about something that’s become a huge obstacle for women a generation later: money.

All three were not only women of wealth; they also came of political age in an era when even middle-class families could survive in the Bay Area on one income, and the cost of running was not as prohibitive. Running here today in the country’s sixth-largest media market can be extraordinarily expensive because of the high cost of political ads: Fiona Ma spent $1.5 million to run for a two-year seat in the Assembly. “You have to come up with $10,000 to $20,000 just to run for the Democratic Central Committee, or at least that’s what I’ve heard,” Philhour says. Her husband is a high-school teacher, so they depend on two incomes to pay the mortgage; raising all that money for her own campaign would seriously cut into her earning potential—not to mention her family time. (As it was, just after she gave birth last April, she was firing emails from the delivery room about a visit by U.S. Senator Joe Biden, whose presidential campaign she consulted for. “My husband said, ‘Could you please put the BlackBerry down?’” she recalls.)

Finally, politics is how this peace-loving city gets out its aggressions. Because San Francisco is both a city and a county, there are fewer political slots and more competition here. And, adds Christine Pelosi, “When you have a town that’s ideologically united, the politics becomes more personal—much nastier.” The job is also incredibly time-consuming here. Elected officials must practice “retail politics”—getting to know every neighborhood group and issue and listening to every viewpoint, no matter how whacked-out some may seem. “There’s so little land, the stakes about land-use issues are so high,” adds Jerry Roberts, Feinstein’s biographer. “There are a lot of issues that are historically polarizing between labor, business, the environmental movement, and the neighborhood movement. When the fights come to the legislative body, they’re pretty raw.” He adds, “It’s good training in what politics is, the apportioning of power.” Those who succeed in this environment—not just Feinstein and Pelosi, but Phil and John Burton and Willie Brown—often go on to outsize success in Sacramento and D.C.

But for young women, all this can be a huge turnoff. Says Alix Rosenthal, who is considering whether to run again in the district that includes the Castro, “San Francisco is so vicious, so bloody, women say, ‘Screw it. It’s more important to focus on my kids right now,’ or, ‘I’ll go focus on my career.””

Christine Pelosi thinks one of the long-term ways to get more women into elected office is finance reform. “To make it easier for them, you need to make it not so expensive,” she says. “Publicly financed campaigns would open up politics. A lot more women would do it if they could balance it with their families and not constantly be on that phone, dialing for dollars.”

Of course, public funding might be a lot easier to pass if there were more women in the legislature and Congress, voting for it. So getting them into the pipeline is a logical first step. “We need to energize and encourage women to step forward,” Carole Migden says. Given the high rates of attrition from the political process, “anybody who’s going to quit has to replace herself with 2 people or 5 people or 10 people.” This challenge has given rise to a movement. Emerge California is shaping up as one of its leaders.

Founded by the Buell Foundation’s Andrea Dew Steele and a group of like-minded San Francisco women in 2002, the seven-month program brings in experts to talk about fundraising, polling, and handling the media. So far there have been five classes totaling 114 women; graduates have won 60 appointments to boards and commissions and 12 elected offices. The results are so encouraging that Emerge has spawned versions in six other states.

Similarly, Emily’s List started the Political Opportunity Program, or POP, in 2001, after the number of women in state legislatures declined for the first time in 30 years. It trained 462 women across the country in just the first nine months of 2007. “It’s an incremental process,” says Lisa Lyon, a campaign consultant who worked on Boxer’s first Senate race and teaches an Emerge session on strategy. “Ten years later, they’re in Congress.’’

At the Emerge graduation at the San Francisco City Club in June, packed elbow to elbow with political dignitaries, the mood is celebratory and spirits are high. The hors d’oeuvres are rapidly picked down to wisps of celery and zucchini, and an inordinate amount of white wine is poured. Migden huddles in one group, talking a mile a minute. In another corner, Christine Pelosi takes in the scene with her mother’s chief of staff, Dan Bernal. Mayor Gavin Newsom stops by for a glass of water, and Cindy Chavez, who hopes to become the country’s first Latina mayor of a major city, mingles with South Bay union leader Phaedra Ellis-Lampkins and Assemblywoman Sally Lieber. Emily’s List founder Ellen Malcolm is the keynote speaker.

Marjan and Byron Philhour cling to one wall. Joey is too little to be left home with a sitter, so they brought him along, but they can’t maneuver the baby stroller through the crowd. After a while, Byron takes baby and stroller to a separate room in the back, so Marjan can chat with her classmates. As the time draws near for her to go onstage and get her certificate, Joey starts to scream. Byron tries to tough it out—5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Finally, someone in the sitting room turns and says, “He needs his mom. There’s nothing you can do about it, Dad.”

In the other room, Marjan feels her phone vibrate. When she answers, all she can hear is Joey screaming. After she calms and breastfeeds him, she still has time to get back to the program, but with Joey in tow. He’s in the Emerge graduation group photo. That, she thinks, is as it should be.

For all the challenges of running for office these days, especially with a growing family, Marjan says she has no intention of giving up. It’s not an either/or situation, she says. Her family won’t hold her back; rather, it will help keep her grounded through the tough fights ahead.
 
And just to be clear about one thing: she’s not ready to move to San Diego.

Katherine Corcoran is a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.