New records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon contradict Massachusetts senator and Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s claim that she was fired after her first year of teaching because she was “visibly pregnant.”
Minutes from a 1970 meeting New Jeresey’s Riverdale Board of Education show Warren was unanimously approved for a second-year contract in 1970. Minutes from a meeting the next year, 1971, show Warren’s resignation was “accepted with regret.”
In Warren’s version of the story, which she used on the Democratic primary debate stage and often tells during stump speeches, she describes losing her “dream job” and her “calling.” She uses the story to explain her move from teaching to law school, and to lament difficulties that women face in the workplace.
“By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days,” Warren told a crowd in Carson City, Nevada last week. “Wished me luck, and hired someone else for the job. Okay.”
Questions about the veracity of her claim began circling last week when a video of a 2007 interview at the University of California at Berkeley resurfaced. In an interview with Harry Kreisler, Warren describes her teaching career but does not cite discrimination as the reason for quitting her public school job.
I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me.’ I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ My husband’s view of it was, ‘Stay home. We have children, we’ll have more children, you’ll love this.’ And I was very restless about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=102&v=eGiclrXpuZQ
Warren has faced other scrutiny about her background, primarily for her claim of Native American ancestry and apparent use of claiming minority status to bolster her academic career. On a handwritten registration form filed in 1986 with the Texas State Bar, Warren wrote that her race was “American Indian.”
Two months before her campaign launched last October, Warren released the results of a DNA test that revealed she was 1/1024 Native American, which is less Native American heritage than an average American’s genetic make up. She has since apologized for using the test to prove her family’s claims of Native American heritage.