When Nancy Pelosi arrived in Congress in 1987, not much was expected of her. At the time the 47-year-old activist and housewife won a special election to represent San Francisco, there were just 25 other women among the 535 members of the House and Senate—many of them widows who’d taken their husband’s place. With her rich husband and expensive clothes, Pelosi was assumed by many of her new colleagues to be a dilettante or even a bimbo. Nearly 40 years later, Pelosi will leave office as the