Washington’s first woman speaker of the House tells The News Tribune about her life

Laurie Jinkins had a question for a well-traveled friend during their Wisconsin college days in the 1980s. If you could live anywhere in the United States, where would it be?

The Puget Sound area, her friend said.

“Where is that?” Jinkins replied.

At that time, Jinkins was applying for law school. She realized that if she went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she likely never would leave her native state. She decided “to push herself to go somewhere else.”

Of the law schools in the Northwest that accepted Jinkins, the admissions director at the University of Puget Sound School of Law was the nicest to her, so that’s where she decided to go.

In August of 1987, Jinkins got into her black Ford Escort pulling a U-Haul trailer and drove from Madison to Tacoma, a city she had never visited or knew much about.

That journey set off a series of events over three decades that led Wednesday to Jinkins making Washington state history.

House Democrats elected her as speaker-designate. When the entire chamber votes at the start of the 2020 legislative session in January, she will become speaker — the first woman and lesbian to serve in that powerful position.

‘You needed to help’

Born in 1964, Jinkins grew up amidst the Wisconsin dairy farms around Montfort, a community of 500 people. It’s about 60 miles southwest of the state capital of Madison. Her father, Jack, was a veterinarian who cared mainly for dairy cattle. Her mother, Donna, stayed home to raise three daughters and two sons.

Jinkins’ hometown was so small that when children wanted to pursue a school activity, from sports to a theater production, everybody had to participate.

“That was how I learned about community,” she told The News Tribune on Thursday. “Even if it wasn’t the most important thing to you, if you wanted somebody to be able to do something that was important to them, you needed to help.”

Jinkins said her rural upbringing also made her more willing to take risks. She was the trombone player in the marching band who never learned to read music. She played softball on a middle school team that had to compete against their mothers because there were no other teams nearby to challenge. It took two years to defeat their moms, she said.

“We stayed together through high school, and we ended up becoming a top-tier softball team, and I was a starter there,” she said.

As she came out to herself as a lesbian at Iowa-Grant High School, Jinkins said, her hometown “started to a feel a little bit more isolating.” She graduated in 1982 with 82 students in her graduating class, having served as class president her sophomore, junior and senior years.

Jinkins said she came out as a lesbian in her early 20s while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master of arts degree in business, specializing in public health administration.

When Jinkins drove from Wisconsin to Tacoma in August of 1987 to attend law school, she decided to never live in the closet again.

“I would always live an out life. I felt like secrets had really kind of nearly destroyed me,” she said.

Jinkins met her future wife, Laura Wulf, at the start of law school in the fall of 1987.

“She’s very smart and very giving, and she’s beautiful — has the best brown eyes in the world,” Jinkins said.

The road to politics

Jinkins, who got her law degree in 1990, became a community activist and served on the boards of several nonprofit groups. She began to make the transition to politics as she worked on behalf of gay and lesbian rights, initially in Tacoma and then statewide as a board member of Hands Off Washington.

She litigated child abuse and neglect cases for the state Attorney General’s Office and later became an assistant secretary of health at the state Department of Health.

In 2009, she co-chaired the winning campaign to approve Referendum 71, which made domestic partnerships between same-sex couples legal.

“I was not involved in party politics for a long time. I was very issue-oriented and oriented toward community boards. Then at a certain point, I came to the recognition that elected officials have a lot to do with policy,” Jinkins said.

In 2010, she was elected to a House seat representing the 27th Legislative District in Pierce County, which includes much of Tacoma as well as Ruston and Fife Heights.

Jinkins said early in her House career, she was meeting with some fellow lawmakers who also took office in 2011 when she said it would be “kind of cool to be speaker one day.”

“I wasn’t really saying I wanted to be speaker — and I have heard since then it was definitely interpreted that way by other people in the room,” she said. “I never thought about it again for a very long time. I view it as kind of a mistake on my part; it was a good lesson about being more thoughtful when you’re in that political environment.”

Jinkins said her involvement in the marriage equality movement, which culminated in Washington legalizing same-sex marriage in 2012, is what best prepared her to become speaker.

“We had to take much smaller bites to get there. We did domestic partnership bills leading up to marriage. The whole point of building was to give us the opportunity to have more dialogue with Washingtonians,” she said. “That taught me a lot about incrementalism and how important it is to have a dialogue. Trying to force things too fast in the end usually doesn’t work out.”

LBGTQ rights

For 24 years, Jinkins and Wulf, who is an attorney in the state Attorney General’s Office, celebrated their anniversary on Feb. 6, the day in 1989 when they made a commitment to each other as a couple.

They added a second anniversary on July 20, 2013 when they were married at Tacoma Union Station in front of about 400 people.

“There are a lot of people who you come to know and love. And for us, who worked on LGBTQ rights, a whole community that we worked with became close friends. It was such a lovely event,” she said.

Jinkins and her wife have an 18-year-old son, Wulf Jinkins, a graduate of the Tacoma School of Arts.

“He’s been incredibly supportive of me doing this,” said Jinkins, referring to her legislative work. “More than anyone else almost, he’s had to give up more. I have big chunks of months where I can’t really be in his life very much. I am super-lucky to have a partner who is an amazing mom.”

Jinkins, who is director of organizational activities at the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, said she began to think about running for speaker over the past couple of years.

In November 2018, Rep. Frank Chopp, a Seattle Democrat and the state’s longest-serving speaker, announced he would step down from that post after this year’s legislative session.

“As I got better and better, I hope, at being a committee chair, I started to see myself as able to pull different levers and help make things happen and use more and more strategies,” Jinkins said. “That’s when I started to see, `Oh, OK, you can develop more and more skills and then exercise them as a speaker.’”

On Wednesday, House Democrats gathered at a hotel in SeaTac to elect the elect speaker-designate among four female candidates. Jinkins, a Leo, had read her horoscope that morning in The News Tribune. She said it’s something she usually does but doesn’t remember what the horoscope says for long.

This day was different.

“Play to win and don’t stop because someone makes other plans. Do your own thing and make what you do count,” the horoscope said.

Her parents, who still live in rural Wisconsin, texted to say they were thinking about her.

After she told them she had won the speaker’s election, her parents said: “Well, you’ve worked very hard for this. You’ll do a good job.”

Jinkins said it was a reminder of the “practical side” of her Midwestern parents.

Jinkins also received a text from one of her sisters. She had a message for the oldest sibling who often played the part: “Congrats on your huge accomplishment. I take it you are Speaker of the House! You always were the speaker of our house!!”

On Thursday morning, Jinkins made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at her home in Tacoma to take along on a short hike. She said her goal was “a bit of mind-clearing” the day after her victory.

“It was very whirlwind-ish. It takes a while for things to settle in,” she said.

This story was originally published August 2, 2019 at 6:05 AM.