Something’s snapped. After the 2016 presidential election, women nationwide wanted to make a scene. We flooded streets in protest. We filled out ballots. Whispers gave way to battle cries. We didn’t do it for “attention.” We did it for progress. In “Fired Up,” ELLE.com explores women’s rage—and what comes next.

With a few months until the midterm elections, the New York Times published a piece on a relative political newbie. The upstart candidate was just the latest evidence that some convention had been upended, that all across America new opportunities had opened up for people who wanted to seize them. The nation was in the midst of a fundamental redistribution of power, the profile concluded; because “[o]utsiders, many of them women, have leaped to the forefront...in American politics.”

It’s the kind of statement that those of us who’ve watched the events of the past 14 months have come to expect—to revel in, even. Except reporter Timothy Egan didn’t write it in 2018. He didn’t write it in 2017 or 2016, either.

It was 1992, and he wrote it to introduce people to one woman who would soon rise to national prominence.

Patty Murray (D-WA), an activist, school teacher, and Washington State Senator, had just beaten out her "better known" and male opponents to become the top Democratic candidate for an open Senate seat. Within 12 weeks, she would compete in the general election and win. Murray was "perhaps the most powerful variation yet in sexual politics," Egan wrote, a candidate for the United States Senate who intended to run as no more or less than what she was: "a mom in tennis shoes." The epithet was Murray’s de facto motto, but it had been meant as an insult. Earlier in her career, she’d traveled to the state capital to protest budget cuts in education when a male lawmaker snarked, "You can't do anything; you're just a mom in tennis shoes."

It turned out "just a mom in tennis shoes" was exactly the kind of person to whom constituents could relate. She cared about the issues that mattered to them—family leave, education, better pay. Voters in Washington elected Murray that November and have kept her in office ever since.

Patty Murray, surrounded by her interns—in tennis shoes. Courtesy Sen. Patty Murray

In the end, it turned out to be banner season for women nationwide, with such a historic number of women-won elections that 1992 came to be known as “The Year of the Woman”—at least until 2018 puts in a bid for the title.

In the more than two decades she’s spent in the Senate since then, Murray has achieved a remarkable status; she is the rare, battle-tested dealmaker. In 2013, she struck a bipartisan budget compromise with none other than Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI). In 2015, she and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) unveiled a bipartisan fix to No Child Left Behind. For at least the past six months, Alexander and Murray joined forces once more to breach the impasse over the fate of Obamacare. (Murray is talented, but her powers are not superhuman; on Monday, it was reported that their deal had collapsed.)

Her successes have been not just impressive, but near folkloric. President Obama declared the Every Student Succeeds Act, one of her first collaborations with Sen. Alexander “a Christmas miracle.” And what's more, she makes the process look seamless. Even in wearied Washington, Murray commands a quiet grace. Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) tells me that her friend scores her hardest-won concessions behind closed doors; the divisions may be deep, but she almost never discusses them. Few balance “realism and idealism” as well as she has, Hassan explains, the admiration palpable. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards echoes Hassan: "She is principled, not partisan. She’s not one to pontificate. She listens."

But the "mild-mannered woman from Washington" State, as she was once identified in HuffPost, has lately wanted to be a little louder.

Murray, front row, between Sens. Carol Moseley Braun (D-IL) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) in a photo of the Democratic Senate class, 1992. Getty Images

Our current moment, with Donald Trump in the White House and furious women in the streets—has reminded her what drove her into politics in the first place. "I did it because I was mad," Murray says. It’s the frozen, late winter, and Murray and I are seated in her office. It’s neat inside, all framed photos and a few errant pairs of white tennis shoes; mementos. Like thousands of women nationwide, Murray wants me to understand that she decided to run because she was livid.

A few months earlier, in 1991, Anita Hill had stood in front of an all-male committee and testified against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Murray had watched Hill at home, stunned. Just the visuals infuriated her—all men on one side, one brave woman alone. "I watched and I wondered, 'Who exactly is speaking for me?'" At the time, there were two women in the Senate, and neither sat on the committee that Hill had had to face. The problem of their absence—Murray knew she couldn’t "solve it by saying someone else should do it." If no one would step up, she would. Besides, if she were on the ballot, at least she’d have someone she wanted to vote for.

That kind pragmatic, just do it approach is one that her constituents have come to expect from her. And it's an attitude that Murray has seen recently in American women nationwide. They don't want to wait for someone else to fix it, to clean up this continent-sized mess. She grins; they've made her bolder.

Murray, front row, stands with all eight women in the Senate, 1997. Getty Images

"I've been elated" since the Women's March, Murray insists. Even now, months later, she leans forward when conversation turns to it. The fact that women took to the streets in coalition, their cries and protests carried as if on a wave; it's proof that that what she does matters.

At one point, in the middle of the march, Murray convinced the Capitol Hill police to let her back into the section on the stairs where she’d stood as Trump was sworn in 24 hours before. The scene was so massive, so "awesome" in the truest sense of the word. Even now, Murray is almost at a loss for words. But then she remembers what it was like to look down at the full, pink-streaked mall, and she finds a few: "We were bigger," she offers. That is, there were more of us than there had been of them.

Such modest euphoria aside, Murray isn’t at all vindictive, nor does she take pleasure in the fact that this administration seems uninterested in its most basic governmental responsibilities. "People cheer on opposition," Murray says. "It’s part of what we like—fighting for things. But at the end of the day, people really want their government to solve problems, not to create them." And so it’s as much inaction as terrible policies that infuriates her.

"If something is working in Washington, likely Patty's fingerprints are on it."

"We’re here to get a result," as Sen. Lamar Alexander puts it. (I reached him last month, when he’s still optimistic that he and Murray will hash out a bipartisan health care fix. They won’t.) "It’s very difficult to become a member of the U.S. Senate. It’s very difficult to remain here. My feeling is while you’re here, you may as well amount to something, and amounting to something means getting a result. If all you want to do is take a position, you can get a radio station."

(Don't tell me, Lamar! Tell the GOP!)

"People really want us to find ways to make their lives work better," Murray continues. "To me, that’s important." And so like the best foot soldiers, she marches into battle no matter the odds. "She just gets it done," Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) tells me. And then she puts it in starker terms: "If something is working in Washington, likely Patty's fingerprints are on it."

Baldwin recalls how in 2013, Murray, then chair of the Senate Budget Committee, came to her as she prepared to meet with Paul Ryan, then chair of the House Budget Committee. The aim was to avoid a potential government shutdown, though "that no one really thought [their discussions] would amount to much," Baldwin says. Still, Murray wanted to talk to Baldwin, whom she knew had once represented the district next to Ryan's in the House of Representatives. Murray "asked me a lot; 'What's important to Paul?' She wanted to understand him. She doesn't just go to the table with a list of demands. She appreciates the pushes and pulls that affect the other person."

After she and Ryan did at last settle on a bipartisan budget, a process that had taken weeks of round-the-clock negotiation, Murray flew home from D.C. to Washington State. The flight was a blur, so total was her exhaustion. But as soon as she landed, people raced toward her. They didn’t know what was in the bill or the ins and outs of each disputed line. But the fact that a deal had been reached, that made news. People hugged her at the airport. People thanked her; she had stood up for them.

"Sure, we all love our fights, and I do, too," Murray says. “I can get in the middle of it, whatever it is. But I don’t want my country to feel like it’s in chaos. I want to believe that we can listen to each other."

It sounds at once like an obvious and novel stance, and Murray knows it. Whatever Alexander claims, a number of their peers would in fact like their own radio stations. Murray waves it off. "Since I’ve been here, there’s been people like that. Their voices are important, too." But while those people state values in inexorable terms, with one essential set of truths, Murray is more interested in a shared narrative. We all tell ourselves fictions; how can people on different sides of an aisle make their stories line up? In all of the deals she's reached, this has been her guide: What frame do we both need to make this feel like a true success?

She got mad, so she ran. She sensed stalemate, so she broached a solution. She despaired, so she marched. Fire is fuel, and Murray burns it to illuminate the darkness.

Rest assured: Murray, who relentlessly interrogated Betsy DeVos during the confirmation process and helped ensure Andrew Puzder never even made it that far, does not mull over such reconciliation plans because she's "nice" or the "peacekeeper." Those aren't her responsibilities, and she chafes at the idea that those are qualities people expect women to demonstrate.

She does it because anger alone has never satisfied her. She got mad, so she ran. She sensed stalemate, so she broached a solution. She despaired, so she marched. Fire is fuel, and Murray burns it to illuminate the darkness.

Decades before voters sent her to Washington, D.C., Murray worked as a preschool teacher. No surprise, the skills she used then have served her well now. "You can’t walk into a class of 24 four-year-olds and tell them, 'Here's how it's done; do it my way.' You have to listen to what’s important to them. You have to say, 'OK, now it’s my turn to talk.'"