Violent Femme

By day she was a buttoned-up intern for the Reagan White House. But at night, in D.C.’s wild and gritty punk scene, Darcey Steinke really found herself.

- Darcey Steinke

In the spring of 1983, I returned to my dorm room one day to find a note scrawled on the college message board: CALL THE WHITE HOUSE. At first, I thought it was a joke. It was not unusual to get prank messages: MATT DILLON CALLED or PRINCE WOULD DIE 4 U, left by the work-study receptionist who also happened to be my roommate. I ignored it until several days later when I remembered the woman from the Reagan administration who had come to speak at my college the year before about professions for women in politics and her work as the head of the Office of Congressional & Legislative Affairs. After her lecture, I had approached her to ask about a job.

At that time I was a sophomore at Goucher College, outside Baltimore, planning my junior year abroad in Ireland. I was also a Democrat who had voted for Jimmy Carter in the most recent election—the only one in which I’d ever cast a ballot. I knew nothing about the Republican Party and was only mildly interested in Washington. My defining character trait at that point was curiosity. I longed to get a glimpse of a world that extended beyond my suburban Virginia childhood and my closed-off college campus. I had not been fantasizing about cocktail parties at embassies or Sundays at the Smithsonian, but I figured a potential job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was too good an opportunity to dismiss outright.