Keys, Martha E. (Martha Elizabeth), 1930-

Martha Elizabeth Keys (née Ludwig; born August 10, 1930) is a retired American politician. A member of the Democratic Party, she served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Kansas between 1975 to 1979.

Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, Keys graduated from Paseo High School in Kansas City, Missouri in 1945. She attended Olivet College from 1946 to 1947 before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1951. In 1949, Martha Ludwig married Sam Keys, a university professor and later the dean of education at Kansas State University. Martha Keys worked as a housewife over the next several decades, her political experience limited to serving as a volunteer coordinator in the 1964 and 1968 presidential campaigns.

Keys’s brother-in-law, Gary Hart, a campaign aide to presidential candidate Senator George Stanley McGovern of South Dakota, persuaded her to join the McGovern campaign in 1972; she eventually ran the McGovern campaign in Kansas. Though McGovern lost the state by a wide margin, Keys’s tact and organizational skills left a positive impression with many Democrats. Two years later, she announced her intention to seek a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives vacated by Representative Bill Roy. On a shoestring budget, Keys defeated four men in the Democratic primary before going on to defeat her Republican opponent by an 11-point margin, one of many Democrats elected to the House in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

During her time in Congress, Keys was a strong supporter of the Title IX Amendment to create equal opportunities for female athletes at both the high school and college level and used her seat on the influential Ways and Means Committee to help broaden women’s economic base for equality. During her first term, Keys’s personal life made national headlines when she divorced her husband Sam and married Democratic Congressman Andrew Jacobs Jr. of Indiana. Narrowly winning a second term in 1976, Keys was one of 15 Democrats to lose their seats in the 1978 midterm elections. Shortly thereafter, she and Jacobs sought a divorce.

After leaving Congress, Keys served as a special adviser to the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare from February 1979 to May 1980 and as an assistant secretary of education from June 1980 to January 1981. During the balance of the 1980s and 1990s, Keys remained involved with education issues as a consultant with several Washington-based firms.24 In 1990 she and several other former Members of Congress created the Council for the National Interest, a nonprofit that sought to highlight issues important to Palestinians. Martha Keys remained invested in the social development of young women.