Neuberger, Maurine B. (Maurine Brown), 1907-2000

Maurine Brown Neuberger-Solomon, best known as Maurine Neuberger (January 9, 1907 – February 22, 2000) was an American politician who served as a United States senator for the State of Oregon from November 1960 to January 1967. She was the fourth woman elected to the United States Senate and the tenth woman to serve in the body. She and her husband, Richard L. Neuberger, are regarded as the Senate's first husband-and-wife legislative team. To date, she is the only woman elected to the U.S. Senate from Oregon.

Born in Cloverdale, Tillamook County, Oregon, Maurine Brown attended public schools, the Oregon College of Education at Monmouth from 1922 to 1924, and graduated from the University of Oregon in 1929 with a Bachelor of Arts. She later undertook graduate study at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1936 to 1937. Brown was a teacher in Oregon public schools between 1932 and 1944; in 1937, while teaching in a Portland high school, she met Richard L. Neuberger. The couple married in 1945, after Neuberger completed his service in World War II.

Inspired by her husband's successful 1948 run for the Oregon senate, Maurine Neuberger entered politics in 1950 when she was elected a member of the State House of Representatives and served from 1950 to 1955. In 1952, when she was reelected to the state House and her husband was reelected to the state Senate, she won with more votes than her husband. During this period she was also a member of the board of directors of the American Association for the United Nations. Richard was elected to the United States Senate in 1954. Maurine oined him as an unpaid aide in Washington in 1955 after completing her final term in the Oregon house.

Following her husband's death in March 1960, Neuberger sought and won the Democratic nomination and defeated Republican Elmo Smith, a former governor, for both the unexpired term (November 9 to January 3, 1961) and the full term ending January 3, 1967. As Senator, Neuberger focused on consumer, environmental and health issues, including the sponsorship of one of the first bills to require warning labels on cigarette packaging. Difficulties with raising funds, disillusionment with Senate procedures, and a chilly relationship with Oregon's senior Senator, Lyman Morse, led Neuberger to announce that she would not seek re-election to a second full term in November 1965.

After leaving the Senate, Neuberger chaired the Commission on the Status of Women and was a lecturer on consumer affairs and the status of women and taught American government at Boston University, Radcliffe Institute, and Reed College. She briefly remarried, to the Boston psychiatrist Philip Solomon in 1964, but they were divorced in 1967. She retired to Portland, Oregon, tending to her garden and mentoring scores of young Democratic politicians, dying there in 2000.