Schroeder, Pat, 1940-

<p>Patricia Nell Scott Schroeder (born July 30, 1940) is an American politician who represented Colorado in the United States House of Representatives from 1973–1997. A member of the Democratic Party, Schroeder was the first female U.S. Representative elected in Colorado.</p>

<p>Schroeder was born in Portland, Oregon, the daughter of Bernice (Lemoin), a first-grade teacher, and Lee Combs Scott, a pilot who owned an aviation insurance company. She moved to Des Moines, Iowa, with her family as a child. After graduating from Theodore Roosevelt High School in 1958, she left Des Moines and attended the University of Minnesota, where she majored in history. Schroeder is a member of Chi Omega sorority. She graduated with a B.A. in 1961 and later earned a law degree from Harvard Law School in 1964. It was at Harvard where she met her husband, James W. Schroeder, a law school classmate. They married on August 18, 1962, and moved to Denver, Colorado, where Jim joined a law firm. They had two children, Scott William (born 1966) and Jamie Christine (born 1970). Schroeder worked for the National Labor Relations Board from 1964 to 1966. She later worked for Planned Parenthood and taught in Denver's public schools.</p>

<p>In 1970, Schroeder's husband Jim ran for the Colorado state legislature but lost by only 42 votes. In the same election, 20-year Democratic incumbent Byron Rogers of Colorado's first district, based in Denver, lost a primary challenge to more liberal Craig Barnes, leading to Republican Mike McKevitt winning. For the 1972 election, Jim had asked a man who had declined to run for Congress if his wife would run, to which the man had asked him back: "What about yours?" Though Jim dismissed it at first, the Schroeders realized that Pat would make a good candidate - she had good credentials with labor groups through her work at NLRB, also with education groups through her work at public schools, and was opposed to the Vietnam War.</p>

<p>Though political rivals and some male colleagues at first dismissed her as “little Patsy,” Pat Schroeder became the forceful doyenne of American liberals on issues ranging from arms control to women’s reproductive rights during her 24-year House career. Congresswoman Schroeder’s biting wit and political barbs—from her seat on the Armed Services Committee, she once told Pentagon officials that if they were women, they would always be pregnant because they never said “no”—helped to make her a household name and blazed a trail for a new generation of women onto Capitol Hill.</p>

<p>Patricia Scott was born in Portland, Oregon, on July 30, 1940, daughter of Lee Scott, an aviation insurance salesman, and Bernice Scott, a public school teacher. “When I was growing up,” Schroeder recalled, “my father was always interested in politics and he talked about it. The dinner table conversations were always very vivid about what was going on.” Her great-grandfather had served alongside William Jennings Bryan in the Nebraska legislature, lending a reform-populist cast to her political heritage. As part of a military family that moved from post to post, she was raised in Texas, Ohio, and Iowa. Pat Scott earned a pilot’s license and operated her own flying service to pay her college tuition. She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1961, a member of Phi Beta Kappa majoring in philosophy, history, and political science. She earned a JD from Harvard Law School in 1964, though, as one of just 15 women in a class of more than 500, she felt “submerged in sexism.” On August 18, 1962, she married a law school classmate, James Schroeder, and the couple moved to Denver, eventually rearing two children: Scott and Jamie. While in law school, a professor told Schroeder that most corporations shunned women lawyers, so she took a job with the federal government for two years as a field attorney for the National Labor Relations Board. She later moved into private practice, taught law, and volunteered as counsel for Planned Parenthood.</p>

<p>Schroeder, at her husband’s encouragement, entered the 1972 race for the predominantly Democratic but conservative congressional district encompassing most of Colorado’s capital city of Denver. “I was so frustrated when I ran,” Schroeder remarked. “I was so angry about the Vietnam War. I was so angry about all the different things that were happening. And I ran because I thought, ‘Well, somebody’s got to stand up and say something about this.’” Running without the support of the state Democratic Party or the Democratic National Committee who considered her candidacy a “fluke,” Schroeder ran what she described as a “radical” campaign. “Well, because we had no advice from the powers that be, we were kind of on our own,” she recalled. “So, for most of the campaign, we ran it out of our basement.” Schroeder’s grassroots campaign seemed as overmatched as her political idol, Adlai Ewing Stevenson III; she believed she would “talk sense to the American people and lose.” Voters, however, embraced her antiwar, women’s rights message. She beat out her Democratic primary opponent Clarence Decker by 4,000 votes and, in the general election, defeated first-term incumbent Republican James Douglas (Mike) McKevitt with 52 percent of the vote. Schroeder was the first woman elected to Congress from Colorado, a state that had passed women’s suffrage in 1893. “When I announced for Congress,” Schroeder later recalled when asked about the role of gender in her campaign, “the newspaper said, ‘Denver housewife runs for Congress.’ They didn’t even put my name in. I kept thinking, ‘Well, yes, I’m a housewife, but I’m also a Harvard lawyer . . . so it was really a problem from day one.” In her subsequent 11 elections, she rarely faced serious opposition, typically garnering more than 60 percent of the vote.</p>