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

<p>Martha Elizabeth Keys (née Ludwig; born August 10, 1930) is an American retired politician who served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Kansas from 1975 to 1979.</p>

<p>Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, Keys graduated from Paseo High School in Kansas City, Missouri in 1945. She attended Olivet College from 1946 to 1947 and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1951.</p>

<p>Keys was a Democratic campaigner in 1964 and 1968. She ran the McGovern presidential campaign in Kansas in 1972. When Bill Roy retired from the U.S. Congress she was persuaded to run for the seat by her brother-in-law, Senator Gary Hart, a Colorado Democrat.</p>

<p>In many respects, Kansas Representative Martha Elizabeth Keys’s two-term House career provides a window on a transitional moment in the story of women in Congress. As a freshman in 1975, Keys benefited from significant institutional changes that helped land her a plum assignment on one of the House’s most powerful committees. Simultaneously, however, her divorce from her husband of 25 years (and marriage to a House colleague) tested the limits of public aversion to turmoil in the personal lives of their elected officials and highlighted longstanding social double standards to which women were held.</p>

<p>On August 10, 1930, Martha Elizabeth Ludwig was born to S. T. and Clara Krey Ludwig in Hutchinson, Kansas. Martha Ludwig graduated from Paseo High School in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1945. She attended Olivet College in Kankakee, Illinois, from 1946 to 1948. Ludwig received her AB in music from the University of Missouri in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1951. In 1949 Martha Ludwig married Sam Keys, a university professor and later the dean of education at Kansas State University, and they raised four children: Carol, Bryan, Dana, and Scott. In 1973 Keys served as co-chair of the Manhattan-Riley (Kansas) County United Way campaign and also was appointed to a special committee that examined the city’s recreational needs. Keys’s brother-in-law, Gary Warren Hart, a campaign aide to presidential candidate Senator George Stanley McGovern of South Dakota, persuaded her to join the McGovern campaign in 1972. Then a 42-year-old housewife with limited political experience—as a volunteer coordinator in the 1964 and 1968 presidential campaigns—Martha Keys eventually ran the McGovern campaign in Kansas. “We managed to get quite a lot of delegates for McGovern out of Kansas, which was amazing because Kansas was not a state that was going to ever vote for McGovern,” Keys recalled. “But it was quite rewarding. I ran the state for him on purely a voluntary position.” Though McGovern lost the state by a wide margin, Keys’s tact and organizational skills left a positive impression with many Democrats.</p>

<p>In 1974, when Gary Hart launched his successful campaign for a Colorado U.S. Senate seat, Keys announced her intention to seek a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives vacated by Representative William Robert Roy. The two-term Democratic incumbent left the House to challenge incumbent Robert Joseph Dole for a U.S. Senate seat. The district was traditionally Republican-leaning, and the GOP considered the seat to be highly competitive. Only once since the Civil War had the district’s voters sent a Democrat to Congress for more than one term, and that was Congressman Roy. Keys credited Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder of Colorado with inspiring her run for Congress. “And I got out there, and in the milieu of meeting and talking, and Pat was encouraging me, ‘You should be running for that office.’”</p>