Schneider, Claudine, 1947-

Claudine Schneider (born March 25, 1947) is a former Republican U.S. representative from Rhode Island. She was the first, and to date only, woman elected to Congress from Rhode Island. She is founder of Republicans for Integrity, which describes itself as a network of "Republican former Members of Congress who feel compelled to remind Republican voters about the fundamentals of our party and to provide the facts about incumbents' voting records."

Born Claudine Cmarada in Clairton, Pennsylvania, she attended parochial schools before graduating from Pittsburgh’s Winchester-Thurston High School in 1965 and studying at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania and the University of Barcelona in Spain. She received a BA in languages from Vermont’s Windham College in 1969. She later attended the University of Rhode Island’s School for Community Planning in 1975. After graduation, Cmarada moved to Washington, DC, where she worked as executive director of Concern, Inc., a national environmental education organization. Engaged to Dr. Eric Schneider, she moved with him to Narragansett, Rhode Island, in 1970 when he took a position as a research scientist at the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Ocean Management Studies. Married in 1972, she became involved in the Rhode Island environmental movement. She founded the Rhode Island Committee on Energy in 1973, and the following year, she became executive director of the Conservation Law Foundation. After losing a 1978 bid for the U.S. House, Schneider worked as a television producer and a public affairs talk show host for a statewide Sunday morning program.

Scoring an upset victory in 1980, Schneider became the first woman to represent Rhode Island in the U.S. House. An economic conservative and a social liberal, she soon emerged as a critic of President Ronald Reagan’s conservative social agenda, opposing the President’s position 75 percent of the time. Protecting the environment became the cornerstone of Schneider’s work in Congress. After passing on a 1984 bid to challenge Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell, Schneider ran against the five-term incumbent in 1990, losing with a mere 38 percent of the vote.

After leaving Congress in 1991, Schneider remained active in the environmental protection movement. She invested in a Massachusetts-based consulting company, which sold environmentally sound energy systems in Central and South America. Schneider also accepted a teaching position at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Following Democratic presidential candidate William J. (Bill) Clinton’s 1992 victory, she received an appointment to the Competitiveness Policy Council. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.