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Nancy Kassebaum

Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker (née Landon; born July 29, 1932) is an American politician who represented the State of Kansas in the United States Senate from 1978 to 1997. She is the daughter of Alf Landon, who was Governor of Kansas from 1933 to 1937 and the 1936 Republican nominee for president, and the widow of former Senator and diplomat Howard Baker. She was the first woman ever elected to a full term in the Senate without her husband having previously served in Congress.[a] She is also the first woman to have represented Kansas in the Senate.

With her victory in the 1978 election, Kassebaum entered the national spotlight as the only woman in the U.S. Senate. As the London Daily Mail observed, she came not from "a trendy East Coast or West Coast state but from conservative Kansas, where a man's a man and a woman's his cook." She remained in the public eye as a centrist problem-solver in Washington and one of the most popular politicians in Kansas history. In the 1984 election, Kassebaum won re-election to a second term with 76 percent of the vote, outpolling President Ronald Reagan’s landslide mark in Kansas by 10 points.

In three terms in the Senate, Kassebaum demonstrated a political independence that made her a key figure in building bipartisan coalitions in foreign affairs and domestic policy. As chair of the Senate Subcommittee on African Affairs, she played a leading role in legislation to sanction the racist apartheid regime in South Africa, which required the successful override of a presidential veto. As chair of the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, she led the fight for major health care reforms that, for the first time, assured health insurance coverage for people changing jobs with pre-existing medical conditions.

Kassebaum’s work for Kansas produced rare reform of federal product liability law in an effort to aid the state’s struggling aviation industry. And, she authored the law that created a National Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in the Kansas Flint Hills, breaking a 30-year deadlock by forging a private-public partnership as a new model for conservation efforts.

In November 1995, Kassebaum announced that she would not seek a fourth term, despite having become the first woman to chair a major Senate committee, the Committee on Labor and Human Resources, with broad powers over domestic policy. It was time, she said, “to pursue other challenges, including the challenge of being a grandmother.”

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