1960s Onward

In the 1960s, social movements blossomed as activists of all backgrounds claimed the right to participate in debates about the nation’s pressing political issues. Women’s rights advocates joined civil rights activists and anti-war protestors to demand a greater voice for traditionally marginalized groups in shaping public policy. Women sought greater economic equality, more control over their personal lives, and enhanced political power. Many activists credited Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, with articulating the discontent they felt with their own lives and pointing the way toward greater involvement in public life. In 1966, Friedan and others cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) with the mission of securing full political, economic, and social equality for women. NOW used legal challenges, boycotts, and public demonstrations to overturn discriminatory laws and pressure government agencies and private businesses to end practices that disadvantaged women. In 1977, NOW founded a Political Action Committee to influence the election of feminists to public office.  

The League of Women Voters also continued its education and action campaigns during these years, helping its members to become knowledgeable about local, state, and national issues and to work to improve government policies and practices. Other women worked outside mainstream women’s rights associations and organized grassroots campaigns that focused on issues such as workers’ rights, racial equality, and housing reform. Examples in Iowa include Mexican American activists in Davenport who organized in the 1960s to achieve passage of legislation protecting migrant workers; and Virginia Harper, who in the early 1970s worked with the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to block a highway construction project that would have destroyed ethnic neighborhoods in Fort Madison. 

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Beginning in the 1970s, women began to campaign for and win election to local, state, and national office in greater numbers. In the U.S. House of Representatives, eighty-four women, 19.3% of the total, held office in 2018, up from 4.5% in 1985 and 12.9% in 2000. Prior to 1990, there were never more than two female U.S. Senators serving simultaneously. In the year 2000, nine women held office in the U.S. Senate; by 2018 that number had risen to twenty-three. The latter decades of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first have also witnessed a number of milestones for women in the executive and judicial branches of the federal government, as for the first time women served as U.S. Attorney General, U.S. Secretary of State, and Speaker of the U.S. House, sat on the Supreme Court, and won a major party’s nomination for the presidency.  

Though they continue to be underrepresented in national government, women of color made significant strides during this period. In 1968, Representative Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman to serve in Congress, and in 1992, Carol Moseley Braun became the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Other women of color broke down barriers with their election to state congresses, governorships, and mayoralties.  

In Iowa as in the rest of the nation, women captured a greater share of political offices during these years. In 2018, 23.3% of state legislators were women, up from 12% in 1981. Some of these women received help and encouragement for their electoral campaigns from the Iowa Women’s Political Caucus (IWPC), organized in 1973 by Roxanne Conlin. The IWPC was a bipartisan organization founded with the goals of providing women with a political education and increasing women’s political participation and representation.  The IWPC also sought the passage of legislation which benefited women and targeted issues such as welfare, rape, sex discrimination, sex bias in education, the rights of homemakers, and equal access to credit and insurance.  

One of the most influential female lawmakers in the state was Minnette Doderer, who ranks as the longest serving female member of the Iowa legislature and, with thirty-five years of service, as the third longest serving legislator, male or female. She served in the House from 1963-69, the Senate from 1969-79, and again in the House from 1981-2001. In addition, she ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1970 and 1978. As the minority whip in 1967, she became the first woman to gain a leadership position in the Iowa legislature. Later, in the 1970s, she became the first woman to serve as President Pro Tempore of the Senate. Doderer had to fight her own party leaders to maintain the traditional responsibilities of the President Pro Tempore position, powers that she felt male leaders were trying to strip away because of her gender. Doderer began her political career as a volunteer for the League of Women Voters and for the Democratic Party in Johnson County. As a party volunteer, Doderer became frustrated as she watched women do all the clerical, organizational, and campaign management work while male party leaders got all the credit, prompting her to launch her own political campaign. In the legislature, Doderer was active in promoting legislation relating to women’s issues, such as the elimination of sexist language in the Iowa Code, gender balance in state commissions and gubernatorial appointments, comparable worth, gender equitable insurance, rape law reform, reproductive rights, and the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. She also worked on issues such as public health, prison reform, benefits for the elderly, child and spouse abuse, juvenile justice, and collective bargaining rights for public employees.  

Beginning in the 1960s, other Iowa women recorded a number of firsts in state politics. Examples include June Franklin, a member of the Iowa House from 1967-73, who became the first African American in U.S. history to win a leadership position in either party when she was elected Assistant Minority Leader (Whip) for Iowa’s 64th General Assembly. Mary Louise Smith became the first woman to chair the national Republican Party, serving in that post from 1974-77. She led her party through a particularly difficult time in the wake of Watergate. In her official capacity as Republican National Chairman, she was the first woman to organize and call to order the national convention of a major U.S. political party, which took place in Kansas City in 1976. Patty Judge served as Secretary of Agriculture of Iowa from 1999-2007, the first woman to hold that position. In 2015 Joni Ernst became the first female U.S. Senator from Iowa, and in 2017 Kim Reynolds assumed the office of governor, the first woman to serve as the state’s executive leader.