CNN
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Former US Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, a longtime Democratic congresswoman who championed ladies’s rights, has died. She was 82.
Schroeder died Monday night time in a hospital in Celebration, Florida, surrounded by her household, her daughter, Jamie Cornish, confirmed to CNN. The trigger was issues from a stroke, Cornish mentioned.
First elected to the US Home of Representatives in 1972, Schroeder went on to serve in Congress for greater than 20 years, turning into referred to as a forceful voice on points from ladies’s reproductive rights to arms management, based on a Home biography.
She earned a seat on what was on the time an all-male Armed Companies Committee.
Born in Portland, Oregon, to an aviation insurance coverage salesman and a public faculty trainer, Schroeder would go on to be a pilot and graduate from Harvard Legislation College. She had two youngsters when she was elected to Congress.
“Once I was rising up,” Schroeder mentioned, based on her home biography, “my father was all the time fascinated by politics and he talked about it. The dinner desk conversations had been all the time very vivid about what was happening.”
Schroeder mirrored in her memoir, “24 Years of House responsibilities…and the Place Is Nonetheless a Mess: My Life in Politics,” on being certainly one of simply 14 ladies within the Home when she was first elected.
“The ladies in Congress needed to wage just about each battle alone,” she wrote, “whether or not we had been combating for feminine pages (there have been none) or a spot the place we may pee.”
By the late Eighties, the congresswoman had change into recognizable on Capitol Hill, “battling Republicans on navy spending, reproductive rights, or office reform measures,” based on her bio. She additionally coined the time period “Teflon president,” denouncing then-President Ronald Reagan’s reputation regardless of the Iran-Contra scandal.