

AP FILE - President Bill Clinton introduces Rep. She announced three months later that she would not run and said her “tears signify compassion, not weakness.” Her heart was not in it, she said, and she thought fundraising was demeaning. In 1987, Schroeder tested the waters for the presidency, mounting a fundraising drive after fellow Coloradan Gary Hart pulled out of the race. My Life in Politics,″ which chronicled her frustration with male domination and the slow pace of change in federal institutions. Her parting shot in 1998 was a book titled “24 Years of Housework. Schroeder helped forge several Democratic majorities before deciding in 1997 it was time to leave. Despite her seniority, she was never appointed to head a committee. Schroeder was elected to Congress in Colorado in 1972 and became one of its most influential Democrats as she won easy reelection 11 times from her safe district in Denver. Unafraid of embarrassing her congressional colleagues in public, she became an icon for the feminist movement. Her unorthodox methods cost her important committee posts, but Schroeder said she wasn’t willing to join what she called "the good old boys club" just to score political points.

Schroeder took on the powerful elite with her rapier wit and antics for 24 years, shaking up stodgy government institutions by forcing them to acknowledge that women had a role in government. Schroeder's former press secretary, Andrea Camp, said Schroeder suffered a stroke recently and died at a hospital in Celebration, Florida, the city where she had been residing in recent years. Pat Schroeder, a pioneer for women’s and family rights in Congress, died Monday night.
