Elizabeth Dole

Elizabeth Dole, born in 1936, American public official and former director of the American Red Cross (1991-1999) who was elected a U.S. senator from North Carolina in 2002. She was born Elizabeth Hanford in Salisbury, North Carolina, and educated at Duke University. After graduating with honors, she studied at the University of Oxford, then earned a master's degree in education at Harvard University. She received a law degree from Harvard in 1965 and the next year joined the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Then a registered Democrat, she served as executive director of the President’s Committee on Consumer Interests under President Lyndon Johnson before becoming an Independent and later a Republican. She served as deputy director of the White House Office of Consumer Affairs under President Richard Nixon.

Appointed to the Federal Trade Commission in 1973, she took a leave of absence from the post in 1976 to campaign for the Republican vice-presidential candidate, Robert Dole, whom she married in 1975. When he sought the presidential nomination in 1979, she resigned to campaign for him. When he withdrew, she joined the Ronald Reagan team as chairman of Voters for Reagan-Bush. In 1980 President Reagan appointed her assistant to the president for public liaison. She was the first woman to be named to a post in his administration. She was appointed secretary of transportation in 1983 and served until 1987. In 1989 President George Herbert Walker Bush appointed her secretary of labor.

Dole resigned that post in 1990 to become director of the American Red Cross. In 1996 she took a leave of absence for a year from her position at the Red Cross to campaign for her husband’s presidential bid, returning to the Red Cross after the election. She resigned from the Red Cross in January 1999. Later that year she announced her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in the 2000 election. Despite running second in polls for the nomination, she withdrew from the race before the primaries began, citing a lack of money for the campaign. Dole sought public office again in 2002 when she ran for the United States Senate seat from North Carolina. She won the election, becoming the state’s first female U.S. senator.