Maurine Neuberger: The Teacher Who Outpolled Her Husband and Won the Senate

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Maurine Brown was born January 9, 1907, in Cloverdale in Tillamook County, Oregon. She attended the Oregon College of Education at Monmouth, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Oregon in 1929, and taught in Oregon public schools from 1932 to 1944. She met Richard L. Neuberger in Portland around 1937 and married him in 1945. Elected to the Oregon House in 1950, she also served on the board of the American Association for the United Nations. In 1952 both Neubergers won reelection to the legislature, and she received more votes than her husband. When Richard won a U.S. Senate seat in 1954 while she stayed in the state legislature, the pair were described as the Senate's first husband and wife legislative team.

Richard died of cancer in 1960, and the governor appointed Hall S. Lusk to the seat. Maurine won both the special election for the remaining weeks of the term and the full six year term, becoming the sixth woman elected to the Senate and still the only woman Oregon has elected to it. Serving from 1961 to 1967, she sponsored early bills for cigarette warning labels, sat on John F. Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and co-chaired Hubert Humphrey's Task Force on Women's Goals with Muriel Fox. After she married Harvard psychiatrist Philip Solomon in 1964, Governor Mark Hatfield began addressing her by a hyphenated married name. She did not run in 1966, divorced in 1967 and later taught government.

• As a student she belonged to Delta Zeta and was chosen for the Mortar Board honor society.
• Time magazine profiled her in 1964 as a longtime crusader for labeling laws.
• She framed cigarette warnings as a consumer's right to know a product's risks.
• She taught at Boston University, the Radcliffe Institute and Reed College.
• She died in Portland on February 22, 2000, at 93, and is buried in Beth Israel Cemetery.