Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers Dies
On this day in 1960, Representative Edith Nourse Rogers died of a heart attack in a Boston hospital, just three days before the end of her nineteenth campaign. The longest-serving woman in congressional history, she was first elected in 1927 to fill the seat occupied by her late husband. For the next 35 years, she represented her hometown of Lowell and the rest of the Massachusetts Fifth District, making veterans' rights her highest priority. The fearlessness that she showed as an amateur pilot in the era of unsteady biplanes served her well on the House floor. She was an outspoken opponent of totalitarianism, denouncing Hitler's treatment of the Jews as early as 1933, and an early advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment.
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