PORTLAND, Ore. — Every week during Women’s History Month, we’re highlighting a woman important to Oregon. Last week we highlighted Lizzie Weeks who was instrumental in empowering Black women to register to vote when women got the right to vote in Oregon.
Maurine Neuberger had a long political career in Oregon that saw her as part of the first married couple to serve together in a state legislature. However, until 2010, she held the distinction of being Oregon’s first and only woman to serve in the United States Senate.
Neuberger was an English teacher at Portland’s Lincoln High School in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She received her bachelor’s degree in English and physical education from the University of Oregon in 1929. She married journalist Richard Neuberger after he returned from service in WWII in 1945.
In 1941, Richard Neuberger served in the Oregon House of Representatives and in 1948 he was elected to the Oregon Senate. Maurine Neuberger decided she wanted to join her husband in politics in Oregon and she won the house seat in 1950. The Neubergers were reelected in 1952. They were instrumental in the revival of the Democratic Party in Oregon.
Richard Neuberger won the election to the U.S. Senate in 1954. He passed in 1960. Maurine Neuberger ran for the seat in November 1960 and won. She represented Oregon in the U.S. Senate for one six-year term.
Neuberger was known for advocating for education and she sponsored legislation for consumers. In an infamous demonstration on the house floor, she donned an apron and showed how difficult it was to mix yellow food coloring into margarine to end a ban on colored margarine, a butter substitute, which was supported by the dairy industry to keep butter as the main butter-like product for consumers. She also sponsored legislation that would have given men and women equal pay for equal work.
She became part of the Commerce Committee while serving in the Senate and launched a successful campaign to regulate tobacco advertising. In August 1961, she and Margaret Chase Smith, who represented Maine and was the only other woman in the Senate, participated in the commemoration of the 41st anniversary of the federal suffrage movement.
After being nominated by then-President John F. Kennedy, she served on the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. The report from that commission would go on to identify women’s political, economic and social inequities. This report led to the formation of state commissions to address these issues across the country, including in Oregon.
Neuberger remarried in 1964 and did not pursue a second term. She moved to the Boston area where she taught American Government at Radcliffe and Boston University until she left the area following her divorce in 1967. She went on to teach at Reed College and to serve as a strategist for the Oregon Democratic Party. Neuberger remained in Portland until she died in 2000.
This article was written with the help of the Oregon Encyclopedia.
