Jane Byrne

Jane Margaret Byrne (née Burke; May 24, 1933 – November 14, 2014) was an American politician who was the 50th Mayor of Chicago from April 16, 1979 to April 29, 1983. She was the first and only female mayor of Chicago, the second largest city in the United States at the time, and the largest U.S. city to have had a female mayor to date. Byrne first entered politics to volunteer in John F. Kennedy's campaign for president in 1960. During that campaign she first met Mayor Richard J. Daley.

In 1968, Daley appointed her head of Chicago's consumer affairs department. Byrne held that post until she was fired by Mayor Michael Bilandic in 1977. She challenged Bilandic in the 1979 Democratic mayoral primary, the real contest in this heavily Democratic city. At first, political observers believed her to have little chance of winning. A memorandum inside the Bilandic campaign said it should portray her as, “a shrill, charging, vindictive person — and nothing makes a woman look worse.” However, a series of major snowstorms in January paralyzed the city and caused Bilandic to be seen as an ineffective leader. Jesse Jackson endorsed Byrne. Many Republican voters voted in the Democratic primary to beat Bilandic and the "Machine". Infuriated voters in the North Side and Northwest Side retaliated against Bilandic for the Democratic Party's slating of only South Side candidates for the mayor, clerk, and treasurer (the outgoing city clerk, John C. Marcin, was from the Northwest Side). These four factors combined to give Byrne a razor-thin 51% to 49% victory over Bilandic in the primary. She then won the general election with 82% of the vote, still the largest margin in a Chicago mayoral election.