Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a pioneer in the US Senate, died at 94.

The former Republican senator from Kansas, the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate without having succeeded a husband, died Friday of natural causes. She was 94.

Her son, Bill Kassebaum, announced the news to the Associated Press. "She loved Kansas. She loved the people of Kansas and represented them for 18 years in the U.S. Senate," he said. "She was an independent-minded Republican, willing to stand up for what she believed was right, even if it meant going against her party."

Elected to the Senate in 1978, Nancy Kassebaum Baker served three terms. The daughter of Alf Landon, governor of Kansas and unsuccessful Republican presidential candidate in 1936, she shared her father's progressive Republican convictions. Her discretion and approachability earned her the support of voters across the political spectrum.

Her legislative career left a tangible mark: in 1996, a health insurance bill bore her name alongside that of Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, a rare example of successful bipartisan collaboration. At the time of her departure from the Senate in early 1997, she was the only woman among the eight sitting senators to chair a committee, the Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

She married former Republican Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee in 1996; he died in 2014. A self-proclaimed moderate, she supported the ban on assault weapons championed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, without, however, crystallizing the hostility of Kansas conservatives as other centrist Republicans had done.

In the last years of her life, she distanced herself from a Republican Party she considered too right-wing. She supported Democratic candidates in Kansas, including Governor Laura Kelly, elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. In January 2021, after the attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump , she called for the former president's impeachment. "This has gone too far," she told Kansas City's KMBC.

When she announced her retirement from political life, Nancy Kassebaum Baker summed up her aspirations with disarming candor: "I would rather stay curled up doing embroidery all day."