Usa news: Former U.S. Rep. Pat Schroeder, a pioneer for women’s and family rights in Congress, has died. She was 82.

Schroeder’s former press secretary, Andrea Camp, said Schroeder suffered a stroke recently and died Monday night at a hospital in Celebration, Florida, the city where she had been residing in recent years.

Schroeder took on the powerful elite with her rapier wit and antics for 24 years, shaking up stodgy government institutions by forcing them to acknowledge that women had a role in government.

Her unorthodox methods cost her important committee posts, but Schroeder said she wasn’t willing to join what she called “the good old boys’ club” just to score political points. Unafraid of embarrassing her congressional colleagues in public, she became an icon for the feminist movement.

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Schroeder was elected to Congress in Colorado in 1972 and became one of its most influential Democrats as she won easy reelection 11 times from her safe district in Denver. Despite her seniority, she was never appointed to head a committee.