Dottie Lamm embodied what it means to be a strong person in the midst of difficult politics.

She gave a role model to men and women how to be human in the inhuman business of elective politics.

As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains they stood beside as visionary as the views of the Grand Plains.

They looked across.

The women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They are teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country and the world.

I'm Reynolds Muse.

And these are the stories of great Colorado women.

Dottie's story is really important to the state of Colorado.

She has made contributions that few people fully appreciate.

She felt very strongly about women's rights.

She used every bit of her energy in fighting for women and children.

Dottie's work as a columnist and as a community activist were important in the movement toward equal rights for women.

Dottie has a very powerful sense.

We have to make society better.

She could have just been the governor's wife.

Instead, she intentionally chose public service to be more than just the first lady.

It's stunning how many different hats she has worn, how many different things she has done, certainly for women and for girls, whether it was reproductive rights all the way up to leading an international delegation of women.

I think my mom has lived an incredible life of service.

Dottie came from a fabulous family.

Her mother had been a math major and was from New England.

Her dad was the head of the Department of Engineering at Stanford University.

They always said to me, You've got to do the best you can.

My mother's friend in this group of ladies said, When you grow up, do you want to be a housewife or you want to have a career?

And I said, Well, I want to do both.

And everybody laughed.

That was a continued dream of mine.

How can I have a career and yet still be a mother and a good homemaker?

My mother and father and my sister, Jane and I lived very close to the Stanford campus.

It was very tempting to go to Stanford, and I thought, I think I want to go away.

I wanted to go to Occidental, and my parents were very supportive of that.

So I majored in psychology and I really, really liked it.

I was offered one job back in the Bay Area, at the School for the Deaf and the Blind.

And I thought, well, that would be a good way to do some good in the world, and maybe that would be an interesting job.

Well, I went and I interviewed and they were about ready to offer me the job, then I asked what it paid.

It was not a livable wage.

And I said, But this is hard work.

Why aren't I going to be paid more?

You have to live here.

Your room and board is paid for.

So I said, I don't think I'll take the job.

I then decided that I was going to apply to be a flight attendant.

So I went and applied for United and I got hired.

We were trained in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

There were three spots in Denver, and my friends were going all these different directions and I chose Denver.

My whole life has flown from being brave enough to not try to go with a gang of friends.

And I spent four years in the sky.

It was hard work.

It was low pay.

But I had a wonderful time.

Four of us thrown together.

The group of us had a party and we invited everybody we knew.

One woman wanted to come really badly.

She said, I have to bring these two friends and they're new in town and they need to meet people.

I promised I'd do something with them.

One was Dick.

About a week later, he called me and said, This is Dick Lamm.

I'm one of those friends of Jan's that came to your party.

And he said, I wondered if you'd like to go out for a beer tonight.

And I said, okay.

We dated a lot and we did mainly outdoor things.

We got married in May and we went to South America on a mountain climbing trip for our honeymoon, and we stayed there five months.

About the time I met Dick, I was getting a little bored with being a stewardess I was having a lot of fun but I realized that I probably had something serious to do in my life.

The Welfare Department was hiring social workers.

It was a very diverse group of people, and I learned to stand up for welfare clients because it only went to mothers who didn't have fathers or husbands in the house.

You are supposed to help these people, but you had to check to make sure they didn't have a boyfriend or weren't getting income from some other place.

But some of them had boyfriends.

And then you fall into.

Who do you tell on and would you not?

I wasn't crazy about the job, but I did like social work.

And so I applied to go to the graduate school of social work and got in.

She was coming of age at a time when the women's movement was opening up doors.

We were growing up in a time where people really began to focus on that and say, we have a voice and we're going to use our voice.

It turned out that Dick was supposed to march in Selma for voting rights, and he was a lawyer then, and he had a huge case.

He realized he couldn't go.

So he said, Well, would you like to go?

He knew that she felt strongly about this, and he was pretty sure she would say yes.

And she did.

She did the march for him and for Colorado.

To go and see the poverty and the fear of people.

As we marched in Selma, I was feeling the desperation of people of color in the South.

And of course, all the stories came out of how they were beaten and three civil rights workers were killed.

That made me become much more aware of repression and outright discrimination against people of color.

She felt it through her heart.

You know, this is really important.

I came back from that and the women's movement was starting to burgeon too.

And I felt kind of like, you know, what's my problem as a woman compared to people of color in this country?

So I was kind of resistant to feminism.

I didn't think that our cause, particularly since I was around middle class women, mostly.

Why do we need this movement?

Here's my awakening.

I was doing my fieldwork the second year.

It was a daycare center.

The social worker that supervise me was a wonderful guy.

He had worked in the civil rights movement.

He had all my values.

There had been a demonstration on demand for equal pay for women.

The supervisor says, Well, I've never understood that.

He said, Women don't need equal pay because they make the second amount of money in the family if they make any money at all.

What blew my mind was the person next to me.

This woman was a widow, raising two teenagers on her own and it was like he didn't even see her That feminist click goes off in my mind I thought, Yeah, women need help.

If a guy like this thinks women should always have second rate salaries, I'm in.

I had achieved this perfect life of being a mother, working part time.

And in other words, I was going to have a career and a family.

We had kind of this agreement that I would kind of help the world one by one as a social worker, and he would maybe do broader things.

Then the children came along.

First we had Scott.

We didn't know what it was in those days.

I went into therapy.

This therapist really helped me with my self-image and with the fact that you can't do it all at once perfectly.

And that's what I was trying to do.

I had Heather and decided not to work then, but got more involved in the political side of things.

The beginning political days of our life really started on kind of a grassroots way.

He was a lawyer, but he got into young Democrats.

He became president of young Dems.

It took a while till he got interested in running for the legislature.

And he did.

And he won.

He'd been in the legislature for eight years, I think, and we decided that the governorship was better to go for than the Senate.

We wanted to stay in Colorado.

And Dick and Dottie Lamm represented physically and visibly the kind of attitude of the newcomers to Colorado.

And our politics pivoted around them Dick Lamm had said he was going to run for governor.

And I think she really was able to help Dick understand what communities were going through.

He was an environmentalist.

He cared about all these areas of the state.

When he started to run for governor, he decided to walk the state.

In the meantime, his two opponents in the primary were doing things like debating each other.

So I started taking his place in debates and representing him.

So most of my campaigning was doing things on my own that I was asked to do because he couldn't do.

And I liked it.

She was going to be a speaker if she needed to be or help in whatever way that she could.

So I think she did a little bit of everything that you do in a campaign.

I said more than Oh my, when we won the election, particularly when I looked at the governor's mansion where we were going to live, I was very nervous about this move.

I was hiring staff, which turned out to be the best thing I ever did and the best people I ever got.

They really ran the mansion so that I could do other things.

I was hired as Dottie's administrative aide.

The governor's mansion had been a very proper and sedate place where the families lived, and the Lamms said, This is the people's home just as much as it is our home.

And they opened the doors to people throughout the state of Colorado.

The interesting thing about growing up in the governor's mansion is there were always people around and there were tour groups that were led through probably, you know, once a week.

And there were always functions that just became somewhat normal for us to have people in the house.

The Lamms were very intent on making this a warm and welcoming place, not just a very beautiful governor's mansion.

And the Lamms said, Well, why don't we give some nonprofits a chance to come in and use this as an attraction to support their organizations?

My dear friend Swanee Hunt came to me with the idea that Colorado should have a women's foundation that raised money to advance the causes of women.

She said, I'm used to raising money, but I need help.

And I said, Well, why don't you be the fundraiser and I'll invite people to the governor's mansion?

A very wealthy woman got interested in this and said that if we could raise a million, she'd get another million.

We set a goal with this group that this was going to be done in a big way.

And if we hadn't raised $1,000,000 in a year, we weren't going to even tell anybody.

We tried.

All of us who joined to make it happen knew this was not going to be easy, and Dottie was making sure that we were getting to the right people who would support it.

She used the mansion as a way to host events that attracted people.

Oh, my heavens.

I've never been to a governor's mansion and they were successful enough to raise the million dollars.

It was a front page article on the Denver Post that this new foundation had raised $2 million.

As I began to learn more about Dottie and I recognized how much she was the partner of the man she was married to.

She was her own person.

She gave a reach into the feminist community that they just didn't have.

And yet she did it without undercutting him.

She did it as something that made him stronger by being with a really strong woman.

I think the position of being the governor's wife was something not in Dottie's gameplan and coming here and realizing that she had a voice and that people cared about what she said and that she can inspire other people to be part of the change.

I thought, I'm a feminist.

I have a lot of important ideas.

I've got a platform and the world will listen because I'm the first lady.

She decided she wanted to set up a task force on children, and people were so excited about it.

She knew how privileged those of us were who could afford good childcare.

She never took that for granted.

She advocated for child care as one of the most important elements of distributive justice.

Women were going to work in numbers and there wasn't enough childcare available for them.

And Dottie was an education advocate to begin with.

So when we talked about early education, she was thrilled.

She wanted to know everything that she could know about it, and she wanted to be involved in a way.

She had an invitation from the Denver Post to write a column.

She had lots of ideas and she had a good writing style.

She then did a regular column for The Post and it had overwhelming response and it came from around the state.

And so she was willing to talk not only about an issue, but about her feelings about that issue.

She knew how to relate on a personal level with people.

She communicated with her readers as if they were her friends.

Her courage and her willingness to put herself out there was an extraordinary role model for me and for a lot of other women to hear that voice and to know that that she was thinking about us.

I was willing to do what other women would not do, going totally public with what I believed in.

So many political spouses in that day, they were scared to do that.

People would ask me, But when does your husband have time to check your columns?

(Laugh) my husband doesn't check my columns.

He doesn't even know what I'm writing about.

They couldn't believe it.

They thought I couldn't possibly send this out of the world without his permission.

One time Dick asked me, What are you writing about this week?

And I said, Oh, I'm writing about gun control.

His face goes...

I said, What's the matter?

You know, I'm for that.

And it wasn't a topic that was controversial that she didn't tackle.

Environmental justice, racism, child care, health care, women's rights.

The columns that Dottie wrote for the Denver Post were personal, they were real, and they worked because she talked about issues, whether it was the environment or whether it was issues that women face in a misogynist society.

But if there was any issue that Dottie was more out front on than Dick it was the issue of the right to choice, the right to control your own body when it came to abortion rights.

Dottie did not try to inflame the conversation, but she tried to enlighten people about individual challenges that people faced and the importance of women having the right to choose and having control over their lives and their bodies.

To have someone showing how you can talk about these things and not villainize the people that you're trying to persuade or that you're disagreeing with.

That was her brand.

That was her stock in trade.

And she's had some things happen in her life that weren't good, and she had to step back and take it easy for a while.

I had breast cancer when I was only 44 years old.

It was 1981 and it was a bad diagnosis.

When my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.

I think there were a couple of media reports around how, you know, first lady Dottie Lamb's breast cancer has spread to her lymph nodes.

And of course, I didn't know what that meant and it was really scary.

Heather called me one time in the hospital and she was crying and she said, People are saying, you're going to die.

Will you promise me you won't die?

And I said, No, Heather.

Nobody can ever tell anybody.

They promise they won't die.

And she accepted that.

The impact on Dick was enormous.

Dick had had this aggressive attitude about life and death and dying.

He had say, you know, we have a duty to die and we spend too much money on the end of life.

And all of a sudden, the most precious person on earth was in jeopardy.

And Dick Lamm wasn't as glib any more about the subject of death and dying by being able to take this one medicine.

My doctor said that my chances of survival had gone from about 40% to 60%.

And at that moment, I said 60%.

I can survive on 60%.

I had this feeling I was going to survive.

At that point, everybody came to my first press conference when I got out of the hospital, so I decided to bore them with the details of what I had and what I didn't have.

And then I said to them, But I need your help.

I'm going to try to use this disease to educate women around the state about the importance of having mammograms.

She saw it as an opportunity to teach, as an opportunity to give to women who face the same kind of dreadful possibilities.

She used her writing at the Denver Post as a way to talk about it and comfort people in a scary disease like that.

Her ability and her willingness to not only talk about it, but to be kind of a proud breast cancer survivor.

And it was a terrific service, I think, for women across the country who have gone through similar things.

I was still writing for the Post when Obama was running for a second term.

The campaign called me and wanted me to do a special interview with Obama after he had spoken out at woman's group.

So I told the Post, guess what I'm going to do in two weeks?

The editor of the editorial page said Only certain people here can do political interviews.

I said, I'm a freelancer.

I know a newspaper who would like this column.

And I think I'll call them.

And I was about to dial a number and the male editor called me back and he said, we've changed our minds.

We think maybe you ought to do that column.

So I did write four books.

The first one was called Second Banana, and that was written when I really felt in so many places, like a second banana when I was with Dick and I wrote this article about being on a ski day with him up in Aspen.

People were literally trampling on me to get to Dick.

I was getting very resentful.

So I wrote a column about how I felt on that and what felt like being a second banana when you're married to the top banana and people are only paying attention to him.

It's an admission that you have to bring patience and deference to being the wife of a major political personality.

She did that without compromise to her strength and integrity.

Dick was such a big personality, you know, and he could suck the oxygen out of every room that he walked into.

She really had the ability to define the issues so that they were approachable by human beings.

I started to think about how all my political life I'd been doing was encouraging women to rise to the top, to do other things, to get a job if they wanted to quit a job if they wanted.

I mean, I was doing all this stuff and I'd never really put myself on the line.

I decided to run for the Senate and I got lots and lots of people behind me.

Young people, particularly, she developed a policy slate that she really believed in.

She hired some great people to work with her to help her out with the campaign.

And she was very, very good at campaigning.

There was a lot of help from the national party.

Hillary Clinton came out and had a fundraiser and campaigned with Dottie.

She did a terrific job, but it just wasn't there.

I was very sad to lose.

It was a real blow, and I didn't think I'd be that much of a blow to me.

But it was.

After I had lost the election in November.

A woman called me from some new group called the Women's Success Forum, and she said to me, Dottie, we want you to come talk and either be a keynote speaker or lead a breakout session.

I start to cry.

I said, I'm not a success anymore.

She said, Oh, come on.

Just because you lost the election, look at all your other successes.

Look at what you've done in this pep talk.

I said, I don't know.

I'll think about it.

I hung up and all of a sudden my spirit came back and I said, I can give a talk about risk taking because that's what I did.

You don't always win when you take a risk.

And I called her back and I said, Yes, I'll do it.

So I developed a speech called Reaching High, Falling Far and Moving On.

My breakout session.

I got more people in the conference than any other breakout session.

They wanted to know how I recovered, I guess, from losing the election.

And it was very, very successful.

And I turned it into a course I taught at DU.

I had never seen students, mostly women, so engaged as they were with Dottie and in her classroom.

She loved teaching, but teaching saps all of your time if you care about your students.

I liked it, but after six or seven years, I was tired of teaching.

I had known Hillary Clinton.

I had gotten to know her as the governor's wife and then had worked on the Clinton campaign.

And they were picking a group of six women around the nation to be what they called outside delegates to a conference in Cairo on population and development and the conference in Beijing on women.

We were all talking, you know, as a world about women's issues.

I went to Vienna.

I went to Dakar, Senegal.

I went to Mar del Plata, Argentina.

It was almost the highlight of my life in a way, because it was really hard work.

But you did have some influence.

Dick and Dottie were so active.

That was a big part of their lives.

They would take bicycle trips and hiking trips, and they just always seemed to be vital and alive and engaged in in the world.

They loved adventures going to unique places, and there was always a trip on the table.

When a long, beautiful marriage they had.

I know she misses Dick, but she's made up her mind she's going to be happy and enjoy her life.

I think up until the age, she was probably 82, she would be on the last Lift skiing the latest hours.

Still today, Dottie Lamm sits down with young women encouraging them to move into public life and be a part of the solution and do what they can to make our society better.

Her activism for women and for reproductive rights and for environmentalism.

Combine that with being an extraordinary mother and a political spouse and a columnist.

She has always lived in a way that is trying to make the world a better place.

And I think that's that's a role model for everybody, not just women and girls.