But then she was named 1958's Student Leader of the Year, snagging an honor usually reserved for men and signifying a success in the wider co-educational world that would continue to grow after college.

From Harvard to Washington

After Duke, Dole headed to Harvard Law School (HLS), where as one of only two dozen women she met hostility from the very beginning of her time in Cambridge.

On her first day at the Law School, Dole recalled in a commencement speech at Smith College earlier this spring, "A male student came up to me and demanded to know what I was doing there."

"He said, 'Elizabeth...don't you realize that there are men who would give their right arm to be in this law school--men who would use their legal education,'" Dole said.

After three years at HLS, Dole once again was forced to face prejudice. She secured a job as a White House consumer lawyer after finding that no Washington law firms were hiring women.

This was the first of many government jobs for Dole, who started her political life as a Lyndon Johnson Democrat and soon became a stalwart in Reagan Republican cabinets.

Instead of crossing the aisle to switch party affiliations, Dole walked down the aisle, leaving what many saw as a marriage to her political ambition for a wedding to a divorced Senator from Kansas in 1975.

She spent the 1970s distinguishing herself as a consumer-affairs lawyer, and as her husband's political star rose in Congress, Dole used her legal experience to vault into the executive branch as President Ronald Reagan's Transportation Secretary.

President George Bush tapped her to be his secretary of labor, and there Dole had again to be prepared as she was thrown in the middle of a man's world of coal-mine strikes and labor negotiations.

Her life in government seemed to end in 1992, when the Clinton administration took over and Dole accepted the presidency of one of the world's largest charitable organizations.

The Red Cross

Since taking the helm of the Red Cross, with 30,000 full-time staff and over a million volunteers nationwide, Dole has concentrated on improving blood-donation services and disaster relief.

The move to a non-profit group was seen as somewhat out of character for a woman widely perceived as one of the most ambitious in Washington. However, just as those who knew her in college say Dole's overachieving was completely genuine, those who work with her at the Red Cross see no underlying political motivation.

"She exudes this very genuine nature. She exudes that which she asks of [Red Cross] volunteers," says Navin Narayan '99, who last week became the youngest head of a Red Cross committee--the Committee on Youth Involvement--in the organization's history.