Profile · Brookfield, Wisconsin
Susan Jane Shannon Engeleiter
Youngest woman elected to the Wisconsin Legislature; first woman to head the U.S. Small Business Administration; born and schooled in Brookfield
$82,500
Susan Jane Shannon Engeleiter was the youngest woman ever elected to the Wisconsin Legislature and later the first woman to run the U.S. Small Business Administration. She grew up in Brookfield—Brookfield Elementary, Pilgrim Park, Brookfield Central class of 1970—and has often described a small-business household as the ground that shaped her politics. The clerk at the Wisconsin State Senate would not hire her at first: there were no page uniforms cut for women. She kept showing up until he relented, and she and a friend became the first female pages in the building. Through UW–Madison (class of 1974) she worked twenty to thirty hours a week, then spent a summer knocking on some twelve thousand Waukesha County doors. At twenty-two she won an eight-way primary and beat a nineteen-year-old in the general by joking that she had more experience. She left the Assembly to chase Bob Kasten’s House seat and lost the 1978 primary to Jim Sensenbrenner by 589 votes. A 1980 special election put her in the state Senate, where she became the first woman minority leader; she finished a UW law degree in 1981 while sitting in the chamber. In 1988 she ran for the U.S. Senate and lost to Herb Kohl. George H. W. Bush named her SBA administrator in 1989—the first woman in the job. When she was sworn in she had a five-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son and had backed six weeks of maternity leave for Wisconsin workers. Honeywell later took her to Minneapolis. Since 1998 she has been with Data Recognition Corporation, an educational-testing firm, serving as CEO since 2006. The page who did not fit the uniform ended up running the agency that writes the rules for people who start without a uniform.