This segment originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.

Gladys Pyle was a woman of many firsts.

She was the first woman elected to the United States Senate without having previously been appointed to it. She was also the first female Republican Senator, the first unmarried female Senator and South Dakota's first female Senator. Before her time in the U.S. Senate, she was the first woman elected to South Dakota's House of Representatives.

Listen to an excerpt of an interview she gave to Steven Schaefer in 1979. Pyle connects her earlier fights for women's rights in the 1920s and 1930s with a battle that was happening at the time of the interview—the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Audio courtesy of the South Dakota State Historical Society Archives.