Barbara Flynn Currie, 40-year veteran of Illinois House, trailblazer for
women in Springfield, dies
[April 18, 2026]
By Hannah Meisel
CHICAGO — Barbara Flynn Currie, a 40-year veteran of the Illinois House
and the first woman to serve as the second-in-command majority leader of
the chamber, died Thursday. She was 85.
Currie, who is tied for the longest-serving legislator in Illinois
history behind imprisoned ex-Speaker Michael Madigan, retired from the
Illinois House in early 2019 but remained involved in state government
and politics, including serving as the head of the Illinois Pollution
Control Board, a post she held until her death. She maintained
relationships with colleagues who grieved her death on Friday.
State Rep. Curtis Tarver, D-Chicago, who was elected in 2018 to replace
Currie after she announced she wouldn’t seek a 21st term, was emotional
as he summarized her legacy as a “trailblazer” in a speech on the House
floor in Springfield. He said she “raised her children first, finished
her degree later, in what she described as ‘doing it on the motherhood
plan.’”
“That mattered,” Tarver said. “It shaped how she saw people, how she
approached policy and how she understood their real lives behind the
decisions we make in this chamber.”
Currie, whose father taught at the University of Chicago, grew up in
Hyde Park and graduated from its laboratory high school in 1958. But the
next year, she withdrew from her university studies at the U of C and
married her husband David, a recent graduate, whom she followed to
Harvard Law School. In the early 1960s, the couple moved back to Chicago
when David began teaching at the U of C’s law school.
While raising young children, Currie finally obtained her undergraduate
degree in 1968 before working on the campaign of activist and lawyer
Michael Shakman to be elected delegate to the 1969-70 constitutional
convention. As she told the University of Chicago’s alumni magazine in
2019, it was Shakman who encouraged her to run for an open House seat in
1978.
When Currie arrived in Springfield as a newly minted legislator in
January 1979, it was to a Capitol — and by extension, a state government
— run almost exclusively by men. According to transcripts of House
proceedings at the time, she was referred to as “Mrs. Currie” more than
a third of the times she was called on to speak on the House floor
during her first term; in modern times, representatives are almost
exclusively referred to by their titles.
Women comprised roughly 13% of the legislature in those days, and as
Currie told the U of C’s magazine in 2019, the few women who were in
public office “generally inherited the job.”
But Tarver noted Friday that there are now 78 women in the General
Assembly, which account for roughly 44% of the Illinois House and
Senate, a statistic that can be directly traced back to Currie, he said.
Madigan’s appointment of Currie to majority leader in 1997 was not
popular, but Tarver said she’d earned it “through preparation,
discipline, and most importantly, intellect.”
“She did not inherit it,” he said. “She built the path.”
House Majority Leader Robyn Gabel, D-Evanston, who is now the second
woman to serve in that role, broke down in tears Friday as she asked the
House for a moment of silence “to honor my friend, my mentor and my role
model for over 30 years.”
Gabel expounded on Currie’s example of serving “with dignity … humility”
and her example of how “to dedicate your life to something larger than
yourself.”
“Her leadership in the General Assembly helped guide the state through
some of the most difficult moments,” she said. “The impeachment,
actually.”
Gabel was referring to the impeachment proceedings of ex-Gov. Rod
Blagojevich in early 2009, for which Currie had been appointed chair of
the House committee to investigate the governor after his December 2008
arrest by FBI agents. Blagojevich wouldn’t be indicted until April 2009,
but in the weeks after his arrest, the Democratic governor declined to
resign.
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Longtime Illinois House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie is
pictured in an Illinois Capitol hallway in January 2013. (Photo by
Seth Perlman, Associated Press)
In addition to shaking down people, including children’s hospital
leaders, for campaign donations, Blagojevich was accused of attempting
to sell president-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat. Before his 2004
election to Congress, Currie worked extremely closely with Obama as her
state House district comprised half of the district he represented in
the Illinois Senate.
Heather Wier Vaught, an attorney in the speaker’s office at the time who
worked on the impeachment effort, recalled that when Madigan formed the
bipartisan committee, many in Springfield expected a quick process
wherein articles of impeachment were drafted and Blagojevich swiftly
removed from office.
But from the outset, Currie made clear that the committee’s work would
be “a very solemn experience” and that “every i was dotted and every t
was crossed,” Wier Vaught, who is now a Springfield lobbyist, said.
Wier Vaught said Currie and the committee had to invent the process
“from scratch,” because the state constitution didn’t specifically lay
it out and Blagojevich was the first constitutional officer impeached in
Illinois.
“A lot of us on staff — we never worked harder, we never worked so many
hours as we did those weeks because she was so insistent we did
everything right,” she said, including giving Blagojevich a chance to
defend himself. Ultimately, he declined to testify.
“She didn’t just treat it as a political exercise,” Wier Vaught said of
the impeachment proceedings. “It was important to her that it not look
like a clown show and that it be a legitimate process.”
Wier Vaught pointed to Currie’s same seriousness in leading the
post-impeachment negotiations on campaign finance reform, along with
other matters like criminal justice reform, which she said Currie
championed “before it was cool.”
Another former Democratic House staffer-turned-lobbyist, Liz Brown,
agreed, calling Currie “the original Illinois progressive.”
Currie was often criticized as being too close to Madigan and what many
referred to as his “Democratic Machine.” But from Brown’s vantage point
during a near-decade on staff, she said she saw Currie “work within the
system” to change it.
“If you look at all the bills that passed under Madigan that had any
progressive bent, that was Barbara,” Brown said. “There wouldn’t be any
progressive wins without her pushing back on Madigan.”
But Currie was also a pragmatist, Brown said, and a master negotiator
with an acerbic wit.
She also recalled Currie going to bat for her personally when she wanted
to leave staff to become a lobbyist in 2009. Brown said that key Madigan
deputies told her flat-out no — “this isn’t the year you become a
lobbyist.”
According to Brown, Currie stepped in, “physically pushed me” into the
office of the senior staffer and said simply: “she’s becoming a
lobbyist.”
When the message back was that Brown “wouldn’t be getting any help from
the speaker’s office,” Currie retorted that “she won’t need any.”
Brown said the episode was another example of Currie working within the
system to change it.
“You had to earn her respect,” she said. “But if you earned it, she had
your back for life.”
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