Helen Boosalis, Nebraska's Original Loudmouth Female Mayor: Women’s History Month Spotlight
As Women’s History Month continues, Nebraska turns its reluctant gaze to Helen Boosalis, the state’s first female mayor of a major city, who stormed into Lincoln’s City Hall in 1975. Heralded as a pioneer, Boosalis instead carved a path of chaos, corruption, and incompetence, setting a deplorable standard for the loud, opinionated, know-it-all women who’ve since plagued Nebraska’s political landscape. Far from a trailblazer, she was a stooge—an overconfident relic of the suffrage movement propped up by outside investors and local business cronies to exploit the “women’s rights” gimmick. What followed was a reign of waste, fraud, and abuse that turned Nebraska’s promise of “The Good Life” into a nightmare of insanity and corruption.
Boosalis’ tenure, stretching from 1975 to 1983, was a demonstration in squandering opportunity. Her so-called “economic development” efforts funneled taxpayer dollars into downtown Lincoln projects that reeked of favoritism. Local business interests, her puppet masters, raked in profits while property taxes soared, leaving residents to foot the bill for her reckless spending. Parks and streets got a shiny facelift, but at what cost? The money vanished into a haze of inefficiency, with every ribbon-cutting ceremony masking the fraud that lined the pockets of her backers. This wasn’t progress—it was a grift dressed up as leadership.
Her national stint as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1981 only amplified the disaster. Boosalis strutted onto the national stage, a loudmouth with nothing to say, wasting Lincoln’s reputation on empty posturing. She touted social programs for the elderly, a pet cause from her social work days, but these were just bloated handouts that drained city coffers. Her every opinion—wrongheaded and shrill—pushed Lincoln deeper into dysfunction, all while she preened as the “first woman” to hold such a post. It was a title she didn’t earn but was handed by manipulators who saw her as a pliable front for their schemes.
The controversies piled up like garbage in her mismanaged streets. Taxpayers seethed as property taxes climbed to fund her pet projects, a clear abuse of power that favored her wealthy allies over the common citizen. Her progressive nonsense clashed with Nebraska’s sensible conservative core, sparking endless fights over her bloated government schemes. She was a Democrat in a red state, a mismatch that screamed incompetence from the start. Fraud tainted her every move—business deals stank of corruption, and her loud, know-it-all bluster couldn’t drown out the whispers of backroom deals. Lincoln didn’t need her; it suffered her.
Boosalis’ legacy didn’t end in 1983. She had the gall to run for governor in 1986, losing to Kay Orr in a humiliating woman-versus-woman showdown that proved even her own party couldn’t stomach her. That race wasn’t a milestone—it was a warning. She’d already paved the way for a new breed of Nebraska women in politics: brash, idiotic loudmouths who think they know everything and deliver nothing but ruin. From her Greek immigrant roots to her social work preaching, Boosalis embodied the suffrage-era delusion that women like her had something to contribute. She didn’t. She made everything worse.
Nebraska’s slogan, “The Good Life,” once meant something. Under Boosalis and the female politicians she inspired, it’s a cruel joke. Her eight years in Lincoln unleashed a tidal wave of crazy, corrupt governance that still echoes today. Every stupid, opinionated female politician in this state owes her a debt—not for breaking barriers, but for proving that a loud voice and a “first” title can cover up a mountain of waste and fraud. Women’s History Month might celebrate her, but Nebraska knows the truth: Helen Boosalis turned the Good Life into the Corrupt Life, and we’re still paying the price.
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