M. Jodi Rell, who was the first (and, to date, only) Republican woman to serve as governor of Connecticut, beginning her seven years in office when the incumbent resigned in a corruption scandal, died on Wednesday in Florida. She was 78.
Her family, providing no other details, said she died in a hospital after a brief illness.
Mrs. Rell had been the state’s lieutenant governor for 10 years when she began completing the term of Gov. John G. Rowland, a fellow Republican who had been arrested on a federal corruption charge of accepting $107,000 in gifts from people doing business with the state and not paying taxes on them. He was convicted and sent to prison.
“She steadied the ship, and returned a sense of decency and honesty to state government at a time when both were sorely needed,” her successor as governor, Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat, said in a statement on Thursday.
Known as a moderate Republican, Mrs. Rell sought bipartisan compromise — a goal that she said became more important to her when, five months after becoming governor, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. She returned to her office in the Capitol in Hartford nine days later.
“I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality, as I was told that I had cancer,” Mrs. Rell acknowledged to legislators in delivering her State of the State address. They gave her a standing ovation. Many wore pink ribbons to signify their support for breast cancer research.
“I am looking at things a little differently now, with different eyes,” she added, “eyes more focused on what is truly important, what is truly necessary.”
First elected lieutenant governor on a ticket with Mr. Rowland in 1994, Mrs. Rell served out the remainder of his term after he resigned in disgrace in 2004. “Today the State of Connecticut was humiliated,” she declared at the time, “and I, as John Rowland’s former running mate and colleague, feel personally betrayed. When I first heard the news, I felt like I was punched in the gut.”
Mrs. Rell won the governorship in her own right in 2006 with 63 percent of the vote; the Democratic nominee, John DeStefano Jr., the mayor of New Haven, got 35 percent. The 710,000 votes she received set a record for a Connecticut governor’s race.
Mrs. Rell focused on education, including investing in early-childhood programs, and the state’s economy (although her imposition of an estate tax earned her an F rating on the fiscal-policy report card of the libertarian Cato Institute in 2010). She supported abortion rights, embryonic stem-cell research, public-option health care legislation and the death penalty. The state carried out its first execution since 1960 during her tenure.
In 2005, she signed legislation that made Connecticut the first state to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples without being ordered to do so by the courts. She also signed a bill banning political contributions from lobbyists and providing for the public financing of future campaigns.
In 2008, Mrs. Rell was mentioned as a possible running mate for Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee. He chose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska instead.
In 2010, as Mrs. Rell was poised to leave office after deciding not to seek re-election, she said she considered her campaign to “restore honor to the state of Connecticut” to have been a major legacy.
When she was sworn in at 58, she became the second woman to serve as governor of Connecticut; the first, Ella T. Grasso, a Democrat — the first woman to be elected governor in her own right in the United States — served from 1975 to 1980, when she resigned while under treatment for cancer. The state has not had a Republican governor since Mrs. Rell left office.
She was born Mary Carolyn Reavis on June 16, 1946, in Norfolk, Va., to Benjamin and Foy Reavis. Her mother died when she was 7, and her father, who worked at the nearby naval base, later married Dorothy Peach Glisson, a divorced mother of three. When Mary was in her teens, a boyfriend nicknamed her Jodi because she reminded him of the actress, singer and dancer Joey Heatherton, whose name he garbled.
In the summer, she sometimes stayed with relatives in North Carolina, where she picked tobacco and learned how to drive a truck.
She attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk but dropped out to marry Louis Rell, a Navy pilot, in 1967. He became a commercial airline pilot. The couple moved to New Jersey and then, in 1969, to Brookfield, Conn., near Danbury, where Mrs. Rell attended Western Connecticut State University.
Her survivors include two children, Michael and Meredith, and several grandchildren. Mr. Rell died in 2014.
In 1984, after working as a tutor and a substitute teacher in Hartford, Mrs. Rell was elected to the state’s House of Representatives, where she served from 1985 to 1995. After being elected lieutenant governor in 1994, she was re-elected in 1998 and 2002.
Mrs. Rell was always self-aware: She knew where she stood as a wife, mother and elected official, she said. She liked to recall the first time she ran for lieutenant governor, when, returning home one night in a suit and high heels, she discovered that her family had neglected to take out the trash.
“I’m running for lieutenant governor,” she said indignantly. “The least you could have done is taken out the trash.”
To which, she recalled, her son retorted, “So does that make you someone important?”
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