SPRINGFIELD — As a policymaker, Democratic state Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie was a champion for progressive causes, from pushing for the legalization of same-sex marriage in Illinois to her focus on myriad issues affecting low-income people, while representing a swath of Chicago’s South Side for 40 years in the General Assembly.

But her lengthy stint as the state’s first female House majority leader opened doors for more women in the legislature, and her institutional knowledge on how to navigate the complexities of statehouse politics made her a role model to many lawmakers.

“At first, when I met her, she seemed a little intimidating because she was so brilliant,” said state Sen. Sara Feigenholtz, a Chicago Democrat who previously served in the House for many years with Currie. “One of the strongest characteristics of Barbara Flynn Currie was how she mentored people, and she would very gently give you ideas and thoughts about how to do things better.”

A longtime resident of Chicago’s Hyde Park community, Currie died on Thursday. She was 85.

Currie served in the Illinois House from 1979 to 2019 and was the House majority leader for about 20 of those years as the top deputy to then-longtime House Speaker Michael Madigan. But she also helped lead a Democratic majority during some of the state government’s darkest times — heading the House panel presiding over the impeachment investigation of disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who went to federal prison for corruption, and being embroiled in a dispute in the mid-2010s between Madigan and then-Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner that led to a two-year budget impasse that decimated state services.

She helped shape some of the most consequential state policies of the last 30 years — legalizing same-sex marriage, abolishing the death penalty, and codifying the earned income tax credit for low- and moderate-income families. She also championed public education funding reform and pushed to overhaul how the criminal justice system treats incarcerated youth.

“Young brains are developing. Young brains, we should understand, that they have room to grow and to mature, so the idea that young people who had no clue what they were doing because they weren’t mature enough should be tossed in the slammer and left there for the rest of their lives did not make good sense from a humane perspective and even from the perspective of the penal system,” Currie told the Tribune in a 2023 interview about her prior, sometimes unsuccessful, efforts to eliminate harsh sentences for young inmates. “Why put people in jail forever who don’t belong there?”

Calling her a friend, mentor and role model for 30 years, current House Majority Leader Robyn Gabel choked up with emotion on the House floor Friday while saying of Currie, “There are people who shape your career and then there are those rare individuals who shape who you are.”

“When I first came into public service, Barbara had already established herself as a force. Respected, steady and extraordinarily capable. I watched how she led, how she listened and how she carried herself with a quiet confidence that never needed to demand attention,” said Gabel, an Evanston Democrat who has served in the House since 2010. “She showed me that leadership is not about being the loudest voice in the room but about being the most thoughtful, the most prepared and the most principled.”

When she entered the legislature, women made up just 13% of the General Assembly, a percentage that grew to 26% by the time Madigan chose her as House majority leader in 1997, according to a 2019 University of Chicago Magazine article about Currie, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the school.

In a prepared statement, current House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Hillside Democrat who was a rank-and-file House member when Currie was majority leader, credited her with making the Illinois House “one of the most diverse and representative chambers in the country,” praising her as a leader who “didn’t just break a glass ceiling — she lifted others up after her.”

Most recently, she served as chair of the Illinois Pollution Control Board after being appointed to the body in 2019 by Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker.

“Barbara Flynn Currie was a trailblazer,” the governor wrote Friday morning on X. “She devoted her life to public service, from advocating for families to ensuring clean air and water for Illinoisans — a leader who tackled each issue with grace. My condolences to her family and loved ones. May her memory be a blessing.”

Born May 3, 1940, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Currie grew up mostly in Hyde Park and earned undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago, where her father was once a professor, according to the university magazine’s article.

She was an activist in the community, and one of the people giving her the nudge to run for office was longtime Chicago attorney Michael Shakman, a friend from the neighborhood and a former student of her now-late husband, David Currie, who taught at the University of Chicago Law School. Shakman ran into her on the street and they talked about how their state legislative district was going to have an open seat.

“I said, ‘Barbara, why don’t you run for that?’ as we were walking on and she said, ‘Oh, why don’t you run for that?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m pretty happy doing what I’m doing but really you should consider it.’ So, she did,” Shakman said. “She was a very outgoing and friendly person, and as a result, she was a good politician.”

Even though she helped Madigan oversee other Democratic lawmakers who controlled the House, Currie maintained collegiality with the other side of the aisle. David Harris, a former longtime Republican state representative from Arlington Heights, attested to that based on their time working together on revenue issues.

“I was a committed Republican, but that doesn’t mean we could not talk about issues,” said Harris, who now serves as Pritzker’s revenue director. “Of course, the Democrats, as they are now, they were in the majority, so her point of view generally won. But she was never harsh with anybody. She treated people with respect.”

Also on the House floor Friday, state Rep. Kelly Cassidy, a progressive Democrat from Chicago’s Rogers Park community, recalled that while she was an activist, she was probably “a pretty annoying little fangirl” of Currie, before starting work in the legislature in 2011. Currie was “one of us” and “she wanted us to be a team and a family,” Cassidy said.

“Just the moments of my kids being under my desk and her talking to them and getting hints on what to buy her grandkids for Christmas, her interest in what the kids were doing, endlessly remembering all of the moments in our lives together but then having that same moment when a staffer would come up and hand her a file that she had never touched before,” Cassidy recalled. “She’d spend about 37 seconds scanning the analysis and then get up and give a master class in debate. I don’t know that we’ll ever see anything like that again.

“Somebody mentioned she was always the smartest person in the room,” Cassidy continued. “But the key to that, and the thing that made it clear that she truly was the smartest person in the room, is she never made you feel like she thought that about herself.”

Currie is survived by two children and several grandchildren. Services are being planned.