More than 75 years after she first graduated from UW–Madison, Louise Moede Lex ’51, MS’57 still remembers the apple blossoms.
As a freshman, Lex resided in the sleeping porch of the Tabard Inn, a low-income women’s co-op at 115 Orchard Street. While winter cold kept Lex and her roommates alert through evening study sessions, spring mornings offered a sweet and memorable reward.
“There was an apple tree just outside the windows, and in the spring, the apple blossoms and the smells and the fragrance — it was just incredible,” she recalls. “It was almost as if I had earned it, because I studied with blankets around me.”
The same fortitude that helped Lex weather those frigid winter nights drove her to forge her way to the UW — and then to the remarkable life she led thereafter.
Born Louise Moede in 1929, Lex spent her childhood traversing the upper Midwest as her minister father moved among congregations. She grew up surrounded by a deep love of learning — her father was an avid reader and active participant in her schooling. During the family’s time in Morris, Illinois, Lex was inspired by her fifth-grade teacher to pursue a career in education.
In 1943, the Moedes moved to Madison so that Lex’s father could go back to school for his doctorate. Instead, his health declined rapidly. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and Lex’s mother, a registered nurse, became the sole provider for the family. For Lex, then a freshman at West High School, childhood ended abruptly, and higher education became not just a dream, but a practical necessity.
“My dad and my mother knew that if I was to survive, I would have to have something that was important in terms of being able to support myself,” Lex says. “I think the whole notion of that was one of the strong, guiding principles that I had.”
That principle guided her to the University of Wisconsin, where she had some of the most formative experiences of her life, including a Shakespeare course with Professor Helen C. White.
“I remember sitting in Bascom Hall, and all these women were waiting for her, and she’d come in — and she wore purple, always wore purple — and we would just sort of sit up and say, ‘She’s okay. She’s somebody we really can admire,’ ” Lex recalls.
Another memorable moment came at the end of her senior year when, after a semester of intellectual sparring with a professor, Lex was carried out of Bascom Hall on the shoulders of her all-male classmates.
“They were so excited,” she says, “but I think they were mostly grateful because I raised some issues with the professor.”
Lex’s fiery spirit was a perfect fit at the UW, where she learned not only how to be a teacher, but how to be a leader. She served as president of the Tabard Inn co-op; vice-president and, later, president of the YWCA; and choir chair at the University Presbyterian Church (Pres House). She was also a member of both the Mortar Board and Phi Beta Kappa honor societies.
She also learned the power of her voice. In 1951, when Willie McGee, a Black man, was accused of raping a white woman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Lex joined fellow college students in marching to the capitol and demanding that then-governor Walter J. Kohler Jr. write a letter to the governor of Mississippi in defense of McGee.
“He didn’t, but it was the whole notion of students coming together to object to inequality,” Lex says. “These were important issues to me that started here.”
After graduation, Lex taught high school history and civics before returning to the UW for her master’s degree in political science. It was during this period that she reconnected with Louis Lex ’50, LLB’54, MS’59, a law student and acquaintance from her undergraduate days. Their first date was a late-night swim in Lake Mendota after Louis’s shift at the Oscar Mayer plant, and Louis proposed no less than a week later in front of Memorial Union. (The couple waited two more years before getting formally engaged.)
For some women of Lex’s generation, marriage was the ultimate achievement. For Lex, it was a welcome addition to the robust life she’d long been working toward. Over the course of several cross-country moves, Lex taught high school, volunteered with the League of Women Voters, adopted two children with Louis, worked on Title IX implementation with the Iowa Women’s Political Caucus, earned a doctorate in higher education and political science, and became the second-ever female instructor in the political science department at Iowa State University.
“I was a pretty well-known person because I was an advocate for women on campus, and that was kind of a hot potato at the time,” Lex says.
When it became clear that her opportunities at Iowa State were limited, she took a job with the Iowa Commission on the Status of Women (ICSW), where she helped women find gainful employment in the trades.
“My political activism included working with unions, and my master’s thesis in political science at Wisconsin centered on the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, so getting women into nontraditional jobs at ICSW was just a natural kind of thing for me," Lex says. “It was a challenge, but I could help women, in a very practical way, find a higher degree of pay.”
From the ICSW, Lex moved into a role with the Iowa Department of Substance Abuse and, later, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services, where she worked as a state health planner until her retirement in 2025 at age 95.
Looking back, Lex attributes the winding path of her career — one that took her from teacher to professor to public health professional — to the women in her life that stoked her ambition, and to the UW education that gave it direction.
“I moved from teaching to public health, and I believe that the liberal arts give you permission to look at lots of different areas,” Lex says. “It’s not just one small part of the study but the whole gamut, and this makes you more flexible and more able to see possibilities.”
Lex has spent the better part of her recent retirement steeped in reflection, helping her daughter, Andrea, write a book about Lex’s storied life. She’s also made several trips from her home in Ames back to Madison to revisit the place where she made some of her most cherished memories.
“It’s so much a part of me, and I just love it,” Lex says of the UW. “All of those [memories] are so vivid to me.”
