As a U.S. senator from Kansas, Nancy Landon Kassebaum Baker (born 1932) was a political maverick whose stands ranged from support of the Equal Rights Amendment and a woman's right to choose abortion to support for the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

Nancy Landon was born in Topeka, Kansas, on July 29, 1932, the daughter of Alfred M. Landon and his second wife, Theo (Cobb) Landon. She grew up in a political family. Her father, the Republican governor of Kansas, ran against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936, a race he lost by a landslide, carrying only two states, Maine and Vermont. Although she was only four years old when her father ran for president and remembered little of the contest, she later claimed she received a first-rate political education as she grew up by listening to her father and his friends through a heating vent from...