Nancy Jane Hanks McDonald: Nurse, Legislator, and AIDS Advocate (1934–2007)
By: Jimena Perry
Published: August 27, 2024
Updated: August 27, 2024
Nurse, state legislator, and AIDS patient advocate, Nancy Jane Hanks McDonald was born on October 21, 1934, in Bowling Green, Kentucky. She was the youngest of eight children born to Calla Marie (Sullivan) Hanks and Alger Hanks. When she was eleven years old, the family moved to Austria for her father´s military service as part of the post-World War II U.S. Army occupation. There, she attended a convent school in Salzburg and later the U.S. Army Dependents High School in Linz, where she met her future husband. On the 1950 U.S. census the family was recorded as living back in Bowling Green. She graduated from Nashville’s St. Thomas School of Nursing in 1954.
On December 18, 1954, Nancy Jane Hanks married U.S. Army Officer Candidate Willis Burr McDonald in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The couple had ten children. For a number of years the family moved periodically as a result of her husband’s army assignments. In 1966 the family moved to El Paso, Texas, where they waited for Willis to serve two tours in Vietnam and where they settled after his retirement in 1971.
At the age of forty-one, Nancy McDonald returned to nursing in 1975 and worked at Hotel Dieu Hospital and later Sierra Medical Center in El Paso. During these years, she became involved in politics through the Texas Nurses Association and ultimately served as president of their governmental affairs committee, working on issues such as nursing education and compensation both at state and federal levels. This, along with her involvement with the National Organization of Women, which included the 1980 march for the Equal Rights Amendment in Washington, D. C., were launching points into a political career.
In 1984 McDonald, running as a Democrat, won a seat representing District 73 (later changed to District 76), El Paso, in the House of the Sixty-eighth Texas Legislature in a special election, defeating five opponents, for a thirty-day session on education policy and reform. The following session in 1985, McDonald started her tenure as a representative which made her the only registered nurse in the House at the time. She served in the Sixty-eighth through Seventy-fourth Texas legislatures, when she stepped down after several unopposed reelections.
McDonald’s background as a nurse was a clear part of her work in politics. She was a member of multiple committees during her tenure, including the Ways and Means Committee, Higher Education Committee, Labor and Employment Relations Committee, and Appropriations Committee. She chaired the Labor and Employment Relations Subcommittee on Budget and Oversight in 1991 and served as vice chair of Appropriations in 1993. McDonald spent the most time, however, serving on the Public Health Committee. In 1985 she was vice chair of the Public Health Subcommittee on Budget and Oversight, and in 1987 she served on the Legislative Task Force on AIDS. She played an integral part in securing funding for health and human services programs, spearheaded landmark child immunization legislation, and led the charge for making HIV and AIDS a public health problem, instead of a social one. Her colleagues from the legislature remembered McDonald as someone who worked for those in need, regardless of the situation. Former state representative Glen Maxey called her the “guardian angel’’ of HIV and AIDS patients, and Representative Pat Haggerty, also from El Paso, recalled her efforts to open the El Paso Psychiatric Center to ensure accessible psychiatric care to those in her town. Her legislative service officially ended on January 14, 1997.
McDonald remained in Austin with her husband after her legislative tenure, because six of her children and their families were already in the state´s capital. At seventy-two years old, Nancy Jane Hanks McDonald died of ovarian cancer on May 14, 2007, in Austin. She was survived by her husband Willis who died a few months after her passing. She was also survived by nine of her children, as well as twenty-seven grandchildren. Her funeral Mass was held at St. Austin Catholic Church, where she and her husband were longtime parishioners. McDonald was buried in the Texas State Cemetery.
Bibliography:
Austin American-Statesman, May 15, 2007. Nancy Baker Jones and Ruthe Winegarten, Capitol Women: Texas Female Legislators, 1923–1999 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Legislative Reference Library of Texas: Nancy McDonald (https://lrl.texas.gov/legeLeaders/members/memberDisplay.cfm?memberID=272&searchparams=chamber=~city=~countyID=0~RcountyID=~district=~first=~gender=~last=mcdonald~leaderNote=~leg=~party=~roleDesc=~Committee=), accessed July 30, 2024. Park City Daily News (Bowling Green, Kentucky), December 19, 1954. Texas State Cemetery: Nancy H. McDonald (https://cemetery.tspb.texas.gov/pub/user_form.asp?pers_id=2874), accessed July 30, 2024.
Categories:
- Activism and Social Reform
- Advocates
- Health and Medicine
- Nurses and Nurse Administrators
- Politics and Government
- Government Officials
- State Legislators
- Seventieth Legislature (1987)
- Seventy-first Legislature (1989-1990)
- Seventy-fourth Legislature (1995)
- Seventy-second Legislature (1991-1992)
- Seventy-third Legislature (1993)
- Sixty-eighth Legislature (1983-1984)
- Sixty-ninth Legislature (1985-1986)
- Women
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The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.
Jimena Perry, “McDonald, Nancy Jane Hanks,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 09, 2026, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/mcdonald-nancy-jane-hanks.
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- August 27, 2024
- August 27, 2024
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