Minnesota's first congresswoman lost re-election when her husband demanded she get back in the kitchen

OKLEE, Minn.—Three little words ended the political career of Minnesota’s first U.S. Congresswoman: “Coya Come Home”.

That was the newspaper headline heard 'round the nation.

It all started in 1958 when Coya Knutson’s husband Andy wrote a letter claiming his wife’s career in Washington was ruining their family’s life and that she needed to come home.

The letter worked. Knutson lost her re-election bid, cutting short what started as a groundbreaking political career.

Only later did people learn the dirty truth behind it all.

Cornelia “Coya” Gjesdal Knutson was born in 1912 on a farm near Edmore, North Dakota.

Coya was the second of four daughters born to Norwegian-Lutheran immigrants Kristian and Christina Gjesdal.

Raised in a household that valued hard work, she was driving a tractor by age 11.

But farm life wasn’t all she absorbed — Coya also inherited her parents' deep passion for politics, as they were devoted supporters of the Nonpartisan League.

She eventually attended Concordia College in Moorhead, graduating in 1934 with a degree in music and English. Knutson studied opera at The Julliard School in New York City one summer before returning to North Dakota to become a teacher.

According to the Minnesota Historical Society, that’s when “a slow-moving romance” began brewing between Coya and Andy Knutson, one of her father’s farmhands.

The couple married in 1940 and moved to Andy’s hometown of Oklee, Minnesota, where they opened a hotel and cafe. Coya managed the cafe and taught full-time before they adopted their son Terry in 1948.

Knutson once told a reporter that, as a young wife and mother, she sometimes felt “trapped” and wanted to see “something of the world.”

In addition to her parents’ influence, Knutson was inspired by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to dip her toes into politics, serving on several local boards and chairing her local Democratic-Farmer-Labor party.

She was elected to the Minnesota State Legislature in 1950 and re-elected in 1952.

By 1954, she decided to run for U.S. House in Minnesota’s Ninth District (now part of the Seventh District). She hit the campaign trail hard.

According to the State Historical Society, she traveled more than 25,000 miles and addressed more than 20,000 voters. Records say "she often woke at dawn to visit with farmers and charmed crowds at county fairs and pickle festivals with her accordion and operatic singing voice."

But not everyone in the DFL party appreciated Knutson’s folksy ways. At the time, the party was trying to reach beyond its rural base, and Knutson’s thick accent and accordion playing didn’t cut it. They endorsed a more polished male candidate.

But Knutson beat him and three other challengers in the DFL primary before beating a six-term Republican incumbent in November’s general election.

Once in office, she was a prolific representative, authoring 61 bills and becoming the first woman to serve on the Agriculture Committee. She worked on a school lunch assistance program, a federal student loan bill, funding cystic fibrosis research and introduced bills to help Native Americans in her district.

Knutson was reelected in 1956, but challenges loomed on the horizon as she pursued a third term in 1958. She had ruffled feathers within her own party by not consistently supporting DFL-endorsed candidates. However, the most personal blow came from inside her own household when her husband, Andy, publicly released a letter urging the DFL to nominate a different candidate for Congress — stating he wanted his wife back home, where he believed she belonged.

Lloyd Sveen, a political writer for The Forum, dubbed it the “Coya Come Home” letter.

Coya, I want you to tell the people of the 9th District this Sunday that you are through in politics. That you want to go home and make a home for your husband and son. As your husband, I compel you to do this. I'm tired of being torn apart from my family. I'm sick and tired of having you run around with other men all the time and not your husband. I love you, honey.

A barrage of publicity followed including false accusations that Coya was having an affair with her young campaign manager. Andy begged her to "come back to our happy, happy home."

In 1955, when traditional gender roles were firmly entrenched and only a third of women worked outside the home, Andy's pleas struck a nerve.

She lost the 1958 election by just 1,390 votes to the six-foot-five-inch tall Odin Langen, whose campaign slogan was “A Big Man for a Man-Sized Job.”

Most pundits credited the “Coya Come Home” letter with sinking Knutson’s bid for re-election. But Knutson and her supporters knew the letter wasn’t all it seemed. They alleged Andy didn't act alone.

She told NBC’s David Brinkley that a federal investigation was being launched into who might have put Andy up to it. Some suspected her rivals in the DFL party, while others accused her Republican opponent.

According to a report by The Smithsonian Institute, "Coya hired a handwriting expert, who determined that Maurice Nelson, an attorney for Odin Langen, had written the letter. She alleged that fraud was committed against the voters of Minnesota, but nothing came of it. A few months later, Democratic Chairman James Turgeon admitted to reporters that he had written the letter as a favor to his friend Andy Knutson. Turgeon also added that Coya 'was afraid that Andy was going to beat up on her.' "

To further muddy the waters, Andy later apologized and testified to the house committee that Coya's political opponents tricked him into signing the letter and that he voted for her in the general election in 1958.

In a 1982 interview, Knutson said she wasn’t surprised when her husband “unleashed an attack” on her campaign. She said the truth was she had supported her alcoholic, abusive husband for years long after the marriage existed in name only.

“I told him to go out and get a job and that’s when the fur began to fly,” she said.

In hindsight, she said she wished she had been more upfront with the press about her dysfunctional marriage because "Andy was having a field day enjoying all the publicity.”

The couple divorced in 1962 with newspaper headlines proclaiming “Coya Granted Divorce.”

After the ‘58 election, Knutson set her sights on other adventures while still dabbling in politics.

She produced children's television programming in New York for a year before returning to Washington, DC. When she lost a bid to win back her seat in 1960, she worked for 10 years in the Civil Defense Office. Another run for office in 1977 failed.

After retiring in 1972, Knutson moved to Bloomington, Minnesota, to live with her son Terry and his family.

Looking back on her life, she said she wasn’t bitter about the “Coya Come Home” letter.

“I was living with this one: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay saith the Lord,’ and boy, He did a better job than I would have. Most of the guys who were so mean are dead. A lot of them died violent deaths,” Knutson told a reporter in 1982.

She also said she was “too busy” to be angry. Instead, she was adamant about her desire to see more women elected to all levels of government, like she had been. Today, 151 women serve in the U.S. House and Senate, versus 17 when Knutson served from 1954 to 1958.

She died in 1996 at age 84, before witnessing a historic shift: women now make up most of Minnesota's officeholders in Washington. In 2024, both of Minnesota’s U.S. Senators are women, and the state’s U.S. House delegation is evenly split, with four men and four women.

Toward the end of her life, Knutson felt women were still vulnerable in seeking political office because of long-held beliefs about gender roles. Still, she said they must push past all that to keep representative democracy moving forward.

“I’ve always found that women have to work twice as hard as men to accomplish the same job,” she said. “They’re coming up from behind and they have to catch up.”

VIDEOS contributed by WDAY Collection (MSS 10351) and the State Historical Society of North Dakota. Edited by Chris Flynn.