Mary Elizabeth Alexander Hanford was born into the family of a well-to-do florist in Salisbury, N.C., on July 29, 1936. Popular and a perfectionist, “Liddy” organized a bird club in third grade and a junior book club in seventh grade. Her high school class voted her most likely to succeed. Her classmates at Duke University in Durham, N.C., elected her women's student government president as well as May queen. She graduated from Duke in 1958 with a major in political science and international affairs.

Hanford found secretarial work at Harvard University and enrolled as a student, completing a master's degree in education and government in 1960. During the summers she studied at Oxford University in England and worked in Washington, D.C., and at the United Nations. At Harvard Law School from 1962 to 1965, she was one of 24 women in a class of 550. After graduation she moved to Washington, D.C., passed the bar exam, and found short-term government work organizing a conference on education for the deaf. In 1967–68 she practiced law in Washington as a public defender.

Hanford joined President Lyndon B. Johnson's consumer affairs staff in April 1968 and continued during President Richard M. Nixon's administration. As deputy director of Nixon's Committee on Consumer Interests from 1969 to 1973, she helped write new laws for truth in packaging and helped persuade supermarkets to date products for freshness.

In 1972 Hanford met Senator Robert Dole from Kansas, and a courtship began. The next year Nixon appointed Hanford to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where she worked to ensure that women receive access to credit cards and bank loans. Hanford and Dole married on Dec. 6, 1975. She took a leave of absence from the FTC in 1976 to work on Dole's campaign for United States vice-president on the unsuccessful Republican ticket with Gerald Ford. She resigned from the FTC in 1979 to support her husband's unsuccessful bid for his party's 1980 presidential nomination.

President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 and named Elizabeth Dole, his first female appointee, to head his public liaison office. Two years later Reagan appointed her to his Cabinet as secretary of transportation. Dole's achievements as “safety secretary” included instituting rear window car brake lights, random drug testing of equipment operators, seat belt laws in most states, and a drinking age of 21 nationwide. The National Safety Council honored her with its 1989 Distinguished Service award.

Dole left the Cabinet in 1987 to help her husband try again for the presidential nomination. As President George Bush's secretary of labor from January 1989 until October 1990, Dole tightened enforcement of health and safety laws and persuaded both sides in the bitter Pittston Coal strike to accept mediation.

She left government service to take office, in February 1991, as president of the American Red Cross. Dole launched a massive overhaul of the way the Red Cross collected, tested, and distributed blood, and she visited disaster sites around the world. In October 1995 the Red Cross granted her a one-year leave of absence to campaign for her husband in his third bid for the presidency