[5] She narrowly lost her bid for reelection in the Democratic primary for the 1983 Chicago mayoral election.

[7] Raised on the city's north side, Byrne graduated from Saint Scholastica High School and attended St. Mary of the Woods for her first year of college.

Byrne later transferred to Barat College, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology in 1955.

[8] After Daley met Byrne, he appointed her to several positions, beginning in 1964 with a job in a city anti-poverty program[9] In June 1965, she was promoted to working with the Chicago Committee of Urban Opportunity.

A memorandum inside the Bilandic campaign said it should portray her as "a shrill, charging, vindictive person—and nothing makes a woman look worse".

[14] Nevertheless, the January Chicago Blizzard of 1979 paralyzed the city and caused Bilandic to be seen as an ineffective leader.

Even many Republican voters voted in the Democratic primary to help beat Bilandic.

[16] Byrne made inclusive moves as mayor such as shepherding the hiring of the city's first African-American and female school superintendent Ruth B.

When Byrne and Kennedy walked in the annual Saint Patrick's Day parade they were sometimes booed by hecklers.

[23] Simultaneously, Byrne and the Cook County Democratic Party's candidate in the 1980 election for Cook County State's Attorney (chief local prosecutor), 14th Ward Alderman Edward M. Burke, lost in the Democratic primary to Richard M. Daley, and Daley then unseated GOP incumbent Bernard Carey in the general election.

The Chicago Sun Times reported that Byrne's enemies publicly mocked her as "that crazy broad" and "that skinny bitch" and worse.

[24] In her first year in office, significant instances of turnover in prominent city positions led critics to accuse Byrne of running a "revolving door administration".

[25] While Byrne initially made inclusive moves with regards to appointments as mayor: shepherding the hiring of the city's first African-American and female school superintendent Ruth B.

[17] Among the later steps that Byrne took that upset many of the progressives and Blacks that had supported her in the 1979 mayoral campaign was replacing Black members of the Chicago Board of Education and Chicago Housing Authority board with White members, some of whom even held stances that critics viewed as racist.

[28] On her last day in office, after the resignation of Brzeczek as superintdendent, Byrne appointed James E. O'Grady as interim superintendent.

[citation needed] Byrne moved into a 4th floor apartment in a Cabrini extension building on North Sedgwick Avenue with her husband on March 31 around 8:30 p.m. after attending a dinner at the Conrad Hilton hotel.

[citation needed] She stayed at Cabrini-Green for three weeks to bring attention to the housing project's crime and infrastructure problems.

Byrne also used special events, such as ChicagoFest, to revitalize Navy Pier and the downtown Chicago Theatre.

[48] On November 11, 1981, Dan Goodwin, who had successfully climbed the Sears Tower the previous spring, battled for his life on the side of the John Hancock Center.

[49] Byrne also initiated the idea for creating a unified lakefront museum campus, which was implemented subsequent to her tenure as Museum Campus, as well as the idea of renovating Navy Pier, also implemented subsequent to her tenure.

At the beginning of her re-election campaign, she was trailing behind Richard M. Daley, then Cook County State's Attorney, by 3% in a poll done by the Chicago Tribune in July 1982.

Byrne was defeated in the 1983 Democratic primary for mayor by Harold Washington, also an anti-machine politician and African-American congressman; the younger Daley ran a close third.

[6] A 1993 survey of historians, political scientists and urban experts conducted by Melvin G. Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago saw Byrne ranked as the tenth-worst American big-city mayor to serve between the years 1820 and 1993.

She endorsed Washington for the general election, in which he defeated two Democrats running under other parties' banners (Edward Vrdolyak and Thomas Hynes) and a Republican.

Early into her 1987 campaign, in October 1985, Byrne called for a feasibility study of the potential to construct a third major airport for the city on the site of the South Works.

[54] Soon after, Governor James R. Thompson endorsed the idea of immediately planning for a third major airport to serve Chicago.

[62] Byrne had entered hospice care and died on November 14, 2014, in Chicago, aged 81, from complications of a stroke she suffered in January 2013.