[3] She served as Assistant dean of women at Ohio State University from 1963 to 1964, when she married Peter B. Wagner and moved back to Arizona,[5] where she worked as a reporter for the Tucson Daily Citizen from 1964 to 1965.
She then worked at Catalina High School, teaching government and history from 1965 to 1969 when she, her husband and their two children, Kirk and Kristina, moved to Reno, Nevada.
[4] During her legislative career, she supported women's rights, helped create a fee on marriage licenses that funded women's shelters, increased funding for public and higher education, supported environmental protections and protections for at-risk children, required tests for infants for metabolic genetic disorders and pushed for increased governmental accountability and ethics reform.
Maude Frazier, who had been appointed lieutenant governor in 1962 to fill the remaining 6 months of the late Rex Bell's term, was the first woman to hold that distinction.
Wagner had previously been urged by Republican leaders to run for Congress or governor and had been named as a potential vice presidential candidate for George H. W. Bush in 1988 by the National Women's Political Caucus.
She and Bob Seale, a Republican candidate for state treasurer, were on their way to Carson City from a Labor Day parade and annual Cantaloupe Festival in Fallon when the twin-engined Cessna 411 crashed shortly after takeoff.
[3] Upon leaving office in 1995, she received the Women Executives in State Government's "Breaking the Glass Ceiling" Award and became an associate director of the University of Nevada's Great Basin Policy Research Center.
[3][5] In 1997, Wagner was appointed to the board of Wells Fargo bank[5] and in April was named by Governor Miller to the Nevada Gaming Commission.
"[4] She frequently agreed with the committee's only other female member, Deborah Griffin, and the two were often the dissenting voices in 3–2 decisions to give applicants licenses.
[4] Interested in compulsive gambling, Nevada Gaming Control Board Chairman Bill Bible appointed her to a statewide committee that considered the problem in 1998.