In my last post, you met Rep. Edith Green (D-OR), who introduced the Equal Pay Act in 1955 and saw it through eight years to passage in 1963. That piece of legislation set the stage for more awareness of the unequal status of women in society.
But why is it that Edith Green could see beyond the boundaries that society placed on women of her era?
Edith Louis Starrett was born in 1910 in Trent, South Dakota. Her parents were both schoolteachers who valued education for their daughter. When Edith was 6 years old, the family moved to Oregon, where Edith went on to a pursue a college education.
But here’s where Edith’s dreams get crushed. She had wanted to go to law school and practice law. But her parents and teachers warned her that a woman lawyer would never be allowed to try cases, that she would be stuck with menial tasks in back rooms. Downhearted, she pursued one of the few avenues open to women at the time, that of teaching.
Her path in traditional roles seemed set. She began her career teaching in Salem, Oregon, and married in 1933. She and her husband, Arthur Green, had two children, and she graduated from the University of Oregon in 1939.
Here’s where Edith’s story widens out. While teaching, she served as legislative chairperson for the Oregon Congress of Parents and Teachers. In this role, she had a political awakening. She became an expert in educational issues and learned the mechanics of politics.
Edith took a stab at elected office and ran for secretary of state in 1952. Although she lost, she was confident enough to make a run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1954, she won the seat with 52 percent of the vote in her district.
And so, you see? She was only barely in Congress before she introduced the Equal Pay Act. And no wonder — women had long been underpaid as teachers and their salaries often trailed that of male teachers.
In the House, she was attuned especially to matters of education and equal opportunity. Financial hardship had stretched out her college years, with her graduation coming at the age of 29. Her unrelenting advocacy for equal opportunity in education earned her the nickname “Mrs. Education.”
But not everyone thrilled to her laser focus. Behind her back, male colleagues in Congress called her the “Wicked Witch of the West.” One (presumably male) reporter complained she had “an unladylike aptitude for hard political infighting.”*
Yet her drive for equal opportunity in education eventually lead to the introduction of Title IX in 1970. At the time, everyone envisioned the result of the legislation would be to open law schools, medical schools, male-only universities and other institutions of higher education to women and to equalize financial assistance. So, it makes sense that Rep. Edith Green would be the driving force behind such a bill.
Yet she wasn’t alone. To introduce the bill, Green teamed up with another women in the House and a male colleague in the Senate — Rep. Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink (D-HI) and Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN). These are two people well worth knowing, so they’ll each get their own blog post!
* Karen Blumenthal, Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX, the Law that Changed the Future of Girls in America (New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2005), p. 25.
Image Credit: Oregon Historical Society Research Library