In my last post, I mentioned that groundbreaking woman’s advocate Barbara Hackman Franklin and I share an alma mater — Penn State.

            That’s not all we share! We also both have a connection with the woman suffrage movement. Before I began writing about Title IX, I wrote about the women who powered the 19th Amendment to victory in 1920.*

            We’ll get to that in a minute. First, let me introduce Barbara.

Many firsts, many slights

            In the 1960s, Barbara broke gender barriers in corporate and government spheres. She was one of the first female graduates of the Harvard Business School and the first female with an MBA hired by the Singer Company. From there, she went to Citibank, and then on to the Nixon White House, where she created a path for women to be hired for leadership roles. After that, President H.W. Bush named her U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

            While Barbara was forging ahead, she ran into some of the attitudes that women have perpetually faced in a world run by men.

At Singer: “I know that the salaries being offered to us women in the [Harvard Business School] class of ‘64 were less by a rather hefty amount than those being offered to the men,” she said in an interview for Penn State’s “A Few Good Women” oral history project.**

At Citibank: “I remember being chastised mightily for wearing a red dress. I’ve always liked red but was told not to wear bright colors. There was one other time when I knew I didn’t get as much of a salary increase as the guy who worked beside me. I raised that issue and was told, ‘You don’t need that salary increase. You’re doing fine, for a girl, and, besides, you have a husband who works.’”

At the White House:  “In some of my speeches I commented about the way I was described as ‘tiny, diminutive and Dresden-doll-like.’ Would we ever talk about the ‘diminutive, Dresden-doll-like’ Henry Kissinger?”

At the Commerce Department: “Somewhere there arose the impression that I was appointed to be a ‘cheerleader,’ and not to run that department. The quiet implication was, ‘My goodness. Can a woman really run that big conglomerate of a department?’”

Teaming up with Susan B.

            And here’s where the connection with the suffrage fight comes in.

            Eventually, Barbara and a few of her co-workers dreamed up a way to call out men who held these kinds of attitudes.

            In her own words, here’s how they did it:

            “One of the things that we dreamed up in 1972 that we thought would underscore this push toward equality was a bust of Susan B. Anthony to be placed in the White House. We had to get someone to create the bust, and several women’s groups agreed to pick up the tab.

            They decided to copy the bust of Susan B. Anthony that is in the Capitol. It was done in bronze somewhere in upper New York State.

            The bust was shipped to the White House and taken to my office. Then we had to wait for some months before there was an opportunity to present her. Mrs. Nixon did the honors.

            Between the time that Susan B. was delivered and her presentation to Mrs. Nixon, she resided in a closet in my White House office on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building.

            When someone said something that was derogatory about women, Susan B. would steal out of my closet in the dead of night and appear the next morning in the office of the guilty party to underscore her point.

            Then, of course, I had to come and rescue her and bring her back to the closet.

            It was known that the bust and the spirit of Susan B. Anthony roamed the White House on occasion at night. She just knew exactly where to go, and [White House Press Secretary] Ron Ziegler was always on the top of the list.”

            Perfect! I think that we all should have a bust of Susan B. roaming at night calling out these outdated stereotypes and attitudes, don’t you?

                                                ____________________

* Women Win the Vote! 19 for the 19th Amendment (Norton Young Readers, 2020).

** Barbara’s quotes come from “A Few Good Women,” which is part of the Penn State collection, “Advancing the Cause of Women in Government, 1969-74.” It accompanies a book by Lee Stout titled A Matter of Simple Justice: The Untold Story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and A Few Good Women (State College, PA: Penn State University Libraries, 2015).