Millicent Fenwick - 27 November 1992

A listener writes in to say whatever happened to the Year of the Woman? Right, I'm sorry, I made a promise to talk about it, it must have been about two months ago when the emergence of the phrase as a campaign slogan coincided with the death of a great woman and because she was a political woman, she offers a good starting point for a discussion of women in politics and the promised flood of female senators and congresswomen who were going to flush all those bad old men out of office.

First then, Millicent Fenwick who died in September at the age of 82. By that time she was a vivid legend in and out of Washington, people who had once sat in the public gallery and the House of Representatives got the impression from her easy confidence, her familiarity with House procedures and the spontaneity of her rebuttals to opponents especially if they were sentimental you'd have thought she'd been a congresswoman for ever. In fact, she didn't get to Congress until she was 64 and retired at the age of 72, but in those eight years she made her mark in a role, which is generally unpopular in her party as a doughty Republican liberal.

When she died, an old political aide said "with her dignity and elegance, Millicent could get away with sayings things the rest of us couldn't; she was the Katharine Hepburn of politics." That's not bad, much the same breed a type of American woman who because of her upbringing and the social conditions of her time is fast becoming a period piece. And so because the type had much to offer to society, which will have to be offered by other types in a changed world, her life is well worth looking over.

Millicent Hammond she was born to one of those late 19th-century, eastern New York, in fact, families that was at once wealthy and felt an obligation to public service. Her father was a financier and for a time a member of the New York State legislature, an Anglo type, much like the Roosevelts as Dutch types, natural patricians. His daughter was brought up in a family mansion across the river in New Jersey, a house with 50 rooms and unlike their counterparts in England or France not with a flock of flunkies but with lots of rooms closed off and one cook and one maid.

Millicent Hammond's mother was active in war work long before the United States got into the First World War and her main concern was for the European civilian refugees who'd been wounded or incapacitated and she raised enough money to found a French hospital for them, so in the in the spring of 1915 she sailed for Paris. The ship was the Lusitania and off the coast of Ireland, it was attacked by a German submarine and sank in 18 minutes. It was natural then that when Millicent was in her teens and her father was appointed American Ambassador to Spain, she left her school in Virginia to become his hostess. It was a mild family joke that she never graduated from high school let alone college, she'd had, she said, no time to get educated and to use her time in Europe to become fluent in Italian, French and Spanish.

Back in this country, she appalled her family as such high spirited girls will by falling in love with a married man a businessman and eventually they married and very soon he died and she had two children and the added burden of her husband's considerable debts. Since she refused all money help from her family, she'd got the habit of living an active frugal life and she maintained it even when she came into her father's fortune. She arrived in Washington in an old Chevy when she won a seat in Congress and though the law didn't require it of members of Congress, only of cabinet officers, she put all her unearned income into a blind trust.

And for the next eight years delighted the Democrats and scandalised her own party by working and arguing and voting for civil rights bills for renovating the inner cities, for getting out of Vietnam, for prison reform, for cutting down the military and cutting political campaign spending, for gun control and for publicising and drafting a bill to help asbestos victims – a peculiar speciality, but it resulted in the compulsory destruction of asbestos lining and insulation in for instance all the residential buildings of New York City, enforced in most other cities it will sometime present a bill of something like the magnitude of the national debt. She was, of course, an early and steady champion of equal rights for women, but wanted first to make equal pay for equal jobs compulsory throughout the country.

When I say wanted first, I'm thinking of her special gift as a legislator, she didn't by any means fall in with the whole agenda of the feminist movement, she wanted to go step by step and get first things first like the suffragettes a thought, a comparison which reminds me irristibly of another battling woman of the following generation, the wicked writer Florence King who put a finger with withering mockery on the most persistent flaw or if you like strategical mistake of the 18 carat women's libbers in this country.

Miss King wrote in a passage I'm pretty sure Millicent Fenwick a humorous woman would have approved off 'I am in favour of most feminist goals and I realise how much the women's movement has accomplished, but the feminists have made a fatal error that the suffragettes were wise enough to avoid, they have scattered their shot". The suffragettes went after one thing the vote, the reason that if they got it they could then use it to obtain their goals, but our feminists have entered so many battles with so many flaming swords I can only conclude that the all purpose feminist goal is an abortion performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on an Indian reservation."

Millicent Fenwick was a type we could use in large numbers in the new Congress. When I say type, I'm not referring again to the social type I said was valuable but gone for good, the genuine lady bountiful, well bred philanthropist hardworking devotee of the sick, the poor, the dispossessed. I now mean Millicent Fenwick as a precious type of woman politician. She was highly intelligent, articulate, devoid of sentimental rhetoric, not motivated by hate or sarcasm, hate's smiling partner, she liked men. She kept her eye on the main object, the new good law rather than bemoaning the old bad practice.

Well now, how about the promised Mr Bush thought the threatened tidal wave of women in Congress. To be fair to him, I ought to say when he prayed that they would be defeated he was guessing correctly that most of them would be Democrats. Well in the old Senate, there were three women; in the new Senate there will be seven, which has caused an immediate outlay of emergency funds to build for the first time outside the Senate chamber a lady's lavatory that is the first blow for liberty of the Clinton Revolution.

In the House, there were 28 women. In the new House, there are one or two disputed results; in the new House they'll be over 50, but perhaps more remarkable than the numbers of women is the ethnic composition of the whole House male and female. A generation ago ethnic composition, even the phrase would have been bizarre, so in the whole new Congress then there will be 28 blacks, 19 Hispanics, 9 Asians and 1 chief of an Indian tribe or as we must now say, over my wife's strenuous objections that she is one, a Native American.

California, it would be California, which is a pioneer of many novelties has become the first state in history to have both its senators women. California has quite possibly taken the worst beating of any state in the long crawling recession, mainly because it's the home of so many defence factories and being 800 miles in length and facing the Pacific has a giant share of military, naval and marine and airbases. Apart from the many thousands of men and women in uniform who are being released, something like I think 180,000 have lost their jobs in defence work. All this is due of course to the brutal cutbacks in the defence budget, which President Bush approved off, which the Democrats for so long, long before the melting of the Cold War graved and argued for. Now the plight of California is on the doorstep of the Democrats in Congress and at the White House, so there will be a short honeymoon only a quick slurp of champagne for those two lady senators, the former Mayor of San Francisco Dianne Feinstein and the Liberal Democrat with the appropriately splendid name of Barbara Boxer.

I notice from Ms Boxer's resumé or campaign flyer that her big line against her Republican opponent was for abortion rights, which coming from a Democrat usually means going beyond the 1973 Supreme Court ruling and sanctioning abortion on demand. You know that President Bush who was as he'd say sort of for the abortion thing early on, then wobbled, then decided – a fatal decision – that he needed the embrace of the evangelical right wing of his party, so throughout the campaign he came out unreservedly against any federal approval of abortion. Said the retired Senator Barry Goldwater home in Arizona, he'll loose the damn election on that one issue alone, could be. And it came out after the election that 70% of all American women favour a right to abortion and more tellingly close on 60% of all Republican women favour it too.

Last time 1988, the women's vote was exactly split between Bush and Dukakis. This time 47% of all women voters plumped for Clinton, 36% for Bush. When all the the new girls, new women legislators arrive in Washington in January, I wished they might learn about the example of Millicent Fenwick of New Jersey, I wish there were tapes of her speeches and a record of what she was prepared to yield to get not always what she wanted, but what the Congress could be persuaded to want and an important feature of her character keep the good opinion of the best of your opponents.

In other shorter words, she was that very rare politician, she never gave quarter in debate, but she had always at the back of her mind the thought that perhaps her opponent might be right. Try that out on your favourite politician and see how short he/she falls.

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