WOMEN: As Maine Goes …

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On a summer’s day in 1848, a plump, hoopskirted housewife stood up in Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y. and read the eighth of eleven resolutions to the delegates at the first U.S. women’s rights convention. With her blonde sausage curls bobbing in emphasis, Elizabeth Cady Stanton read: “It is the duty of the women of the country to secure for themselves the sacred right of the elective franchise.” The delegates were aghast at such a daring notion. “Why Lizzie,” cried Quakeress Lucretia Mott, “thee will make us ridiculous!”

In the campaign summer of 1960, a century after Lizzie Stanton’s declamation and 40 years after the 19th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of sex, the emancipated women of the U.S. are far from ridiculous. They form the largest single element in the American electorate (56.1 million women of voting age v. 52.7 million eligible men). Next Nov. 8 will very likely go down in history as Ladies’ Day, with women voters outnumbering men for the first time in any peacetime presidential election. Both presidential candidates and their wives are coolly judged for their sex appeal (consensus: Kennedy has the edge for male honors, Pat Nixon for the distaff); both are keenly aware of female interest in heavyweight issues (Kennedy, economic security; Nixon stressing peace) ; both have staffed party organizations with more women officials and workers than ever before.

In many areas, a feminine candidate is a required entry on any well-balanced ticket, and across the land more bonnets than ever before are in the political ring. Three women are running for the U.S. Senate, 26 for the House of Representatives, more than a hundred for legislatures and other statewide offices, thousands for county and local political jobs that range from board of education to justice of the peace. The nation’s biggest, most eyecatching feminine contest is building up in Maine, where two women are matched, for the first time ever, in a race for the U.S. Senate.

Without Catcalls. The two candidates offer the Down East voters a remarkable choice. As the senior Senator from Maine. Margaret Chase Smith, 62, is the U.S.’s ranking female office holder. A cool, silver-haired, sometimes tart-tongued Republican, she has won the esteem of her colleagues and the nation for her diligence, independence and courage. In 23 years on Capitol Hill, as her late husband’s secretary, as his successor in the House of Representatives, and as the second woman ever elected to the Senate, Maggie Smith has served her sex, her state and the U.S. with distinction.

Her opponent, Lucia Marie Cormier, 48, is a stocky, even-tempered spinster, an ex-schoolteacher and the proprietress of a Rumford gift shop, a Roman Catholic of French Canadian descent, effective minority leader of the state legislature and the darling of Maine’s resurgent Democrats. Lucia Cormier was chosen to oppose Margaret Smith for her sex—but before she could claim the senatorial-race plum she proved in the rough-and-tumble school of state politics that she could outshine the men around her.

Separately, the ladies from Maine will fight their political battle without catcalls. Together, they are the symbols and the harvesters of the long, bittersweet struggle for women’s rights.

Candid Candidacy. After Lizzie Stanton’s manifesto, the suffrage struggle raged on for half a century under the leadership of such doughty heroines as Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony. In 1869 the Wyoming territorial legislature passed a female suffrage bill, and in 1870 Louisa Ann Swain of Laramie put on a clean apron and became the first American woman ever to cast a vote in an election. Twenty years later, Congress threatened to block Wyoming’s admission as a state because of the local suffrage law, and Wyoming’s worried territorial delegate wired home for official guidance. Back came the gallant telegraphed answer: “We may stay out of the Union a hundred years, but we will come in with our women.”

In 1870 Victoria Woodhull, a handsome young advocate of free love and magnetic healing, added considerable spice to the suffrage cause. With her beauteous sister Tennessee, she arrived in New York from Pittsburgh (on the orders, she said, of the ghost of the Athenian orator Demosthenes) and asked the ailing tycoon, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, for financial aid. Vanderbilt obligingly set the sisters up in a Wall Street firm of their own, Woodhull, Claflin & Co., and helped it along with friendly financial tips. He also set Tennessee up as his mistress. The firm prospered, and as a successful businesswoman, Victoria demanded equal rights with men and proclaimed herself a candidate for the presidency.

Appearing before a convention of Susan B. Anthony’s suffragettes, Victoria made a magnetic impression and won unanimous endorsement. Then her moth er spoiled everything by revealing that the presidential nominee maintained her husband and her lover together under the same roof. Victoria stoutly defended her new freedom, but her political cause was lost. She spent election night 1872 in jail, charged with sending obscene material through the mails, and Ulysses S. Grant beat her — and Horace Greeley — by a considerable margin.

The Right to Drown. By 1912 the suffrage movement was almost respectable, despite such zealots as Lida Stokes Adams, who demanded women’s right to drown. The lifeboats of the Titanic, she insisted, should have been filled “with an equal number of men.” A mammoth suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue, with Lillian Russell and 15,000 other marchers impressed the nation and won large-scale public sympathy. After that, bloomer-clad suffragettes paraded in front of the White House, pinned jonquils on the lapels of sympathetic Congressmen. Theo dore Roosevelt endorsed the cause, and in 1918 Woodrow Wilson surrendered, urged Congress to act. Two years later, after 72 years, the battle of the sexes was won.

After suffering so much for suffrage, women were oddly hesitant about exercising their voting rights. Not until 1928, when Al Smith’s Catholicism, Tammany Hall connections and anti-Prohibitionist sympathies roused a feminine stampede for Herbert Hoover, did as many as 50% of the eligible women cast their ballots.

Timidity, more than indifference, was probably the reason.* Through the years, though, more and more women have be come oriented to voting, and with each election the hand that rocks the cradle pulls more and more voting levers.

“A Merry Two-Step.” Long before the 19th Amendment, women ran regularly, if fruitlessly, for high public office. Belva Bennett Lockwood, the first woman lawyer to be admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, was twice the presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party (1884 and 1888); Mrs. Stanton stood for Congress in 1866, received a discouraging 24 votes. The first woman to win a national office was Montana’s Republican Representative Jeanette Rankin, who took her seat four years before the 19th Amendment was passed. Crowed an elated suffragette: “Jeanette is the best stump speaker in Montana, can dance like a boarding-school girl, and, believe me, she will lead those Congressmen a merry little two-step when she comes to Washington!” But Pacifist Rankin’s unique distinction in Congress is the fact that, in her two widely separated terms, she was the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars (in World War II, hers was the only nay).

Miriam (“Ma”) Ferguson was elected Governor of Texas in 1924, succeeding her husband, who was impeached and therefore ineligible for reelection. During the first of her two terms, she freed 3.600 convicts from the state penitentiary. In the early days of the New Deal, Florida’s Ruth Bryan Owen, daughter of William Jennings Bryan, served in Congress, later became Franklin Roosevelt’s Minister to Denmark, the first woman to head a foreign mission. The doughty Frances Perkins became F.D.R.’s Secretary of Labor—the first woman Cabinet member. Mary Teresa Norton went to Congress on the insistence of New Jersey Boss Frank Hague, served with distinction for 26 years (once. when a colleague referred to her as a lady, Mrs. Norton snapped: “I’m no lady. I’m a member of Congress!”). Hattie Caraway of Arkansas reached the Senate through widowhood, appointed to serve out the term of her husband, Thaddeus Caraway, and won re-election with the help of Huey Long, who brought his sound truck upriver from Louisiana and persuaded “Miss Hattie” to put aside her bright clothes for more poignant widow’s weeds. During her two terms, Senator Caraway often sought Long’s advice on how to vote, remained all but mute (“I haven’t the heart to take a minute from the men. The poor dears love it so.”).

In the 1940s, Connecticut Playwright Clare Boothe Luce and California Actress Helen Gahagan Douglas added a much-needed touch of glamour to feminine political talent in Congress. Republican Luce raked the New Deal with quotable oratory, warned repeatedly of the rising power of Communist Russia. Six years after retirement, she was appointed U.S. Ambassador to Italy, served with distinction before resigning in 1956.

Equal to What. Doyennes of Congress in 1960 are Massachusetts’ Edith Nourse Rogers, descendant of a Salem witch, who has served 35 years in the House, a record surpassed by no other woman and only nine men; and Ohio’s Frances Bolton, a wealthy Clevelander, expert on African affairs (the pages call her “the African Queen”), a yoga devotee (she stands on her head every day) and an anti-feminist (“I’m not particularly anxious to be equal to a lot of things men think are so important”). Gracie Pfost, a freckle-faced Congresswoman from Idaho, represents a rugged district almost as large as New England, regularly birls logs, descends into mines and rides in rodeos as a natural part of her campaigning. Katherine St. George, representing New York’s aristocratic (Tuxedo Park) 28th District, keeps a wary eye on her female constituents (“If the women are down on you, you might as well fold up right there”).

On the Western horizon, two attractive candidates for office are being watched with interest: Rudd Smith, 40, the slim brunette daughter of Ruth Bryan Owen, who is campaigning for California’s 21st District seat, a sprawling area that embraces half of Los Angeles and several bedroom valleys; and Maurine Brown Neuberger, 52, widow of Oregon’s Dick Neuberger and a political virtuoso in her own right (three terms in the state legislature). In her campaign to succeed her husband in the Senate, Maurine is raising the political dust. Laments her opponent, former Republican Governor Elmo Smith: “I am running against the most publicized name in Oregon politics.”

“Women Are People.” Politicians of both sexes have had trouble adjusting to woman’s place in politics, and the chemistry of sex has brought some changes in political techniques. Arizona’s Senator Barry Goldwater maintains that a man facing a woman in politics faces unusual problems: “They’re very difficult to run against. It’s like walking on eggs. You have to be careful that in fighting her politically you don’t get so hard on her that it creates sympathy for her.” Once elected, though, women are even harder to dislodge from their political positions, observes Goldwater. “While it’s not easy for women to get elected the first time, after they’ve been elected, they usually do such a good job that often as not they become the biggest vote getters around.”

Idaho’s Gracie Pfost disagrees: “I really don’t think being a woman in politics is different from being a man. After all, elections are based on the issues, and any capable woman can develop an understanding of the issues, can present them and can win at the polls.” Margaret Smith thinks that sex has nothing to do with it: “I consider that women are people, and that the record they make is a matter of ability and desire rather than of their sex. I came here as a United States Senator, not as a woman.”

Shave & a Haircut. When Margaret Madeline Chase was born, the cause of woman suffrage was still far from realization, and the notion of a woman serving in the U.S. Senate seemed as remote as the moon. Maggie was the eldest of six children of George and Carrie Chase, a working-class couple in Skowhegan, the picturesque mill town on the Kennebec. George operated a one-chair barbershop with a gilt-framed mirror and a shelf of personal shaving mugs for his regular customers. The family lived next door in a maple-shaded, five-room frame house, and as a small girl, Maggie learned how to shave and cut the hair of the country bumpkins who filled the barbershop on Saturday afternoons.

Oftentimes the family was hard-pinched for money, and Mother Carrie frequently supplemented their income as a part-time waitress in the Coburn Hotel, as a clerk at the Green Brothers’ 5 and 10¢ store or a pieceworker in a local shoe factory. There was never any lack of necessities, though, and in the tranquil years before the First World War, the Chase youngsters had a pleasant, homespun childhood. At Christmas the family went out in the country in George Chase’s buckboard and cut their own spruce tree, decorating it with popcorn and cranberries and cheesecloth bags full of oranges. “Our Christmas presents were always things we were going to get anyway,” recalls Margaret Smith. “Mother always got my clothes too big so I would grow into them—how well I remember that.”

Telling the Time. In summer there were weekend fishing excursions to Smithfield Pond (“They had lovely beaches, and the water wasn’t too cold. I can remember how we used to ride the horses into the lake”). Birthdays were always special celebrations, with ice cream from the hand freezer on the back stoop. Soon after her twelfth birthday, Maggie went to work on Saturdays at Green Brothers’ for io/ an hour. As a high school girl, she often filled in as night switchboard operator at the local telephone company. One of her frequent callers, who usually wanted to know the correct time, was Skowhegan’s first selectman (“He had the most fascinating voice”).

At 18, on the strength of her high school diploma, Maggie went to work as the lone teacher in a one-room rural schoolhouse, on a salary of $8.50 per week (her early minimal wages have had no small part in Maggie Smith’s long sympathy and activity for labor legislation). But one grim, icy winter was enough for her, and in the spring she retreated to the telephone company. Then, for eight years, she was an all-purpose employee (circulation, advertising, editorial) of the Skowhegan Independent Reporter. In 1930 Maggie married Clyde H. Smith, the selectman with the fascinating voice, after a leisurely, four-year courtship.

Smith was a saturation-point politician who ran for office 48 times in his life without a single defeat. A Republican, he was ultraliberal for his times, pushed hard for labor and pension legislation during his terms in the state senate. Side by side in their big black Maxwell, the Smiths campaigned from Caribou to Kittery, and Maggie became as politically expert as her husband. In 1936 Smith was elected to Congress, and Maggie—after calming her husband’s fears that he might be accused of nepotism—became his secretary. Four years later, just ten days before the deadline for filing for reelection, ailing Clyde Smith died of a heart attack. By prearrangement, his widow stepped into his place, campaigned through Maine like a race horse, and won Clyde Smith’s seat in the House by a 25,000-vote margin in the regular election. “I’d been taught by my husband not to do it halfway.” she explains in her crisp, Down East accent. “It wasn’t even close.” When Maggie won her Senate seat eight years later in a dogged, uphill fight against three popular opponents, she campaigned with the same breathless energy: four hours after she broke her arm in a fall on the ice in Bangor, she turned up punctually at a scheduled political meeting.

Finest Hour. In 20 years as an active legislator, Senator Smith has won the respect of her male colleagues as a meticulous, hard-working woman who asks no privileges because of her sex, rewards her friends and punishes her enemies with the coolness of a big-city boss, and once her mind is made up, will not be budged. Although she generally follows the Eisenhower program, she is no party-liner. (The White House was stunned when she unexpectedly voted against the appointment of Lewis Strauss to be Secretary of Commerce, because “he’d been evasive and nonresponsive.”) Says she: “I call myself a moderate. I work very hard on my votes, and once I make a decision, it’s done. I don’t permit my votes to worry me afterward.” Balky or ill-prepared committee witnesses have often felt the sting of Margaret Smith’s wrath. When Defense Secretary Charles Wilson stubbornly evaded her simple questioning about who had ordered the Air Force cut from 143 to 120 wings, Maggie finally threw down a list of 32 questions after nearly an hour, acidly asked for written answers from “someone capable of supplying them.”

Maggie’s most righteous indignation (and her finest hour in public life) was reserved for the late Joe McCarthy, in her famous “Declaration of Conscience” speech. It was the first major address of Freshman Smith, and the first outcry in the Senate against McCarthy’s campaign of smear and innuendo. While scowling Joe McCarthy listened from a nearby desk, Maggie denounced him for debasing the Senate “to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination, sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity … I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” Afterward, McCarthy sneeringly referred to Margaret Smith and the six Republicans* who signed her declaration as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.” Seeking revenge, he managed to strip her of two committee assignments, entered a protege in the 1954 Maine primaries to defeat her (she trounced him by a margin of 5-1).

Private Show. Underneath her New England reserve, Maggie Smith has a scintillating wit. Some ten years ago, when a radio commentator asked what she would do if she woke up in the White House, she twanged right back: “I’d go straight to Mrs. Truman and apologize. Then I’d go home.” She also nurses old grudges (e.g., the Smith vendetta against the promotion of Actor James Stewart to be an Air Force brigadier general), sometimes writes tart notes to erring constituents. She shuns the Washington social whirl, lives quietly in a three-apartment building in suburban Silver Spring, Md. The other apartments are occupied by Bill Lewis, her ubiquitous administrative assistant, and his parents. Her office is run with taut efficiency, and every letter is answered by return, mail. One fetish: her insistence on maintaining a near-perfect record of voting on every Senate measure, however trivial. The record to date: 908 roll calls.

When Dick Nixon traveled to Maine —at Maggie Smith’s invitation—for a rousing welcome last month, he urged her to break her rule and campaign with him, but rather than risk missing a vote, Maggie chose to stick by her front-row desk. Most G.O.P. Senators would have run to Nixon’s side, but Maggie runs her own show, with her own organization in Maine, and pays little heed to the regular state machine or the National Committee. She turned her back on the Republican Convention last July, chose to mend her fences in Maine instead.

“Out Politickin’.” Well aware of her underdog odds, Lucia Cormier has been racing around Maine in a dust-streaked Buick Electra, driven, at the top of the speed limits, by her 20-year-old nephew. Lucia’s campaign methods are folksy and Kefauverish: a maximum of informal gladhanding on village greens, city streets, in stores and factories, and a minimum of formal speeches and TV appearances. Working hand-to-hand through Buckport’s St. Regis Paper plant, she met 500 employees with a hearty handshake and the greeting: “I’m Lucia Cormier from Rumford. Candidate for the United States Senate. I’m out campaignin’ today, makin’ a tour of Hancock County. Just meetin’ people. Say hello. Out politickin’.” When a man held back his greasy hand, Lucia reached for it eagerly: ”That’s all right, sir. I’ll wipe it off on the next fellow.”

Besides stamina, Lucia Cormier has home-grown assets that stand her in good stead in a Maine of declining farms and growing industrial areas, which has long since abandoned the habit of rockbound Republicanism. She is the second of three children of David Cormier, a steamfitter, and his wife Adele, both emigres from New Brunswick. In the working-class district of Rumford where she was born and raised, Lucia was the neighborhood tomboy and a better-than-average athlete (skiing, skating, basketball). She was also a bright student, excelling in languages (her fluent French is a considerable campaign asset in the state’s French Canadian areas), and after her graduation from New Jersey’s College of St. Elizabeth, Lucia had no trouble getting a job in Rumford’s Stephens High School. In 1945, after 13 drab years as the head of the school’s modern languages department, Lucia abruptly gave up teaching, because her salary was dismayingly low and because she disagreed with the school authorities over her students’ homework assignments (Lucia favored plenty of it).

She opened a stationery and gift shop, which prospered.

Mother Superior. One night, “because it was something to do for an evening,” Lucia dropped in at a meeting of the Rumford Democratic Committee. Three weeks later she became chairman; within a year she was president of the Maine Federation of Democratic Women’s Clubs. In 1946 Lucia was elected to the house of representatives in Augusta, though, as a registered Republican, she was unable to vote for herself in the primary (she had crossed party lines in order to vote for a friend several years before, had forgotten to change her registration again).

In 1950 she ran for Congress against the incumbent Representative, Robert Hale. With heavy labor support, she gave

Hale the scare of his political life, lost by a narrow 7,000 votes (two years later, Hale was re-elected over Democrat James A. McVicar with a 21,000-vote plurality). Lucia soared like a comet through twelve terms in the legislature, into the outer reaches of national Democratic politics: vice chairman of the Democratic Platform Committee in the 1952 National Convention; Maine’s national committeewoman from 1948 to 1956. National committeeman during her second term: Edmund Muskie, a slim, cowlicked young man from Rumford, who subsequently became Maine’s first Democratic Governor in 20 years and its first Democratic popularly elected Senator.

By 1959 Lucia was the legislature’s minority leader, the first woman ever to hold the post, and the mother superior of Maine’s thriving Democratic Party. Last spring, when Maine held its state primary, Senator Muskie and the other leading Democrats had their answer to Maggie Smith: as a seasoned politician and a proven vote getter, Lucia Cormier was a leading candidate for the Senate nom ination; as a woman, she was a natural. No matter which of the ladies from Maine gets the toga, women permeate U.S. politics so thoroughly as to indicate that they have only begun to fight. As voters, party workers, politicians, they will play a larger, more important role in the affairs of state in the 19605. And as their absorption in politics grows, their voices will be heard, emphatically, through the likes of Margaret Chase Smith and Lucia Cormier. Says Clare Williams, assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee: “If you pulled all the women out of either party, the actual party structure would collapse.” No man would deny that fact, for American men, so unwilling for so long to share their franchise, must now agree that the opposite sex is indispensable, even in politics.

* Women voters are more Republican than men (about 4% more, according to Pollster Elmo Roper). *New Hampshire’s Charles Tobey, Vermont’s George Aiken, Oregon’s Wayne Morse, New York’s Irving Ives, Minnesota’s Edward Thye, New Jersey’s Robert Hendrickson.