Nation: Martha Griffiths: Graceful Feminist

EASILY the most persistent feminist in the U.S. Congress, Michigan Democrat Martha Griffiths manages to enjoy the best of both career and wifely worlds. When she returned to her office on the day after her equal rights amendment finally passed the House, she found a dozen yellow roses on her desk and a note from Hicks, her husband of 37 years. “YOU’VE DONE IT AGAIN,” it read. Moved, Martha smiled and said quietly: “It’s nice to know my husband still loves me.”

Firm but not fiery on the subject of women’s rights, Martha Griffiths is a cheery woman of 58 who has been pushing the amendment ever since she came to Congress in 1955. “There will be a day when the Supreme Court says, ‘Yes, the Constitution really does apply to women’—and I will see that day,” she has long insisted. Although the other nine women Representatives in the House recently urged that she be considered for appointment to the high court because she is a highly competent lawyer as well as legislator, Mrs. Griffiths considers such an event “out of the range of possibility.” Privately, she calls the justices “idiots” for failing to apply the 1964 Civil Rights Act to women as well as to blacks

Mrs. Griffiths credits the current Women’s Liberation Movement with giving a “real intellectual stimulus” to the equal-rights drive and resents the ridiculing nature of the publicity it has received. But she sees the spreading industrialization of the South and the prevalence of divorce as bigger factors in awakening more women to economic injustice. She thinks men are waking up too.

Examining her own career, Mrs. Griffiths happily concedes that it has been more advanced than hindered by men. It was at the urging of her husband, who was also her law partner in their Detroit firm, that she first ran for the Michigan state legislature in 1946. She lost, but won two years later when she campaigned largely on behalf of G. Mennen (“Soapy”) Williams, who had joined their law firm and was running successfully for Governor. She served four years, tried for Congress in 1952, but was buried in the Eisenhower landslide.

Williams then appointed her to a judgeship in Detroit. In 1954 she ran again for Congress and earned a measure of masculine appreciation by daily driving a car and campaign trailer through her predominantly blue-collar district on Detroit’s northwest side. She won, despite primary opposition from the United Auto Workers union. Candidate Griffiths was helped by her husband, a former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, and by Williams. “Soapy and I were the happy extra-verts and ran around shaking hands,” she recalls. “But my husband knew how to get things done.”

Mrs. Griffiths quickly earned the respect of her male colleagues in the House by her analytical legal mind and her powers of friendly persuasion. She became the first and only woman to sit on the Ways and Means Committee. She has fought (vainly, so far) to equalize Social Security benefits for men and women, has pushed to replace the school-lunch program with one providing three free meals daily for all children of the poor. She also heads the Select Committee on the House Beauty Shop. While most militant liberationists would scoff at such an assignment as both belittling and irrelevant, Martha Griffiths points out proudly that her shop is “the only thing in Washington that operates in the black.”