Martha Griffiths, 91; Pioneering Politician Pushed ERA, Sex Bias Ban Through Congress

Martha Griffiths, the irascible, independent-minded former congresswoman who was a pivotal force behind the ban on sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and pushed the controversial Equal Rights Amendment through Congress after it had languished for nearly half a century, has died. She was 91.

The Michigan Democrat, who served 10 terms in the House before retiring in 1975, had been in failing health for years. She died Tuesday at her home in Armada, Mich.

Tackling politics during an era when a woman’s place was seen as in the home, Griffiths broke many barriers: She was the first woman appointed to the Detroit Recorder’s Court, the first woman sent to Congress from her district, the first woman seated on the House Ways and Means Committee, and the first woman chosen to serve as Michigan’s lieutenant governor.

She also was the only woman in Michigan to serve in all three branches of state government.

Griffiths’ greatest legislative victory came when she engineered the inclusion of sex discrimination in the landmark 1964 civil rights legislation, which paved the way for a number of laws and Supreme Court rulings on issues ranging from equal pay to freedom from sexual harassment.

She displayed considerable political savvy again in 1970 when she employed a little-known parliamentary tactic to blast the ERA out of the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been stalled for 47 years.

Over the years, she earned respect for her intelligence and independence, and was described by colleagues as “tough as alligator skin” with “a steel-trap mind.”

She also was known for her bluntness. One time she wrote to an airline president after he defended requirements that stewardesses be young, single and pretty: “Just exactly what are you running -- an airline or a whorehouse?”

Former President Gerald Ford, who served with Griffiths in the House and supported her ERA campaign, said in a statement this week: “She was smart, she knew the rules, and she had deep convictions.”

The daughter of a letter carrier in Pierce City, Mo., Griffiths excelled in debate in high school and relished her political science classes at the University of Missouri at Columbia. She married her college sweetheart, Hicks G. Griffiths, after graduation in 1934. They studied law together at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, becoming the first married couple to graduate from the law school.

Hicks Griffiths died in 1996. The couple had no children.

Admitted to the Michigan bar in 1941, Griffiths worked as a contract negotiator in Detroit for Army Ordnance during World War II. After the war, she and her husband went into private practice together. They were soon joined by a former college classmate, G. Mennen Williams, and in 1948 ran his successful campaign for Michigan governor. Democrats dominated state politics for the next 12 years.

Griffiths entered the political fray in 1946 with a bid for a seat in the Michigan Legislature, but didn’t win until her second try. She garnered national attention during a reelection drive in 1952 when she stumped across her district in a house trailer, serving juice, coffee and cookies to thousands of prospective supporters.

The house-trailer approach did not help her win a second term. But she used it to run for Congress in 1954, and won the Detroit seat in Congress.

“I owe my election to all the girls who went out and rang doorbells and invited housewives to meet me,” she said.

In Washington, she found that the issues that most outraged her concerned women and she set about changing laws that treated them unfairly.

She found that when a woman covered by Social Security died, her dependent children were ineligible for benefits, but a man’s dependents were. She discovered that women had to pay taxes on money left by their husbands, but no man had to pay taxes on what his wife left. And she found that, if a man divorced his wife after 20 or 30 years of marriage, the wife was not entitled to any Social Security payments.

Griffiths won changes to all those laws.

In 1964, she was the main force behind the addition of a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act. Howard W. Smith, a conservative Democratic congressman from Virginia, agreed to sponsor an amendment barring sex discrimination at the urging of members of the National Woman’s Party.

Griffiths knew that Smith had agreed to sponsor the amendment as part of a Southern strategy to defeat the entire civil rights bill -- and that Smith’s support would guarantee the votes of 100 or more congressmen from the deep South who would otherwise oppose any feminist initiative.

Smith’s remarks on the House floor on Feb. 8, 1964, made plain his true feelings about the amendment. He began his arguments by reading a letter from a woman who complained that the 1960 Census had reported 2.6 million “extra females” in the United States and asked that Smith introduce a bill to increase the supply of men for those women to marry.

His male colleagues joined in the jocularity, including Rep. Emmanuel Celler (D-N.Y.), who remarked that, after 49 years of marriage, “I usually have the last two words, and those words are, ‘Yes, dear.’ ”

When it was Griffiths’ turn to speak, she pointed out that “the laughter of the men at the introduction of the amendment only underscored women’s second-class citizenship,” Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli and June Bunda Csida wrote in “Feminist Chronicles, 1953-1993.”

She noted that, without the amendment, the Civil Rights Act would protect black women but not white women.

“A vote against this amendment today by a white man is a vote against his wife or his widow or his daughter or his sister,” Griffiths said.

The amendment passed by a vote of 168 to 133, a major coup considering that, in 1964, there was still no widespread national women’s rights movement, the authors of “Feminist Chronicles” wrote.

Six years later, Griffiths led the charge to dislodge the Equal Rights Amendment from the House Judiciary Committee. The amendment proposing that equality of rights under the law “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex” had never gotten to the floor of the House, although it had twice cleared the Senate.

Griffiths filed a “discharge petition”: If enough signatures were gathered, one hour of debate on the House floor would then be permitted.

The Michigan lawmaker collected the signatures of 218 House members, the number needed to boost the bill onto the floor without committee action. It was only the eighth time in 20 years that this little-used parliamentary tactic had been successfully employed.

On Aug. 10, 1970, the ERA was approved on a roll call vote, 346 to 15, far more than the two-thirds majority required. Senate approval came two years later.

The amendment has since been ratified by 35 state legislatures, three short of the number needed to add it to the Constitution.

Griffiths retired from Congress in 1974 and served on several corporate boards. She reentered the political arena in 1982 when gubernatorial candidate James Blanchard asked her to be his running mate. Insiders said Blanchard’s victory would not have happened without Griffiths on the ticket.

They ran together for a second successful term. But Griffiths began to suffer a series of strokes and grew increasingly frail. In 1990, when Blanchard announced his bid for a third term, he dumped the then-78-year-old Griffiths as his running mate.

“The biggest problem in politics is that you help some s.o.b. get what he wants, and then he throws you off the train,” Griffiths said.

Later, she muted her criticism but only slightly.

“He has a right to do what he wants to do,” Griffiths said at a news conference. “And after the election, we’ll see what he should have done.”

Blanchard lost.