Jane Hamilton Macauley, 91; promoted increased role for women in Republican Party

Jane Hamilton Macauley, 91, an assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee in the 1940s, died Monday of complications of a stroke at her home in Falls Church, Va., the Washington Post reported.

A native of Fort Madison, Iowa, Macauley began working for the GOP in Chicago as a secretary in the speaker’s bureau of the Republican national campaign headquarters during the presidential campaign of 1936.

She moved to the party’s Washington headquarters soon after the 1936 election, in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt steamrollered the Republican nominee, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon. In Washington, Macauley worked briefly for the committee’s finance division before being assigned to the party’s women’s division, where she became assistant to the director. According to the Post, she was instrumental in the early development of what were then known as the National Federation of Women’s Republican Clubs. The name was changed in 1953 to National Federation of Republican Women.

In 1946, she was appointed director of the women’s division of the Republican National Committee and was assistant chairman of the national committee. She played an active role in the party’s 1948 convention in Philadelphia and spoke up for women’s rights, urging women in the party to participate in the electoral process and run for public office.