Career
She was a member of the town board of Tuxedo Park, New York from 1926 until 1949. She was chair of the Orange County Republican committee from 1942 until 1948. She was a delegate to the 1944 Republican National Convention. She was elected to Congress in 1946 and served from January 3, 1947 until January 3, 1965. (Her opponent in the 1956 election was Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin.) She narrowly lost a re-election bid in 1964 against liberal Democrat John G. Dow.
A proponent of pay equity, St. George was a supporter of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. In 1962, St. George proposed that legislation be passed to ensure that women received equal pay for equal work. Her proposals were drafted into a bill and introduced by Congresswoman Edith Green, an Oregon Democrat. During a debate regarding the bill, St. George stated that opposing the bill was comparable to "being against motherhood".
The bill met with stiff opposition from the United States Chamber of Commerce, but received support from the Kennedy Administration, the American Association of Women, the National Consumers League, the ACLU, and the AFL-CIO.
The bill passed in both the House and the Senate, but it passed in different forms, and wasn’t ratified. Undaunted, in 1963, Green re-introduced the bill, and this time it was successfully ratified into law.
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Famous quotes containing the word career:
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