NOW Remembers Extraordinary Feminist Legislator Martha Griffiths (1912-2003)

April 25, 2003

by NOW Staff

Martha Wright Griffiths, the outspoken legislator who lobbied successfully to include gender discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to revive the Equal Rights Amendment, died Tuesday evening at her home in Armada, Michigan. She was 91.

Elected in 1954 to Congress, where she served for two decades, Griffiths fought to ensure that protections for women were included in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination in voting and in access to public education, employment, public accommodations and federally-assisted programs.

Known for being colorful and feisty, one of her more famous lines as a member of Congress came in 1966, when she wrote an airline executive to question the firing of a flight attendant for getting engaged. "Just exactly what are you running—an airline or a whorehouse?" she wrote.

In 1970, Griffiths filed a discharge petition to demand that the Equal Rights Amendment, which had languished in a House committee for 47 years, be heard by the full Congress. Congress overwhelmingly approved the ERA in 1972, but by the 1982 deadline it has been ratified by only 35 state legislatures, three short of the number needed to add it to the Constitution.

In addition to serving in Congress, Griffiths was an attorney, judge and Michigan state legislator who became, at age 70, Michigan's first female lieutenant governor.

NOW President Kim Gandy called Martha Wright Griffiths a feminist trailblazer and one of the most effective women's rights lawmakers of her time: "Her tireless work to advance opportunities for women, from the Michigan statehouse to the U.S. Capitol, will be felt by generations."