Fair Play-Equal Access in Membership Resolution

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on the subject of my special order.

Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will remain at the lectern, I am pleased to yield to the gentleman.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his remarks, and I know that the women of his district very much appreciate the kind of attention he is paying to their accomplishments, in particular, and I know that his predecessor would have taken great joy in his remarks. Nobody could be more deserving of his remarks than Eva Clayton, and I thank him for taking the time to come to this floor during this special order when we are, in fact, looking closely at women's issues and women's rights.

First, in recognition of a former trailblazer and Representative Martha Griffiths. Martha Griffiths served in this House at a time when very few women darkened the doors of the House of Representatives, and she died April 22 at 91. Issues that we take for granted today were put on the map by Martha Griffiths so that as we celebrate her life and think of her passing, it seemed to me altogether fitting that we remember that much that women are grateful for today began with and owe to the extraordinary work of Representative Martha Griffiths of the State of Michigan, for it was Martha Griffiths who led the fight to add sex to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and of course, for me, that one gets to be personal since it became my great honor during the Carter years to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The notion that in the beginning sex was not even included as a form of discrimination can perhaps give us some appreciation for what it meant to have one good woman in the House of Representatives, along with a few others, and many men who supported her.

Of course, the 1964 Civil Rights Act that Martha Griffiths championed had a great deal more than Title VII in it. We remember Title VII because it is Title VII that bars discrimination in employment, and that has brought so many women equality in search for work and in the workplace, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination based on sex also in public education, and I will have something to say about that in a moment because it relates to Title IX in public accommodations, in federally-assisted programs, and every day and every minute, women benefit from all of these sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is remembered principally because it was African Americans marching in the streets to finally get enforcement of the 14th amendment that led the way to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but race was not the only status protected in the 1964 Act.

Religion, national origin also have been, in our country, subjects of great discrimination, and they also are protected in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I say protected but it is important to understand that everybody's protected. We cannot discriminate against a white man because he is a white man, and we cannot discriminate against a black woman because she is a black woman. These particular groups had, in fact, borne the brunt of discrimination but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects each and every American.

We owe the work that got us there to Martha Griffiths.

Martha Griffiths also championed the Equal Pay Act and was one of the principal leaders that gave us the great Equal Pay Act that simply means if a man and a woman are sitting in the same workplace, you cannot pay one less than the other because of their gender. But perhaps Martha Griffiths is remembered most for having single-handedly revived the Equal Rights Amendment, which was only three States short of becoming an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

A word on who this great woman was. She was the daughter of a mailman, born in Michigan, attended its public schools, and went to the University of Michigan Law School and graduated in 1940. You can imagine a woman graduating from law school in 1940. The very fact that she went to law school says something about her determination and her character, because we are talking about a time when women in law school were as scarce as hens teeth. Undaunted, she practiced law with a very famous governor, G. Mennen Williams, ``Soapy'' Williams, a Governor of Michigan, along with her husband.

She served in the Michigan House of Representatives from 1948 to 1952. She was elected as a judge. And she served 10 terms right here in the House of Representatives. She was the first woman ever to serve on the Committee on Ways and Means. She left the House to become Lieutenant Governor of the State of Michigan.

Here is a woman whose distinguished career just by virtue of the titles she has held would win her places in the history books, but Martha Griffiths was not looking for a place there because of titles.

I do want to tell the story of the addition of sex to title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Representative Smith, Congressman from the Deep South, introduced it with such levity that he brought the House down. In introducing the notion of adding sex to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he said he had received a letter from a woman who complained that the 1960 census had reported, now here I am quoting him, ``2,661,000 extra females and asking that he introduce legislation to remedy the shortage of men for women to marry.''

Well, I mean, apparently, this House lit up so that they had to call for order, the laughter reverberated such throughout the House. And what did Mr. Smith say? And I quote him again: ``I read the letter just to illustrate that women have some real grievances.''

That is the atmosphere in which Representative Martha Griffiths had to somehow rally herself to respond. She rose in this House and pointed out that the laughter of the men of the House, or at least some of them, at the introduction of the amendment only underscored women's second class citizenship. A woman who thought well on her feet. Every woman in the House, except one, supported the amendment.

And, by the way, that was in defiance of the party discipline. The Democrats at that time did not favor, not until final passage, the addition of sex because women were protected by protective legislation in factories so they could take some time out to sit down and to have rest periods, to have breaks, for example, that men did not have. And they did not want to give that up, most of them under union contracts that had been won. But, hey, you cannot want equality and then want breaks. And, ultimately, the breaks went and the equality has come more and more ever since.

The passage in the House of title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act came after the passage of the Equal Pay Act. I must say that the early 1960s were a very good time for women, and it was Congresswoman Griffiths who led the fight in this House for passage of the Equal Pay Act.

We are now at the 40th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act; and it seems to me we ought to celebrate how far we have come, since you could with impunity sit in the same factory, in the same office, in the same law firm and have nothing to say if a man was paid more than you, as a woman, was paid. However, the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro) and a number of other women and men in the House have introduced a very modest bill that would update the Equal Pay Act. It is called the Paycheck Fairness Act, and I hope every Member will go on the Paycheck Fairness Act, particularly during this 40th year of the passage of the act.

There are some updates that need to happen. For example, sex, but not national origin or race, are included in the Equal Pay Act. Fortunately, title 7 does allow a person to pursue unequal pay under title 7, if not the Equal Pay Act. A person can be punished by firing for telling what her salary is. That kind of sanction needs to be barred.

These are quite modest additions, and I would hope that this year the House would regard them as such and would pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. I had a more extensive bill, called the Fair Pay Act, Senator Tom Harkin has introduced it in the Senate, that would update title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act so that jobs with the same skill, effort and responsibility, but not comparable, could be the subject of a title 7 claim if one could show that men and women were paid differently.

Now, the reason for this is perfectly apparent. If you are a probation officer and your wife is a social worker, guess who gets paid more? The probation officer. The point here is that we ought to look to see not whether it is the same job, but whether the content, the basic content of those jobs is equal; and that is what my bill would do. It would bring the Equal Pay Act into the 21st century.

The pay problems of most women today really do not come from sitting next to somebody who is a male who earns more than you do. It comes from sex segregation in jobs that women do. Two-thirds of white women and three-quarters of black women work in just three areas: clerical, sales, and factory jobs. And many of those jobs are molded to gender rather than to the job to be performed. My bill would say you have to look at the job to see if it is comparable to the job of a male. And if it is, in skill, effort, and responsibility, then it has to be paid comparably.

Without this kind of change, we are seeing the great so-called women's professions abandoned: teaching, nursing. Where are they going? They have gone where the pay is. And the pay is not in those jobs, because very often a teacher or nurse will find a man who has nowhere near the same skills making more money. So what happens then, of course, is people leave the profession. And we are in very deep trouble when those professions are abandoned. We had to pass a special bill last year to try to encourage more women to go into nursing.

Look at what has happened to the teaching profession. Even people who go into teaching often leave the profession. The same happens to nursing. Why do men not come into teaching and nursing? Because, of course, the pay is not what they expect. The way to do this is to look closely at these

jobs to make sure that inequality is not occurring or say good-bye to men or women who will enter these jobs.

By the way, what I am talking about is not as radical at it may seem. Twenty States have adjusted wages for women, raising the pay for teachers, nurses, clerical workers, librarians, and other female- dominated jobs that paid less simply by doing their own studies of the skill, effort and responsibility. If State governments can do this, I cannot be talking about something that is far out. What is far out is imagining an America where social work, teaching, and nursing are systematically abandoned. And that is what is happening today almost entirely because of pay.

The pay problem is structural. It is chronic. Look at what women have done. Women were told, look, go to school, get as much education as men, and that will take care of it. Well, girls are nothing but good little girls, and I will be darned if they did not go out and do just that. Women now earn 55 percent of college degrees. Men get something like 45 percent. They achieve 65 percent of the 3.5 GPAs.

Now, I do not relish this kind of inequality. I think the reason, very frankly, are the boys are out playing sports and girls are hitting the books. I do not like that a lot, but it certainly has not shown up in the paycheck. Doing so well in school, getting all of this advanced training simply has not paid off. That is why you hear women talking about equal pay. It still has not been achieved even under the Equal Pay Act.

An example in the private sector that was recently brought to my attention is one of a brand name famous retail outlet in our country, Wal-Mart, where women there make an average of $1.16 per hour less than men.

We still need equal pay. We need to update the Equal Pay Act. We need to face the fact that when you have had this kind of inequality for the millennia, since human time, it takes enforcement of the law and it takes updating of the law.

This has become one of the great issues of the American family. The interesting thing about polling, is if you poll Americans, what are your top issues, equal pay keeps coming up near the top. You say how come if we are polling men and women, equal pay keeps landing up there in the stratosphere? I think I know why. In two- parent homes, almost always now, even in families that have very young children, both people go out to work. The male member of the household and the female member of the household are not unlikely to have been together in college, for example, or in high school. Suppose they went to the same junior college and graduated, both having done reasonably well. They hit the workplace and he instantly made more money than she does. And she is a drag on the family income. How come? They both went to college; they did well, yet she does not earn anywhere near as much money as he does.

That is why it has become a family issue. That is why equal pay keeps registering when we give the American people a list of 10 issues and ask them to write the ones that mean something to them. Equal pay keeps hitting much higher, very high often within the first three of that family's sight. We better listen to them.

In this Special Order, where we are focusing on women, I do not want to leave the impression that women are looking only to so-called women's issues. I have just said that equal pay has become a major family issue in our country, as both parents go out to work, as the number of female heads of households grows astronomically. I want to look for a moment at the tax cut and what it does for women or does not do for women.

I think we need to lay this out as people decide what does this do for us. We hear about things like the tax cut in such gross terms that even if you are a tax lawyer, it is difficult to figure out what it means. For women, reduction of taxes on dividends, we are told that will help seniors because they are investments, reduce the dividends, greater return for them. Let me see, less than one-quarter of older Americans live in a family that receives any dividend income. Now, who knows what that dividend income is. But less than a quarter receive any dividend income.

That is of all older Americans. Only one-fifth of older women live in a family that receives any dividend income, and that is 20 percent. If we are looking at women of color who receive stock dividends, we are looking at 6 percent of black and Hispanic elderly living in families that receive dividend income. So much for women and the tax cut.

When we look at where at least some of the funds in the tax cut might have gone to benefit women, we probably should start with the uninsured, because uninsured women are far more likely to postpone everything. They postpone the care they need today, they skip all of the services like mammograms, they only go to doctors when they have advanced disease. Latina and African American women are 2 to 3 times more likely to be uninsured than white women, but if we had used the tax cut package, we could have insured 33 million of uninsured Americans with incomes below 300 percent of the Federal poverty level. Most of those people are women, often women with children.

If we look at the tax cut in terms of Social Security, and that is often the way the tax cut is positioned, think about women. It is women who have not been in the workforce who go in late so they do not have the pensions and the savings and the investments. They rely more on Social Security, far more than men do. Over 80 percent of unmarried elderly African American and Hispanic women get half their income from Social Security. So if you took the 75-year cost of the tax cut, we could erase the entire 75 year shortfall in Social Security three times over and secure Social Security for the baby boom generation and future generations. We are going to be judged where our values were, and I always thought they were with Social Security, and I do not believe that is true anymore, at least with many in this House.

Another important issue with women has been domestic violence. I remember how we fought in this House and achieved a very important bipartisan consensus on domestic violence. We have a million and a half women assaulted by some partner each year. They have to go to shelters. They need residential shelters, services for their children, but we are able to handle only 1 of 5 women who needs somebody to take them in from an abusive partner. With just $6 billion or 15 percent of the tax cut, we would have had shelter and transitional services for these women and their children. I do not know how Members can continue to talk about women and children and then wipe away all of the funds that they need to do what it is that we are talking about.

The Congressional Black Caucus today just had a very informative internal hearing on Head Start. I was very pleased to participate in that hearing because of the witnesses that came forward, one of them from a center in the District of Columbia where children emerge, and it is a bilingual center, the Beaumont Center, where children emerge literally bilingual. I asked the question and was assured that these children speaking only Spanish or Vietnamese or some other language emerge at kindergarten able to speak English, and that is what concerns me most, because that is when the brain is most pliable and people can earn language most easily. At that age, a child can learn more than one language, so these children do emerge bilingual. Head Start, I cannot say enough about it, but we are very concerned that it will be block granted and disposed of, because we know what happens to block grants: States steal from the block grants, often for people far better off than the block granted people. For the amount of tax cut, we could get to where everyone wants to get in providing Head Start for every eligible child.

Women continue to be the major guardians of our children, so when, in fact, we make the kinds of decisions we have been making on Head Start, we are taking money right out of the hands of children and not just their mothers.

I want to move on to title 9. Sometimes we forget since we talk about title 9 often in terms of sports, sometimes we forget title 9 covers all of education, and what it has wrought in approaching education equality is nothing short of historic.

In the year that the bill was signed, that was 1972, women earned only 7 percent of all law degrees. By that time I was out of law school. I graduated in 1964, and women were still earning only 7 percent. That is called tokenism. That is not representation in the profession. I have to tell if somebody went to law school and took the bar, it is not a profession that one would expect women not to enter.

That was in 1972, 7 percent. Fast forward to 1997, no longer 7 percent, 44 percent, approaching half. Before I came to Congress, I was a full-time tenured professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. I joke, although it is not entirely a joke, that I continue to teach one course there a year. The House does allow a Member to teach but not to do virtually anything else outside of the House. I joke that I continue to teach because one thing I want to do is keep my tenure because it was harder to get tenure than it was to get elected, and there is a lot of truth in that.

But the fact is that I look at my classes, and I teach one course every year, and I am astounded. Not only are the classes often evenly divided, sometimes there are more women than men. In my wildest imagination, that is not what I foresaw for my profession, not when I was in law school.

Let us look at medical school. There were always a greater proportion of women in medical school, not a lot, because if we look at 1977, and that is 5 years after title 9, only 9 percent of all medical degrees were awarded to women. By 1997, 41 percent of the people graduating from medical school were women. This is the pattern in higher education for women. Looking at Ph.D.s, 1997, a quarter of the Ph.D.s went to women. Today 41 percent of Ph.D.s go to women.

Where we hear about title 9 most today, where we do not see this kind of progress, although we see considerable progress, is in athletics; and that has become somehow controversial. There are 32,000 women athletes playing intercollegiately in 1972, and 150,000 today. I would have never thought about intercollegiate athletics, not only because I am unathletic, but because it was not a girl thing to do. It is very important that athletics are open to women, not only for its own sake, but also because of what it means for how women can view where they can go in the world in other pursuits as well.

There were virtually no athletic scholarships for women in 1972, and today there are 10,000 scholarships for women athletes. There has been a lot of progress there. One would think that where there was this kind of progress, we would leave it alone. There is a lot of stuff to study in this House and in this country, but the fact is we just finished a very controversial, polarizing study, commission on title 9. I could think of a thousand commissions to set up where we see negative progress. The last thing I would spend any time on is title 9; but why, because some wrestlers said they were losing out to women who were in fact given title 9 funds.

Give us a break. Thanks to women who protested this commission's work, not a lot has happened, but the commission's bias was astounding. Normally these commissions give the appearance of being open. There was one hearing, and not all sides were heard. There was no indication of continued discrimination against women in sports, no talk about how, for example, men's football and basketball really eat up the money from wrestling. It is somehow the fact that a few more women are playing intercollegiate ball that takes from the men.

Mr. Speaker, I want Members to know what happened on June 13. A district court threw out a lawsuit by a coalition of wrestlers who argued that title 9 requires quotas of female athletes that have resulted in discrimination against men.

The judge said nonsense. He said that the wrestlers failed to show that title IX caused their teams to be dropped. Let us look for the causal effect here. If they do not have a wrestling team now, what is the reason? And this judge found, hey, you cannot even show that if title IX had not been there at all, they would not have dropped the wrestling team. Why in the world do we not ask schools, is it really necessary to pump such large amounts of money into basketball and football? I will grant you that there is reason to put a lot of money there, but if you have got some wealth to share, do not take it from the wrestlers who then blame it on the women. Take a little bit from basketball and football. I do not think either of those sports, given the rah-rah spirit they have and the alumni they draw, are going to suffer from it.

The commission was certainly a very bad idea. There was a minority report by two commissioners who refused to sign the commission's report because of its detrimental possible effects on women. Then Secretary Paige said, fine, we have a unanimous report now. I mean, wait a minute. This is America. We do not do things that way. We acknowledge that there are differences, the majority rules; but we do not say, okay, we have a unanimous report and those people who did not sign simply are not counted at all.

Scandalously, some of the recommendations here hark back to the old days of discrimination. For example, the notion of the use of an interest survey to determine the level of interest women and men have in various sports. What? That builds discrimination on top of discrimination. The reason that girls like me did not have an interest in sports is we were literally taught that a smart girl did not do sports. Now of course that you do not have an interest in sports is why you should not have sports. That is like in the days before title VII saying, let us ask the clients in this law firm whether they would in fact continue to do business with us if we had a black lawyer as a partner. That is exactly what that is like. Or a retail outlet saying, let us not hire this Hispanic person because we do not think people would like to be served by a Hispanic person in this store. I thought we called that discrimination. We do not ask people whether or not they should be given equal treatment in the provision of athletics based on whether they are interested or not. We say, look, if you are not interested, you do not have to do it; but we are not to condition your ability to participate in athletics on a survey as to how many of your gender are interested. That simply compounds the discrimination we are trying to escape. Profit from our own exclusion.

Since title VII, the opportunities for both men and women have increased, but the number of opportunities for women athletes, and, remember, there are more women than men in college, the number of opportunities for women athletes has yet to reach what it was for men before 1972. We need a commission all right. We need a commission to help us get to equal opportunity in athletics quicker than we have done. We need to pat ourselves on the back for how far we have gone and then move further.

I want to say a word about choice. When President Clinton was in the White House, I remember press conferences where women came forward to make the American people understand the notion of late-term abortions. Women came forward and spoke, gave testimony, some of the most moving testimony I have heard, about how their lives or their fertility had been saved by a late-term abortion.

We are going to have next week, or I am certain before recess we will have another spectacle. President Bush is going to invite anti-choice zealots into the White House to sign a bill taking away a woman's right to end a pregnancy not in the last weeks of pregnancy, but from 13 weeks on. That is how that bill reads. That is how a, almost exactly worded bill or worded in almost the same way was read by the Supreme Court. I am hoping that the Supreme Court will save us. Based on my own reading of the prior opinions of the Court, I believe they will; but it is a human tragedy that we have not been able to reach a compromise and that we now have a bill that would disallow the ending of pregnancies in the very last month or so.

The third trimester is already covered by Roe v. Wade, but because the procedure described in the bill is also used in the second trimester, I am certain it is unconstitutional, although nobody can presage what the Court will do. But I do know this, that no one is thinking about the health exception that Roe v. Wade has in it. That is the kind of response to women's reproductive needs we are seeing in this administration. Tragically, we see that we

are trying to carry these notions abroad where they are not wanted and where people have their own set of values. Why in the world were we at a U.N. population conference objecting to the very phrase ``reproductive rights''? What? Wanting it stricken. Why did we object to the words ``reproductive health services''? Representatives of the administration, of the State Department among U.S. delegates? Do reproductive rights necessarily mean abortion? Not the last time I heard. It is a very broad phrase. But the whole notion of trying to rewrite not only the English language here but rewrite the language for the world does seem to me to go beyond our writ and our right.

There are some women in here who are trying to restore the funds that we have now cut off from the United Nations population fund, funds that, of course, were meant only for birth control and contraception; and we have ourselves indicated that those funds will not be available to organizations which do not forswear using other funds for abortion. What this will result in in maternal deaths and the deaths of children will be on us.

Finally, let me say a word about poor women. We passed a TANF bill here. It has not been passed in the Senate yet. I can only hope that it will be thoroughly revised. Every State and the District of Columbia allows some of the time that a woman on TANF, some of the time for work to be spent in some form of postsecondary education. This is seen as an allowable work-related activity. In this House, however, no State would be allowed this flexibility so that a woman, for example, could work part-time and go to college part-time. Why not? Do you want women to get off of TANF and be on minimum-wage jobs for the rest of their natural lives? We want to make sure she is going to school, that she is pursuing a degree or some form of higher education. But why is that not exactly what we should be encouraging? It is almost impossible for poor women under the TANF bill we passed to have enough time available beyond weekly work-related requirements to do anything else, because we have increased the work-hour requirements to 40 per week and then limited what counts as work. What we were trying to do, I thought, was to make people less poor, not simply get them off TANF.

The final straw here was what we did just last week, in essentially killing the child care credit for poor women, poor families. Those are families that earn between $10,000 and $26,000 a year, including military families. By adding on the cost of child care for so many higher-income families, essentially we stabbed the bill in the back, knowing full well that the Senate required that the poor families be paid for and that if you add families of over $200,000, for example, I would love to see it, I would love to have universal child care, we do not have it, but knowing that if you added them, that would kill the bill, that is what this House did.

By the way, the House did not try to hide it. I will not call the House dishonest on this one. Member after Member was clear, said it to the press, said it on the floor, these people do not pay Federal income taxes; therefore, they should get no tax relief. The last time I heard, they were paying a greater share of their income in payroll taxes than most of us pay in income taxes. For the life of me, I do not understand why a child care credit, because that is all this is, it is a child care credit, it is for the child, would not be precisely what we want these families to have.

I give my friend Tom DeLay, and he is a friend, he and I wrote a bill together for family court in the District of Columbia, Tom never does hide where he stands. He said, ``It ain't going to happen. There are a lot of things more important than that.'' That is a quote. You know what, he was right. It is not going to happen. The child tax credit is probably dead, killed in this House after the Senate tried to revive it.

Mr. Speaker, what I have tried to do in memory of Representative Martha Griffiths was simply to call the roll on some of the women's rights issues of special currency today. See, that is where Martha Griffiths would be. She would not be talking about the great feats of yesterday. She would be moving on. I wanted us to remember where these rights came from and that they came in a House where there were but a shallow number of women and a few good men, enough to pass the bill, indeed, without whom no bill could have been passed, who were determined that equality would apply to their wives, to their daughters, to their aunts, and to their mothers.

It is important that we know where this came from because it did not come from a House where, what do we have today, 63 women and a lot of men, Democrat and Republican, who respect and vote for women's rights and vote on women's issues as one might expect any civilized, advanced Nation to do. We have got a lot of that today. But in order to place the true value on where we have come in 40 years, it did seem to me one way to do this was to recognize the life of Representative Martha Griffiths, who had to stay on this floor and remind people that their laughter at the addition or the proposal to add sex to title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act simply underlined the second class status of women when women are not first class citizens yet, but nobody can doubt that they are on their way to being exactly that.

There are some ways in which we do not have consensus. I have named some of them. I have named more of them on which we do. There is one in which I hope we will gather consensus soon. H. Con. Res. 130, the Equal Access in Membership Resolution is pending in the House, and its operative words say, and I cite this because this ought to be an easy one, and yet it is one that is not done, it says no Member of Congress, justice or judge of the United States or political appointee in the executive branch of the Government, should belong to a club that discriminates on the bases that have been named, and my colleagues know what they are, gender, race, et cetera. Come on, everybody. It even respects the right of free association because it does not say no Member must belong. It says no Member should belong. Can we not get at least that passed in the House?

And, remember, we are talking about a Member of Congress, a justice or a judge of the United States or political appointee of the United States of America, that if on is one of those, one is to forego belonging to a club that does not allow Jews and blacks and women in, Hispanics in. Is that too much to ask this late in the day? Hey, look, one can. All this resolution says is the House says one should not. It is because one gives the appearance of not being a fair person.

I hope that we will pass this resolution, this one we might have expected to pass during the height of the civil rights movement. We are all officials. It seems to me we want to give the appearance of fairness, and one way to do it is in the way we live our lives.

I hope that if I have done nothing else, I have pointed out not only our progress but our problems that we have both and that together we have come a very long way, and together we can get the rest of the way.

Mr. Speaker and Congresswoman Norton, thank you for the opportunity to support women's issues and to acknowledge the contributions of former Michigan Congresswoman Martha Griffiths to the cause of equal rights for women.

As the U.S. Representative from Michigan's 1st District, I am particularly proud of the example set by this dynamic, fiery woman, who was elected to the U.S. House in 1954 and served here for twenty years, including a term as the first woman on the House Ways and Means Committee.

Before her service in the U.S. House, Martha Griffiths served from 1949 to 1952 in the Michigan House, followed by two years as the first woman Detroit Recorder's Court judge.

Martha Griffiths was still in Congress when I began my career in public service as a police officer in Escanaba, Michigan in 1972. By the time she re-entered public life as Michigan's first elected female Lieutenant Governor in 1982, I was serving as a Michigan State Trooper.

In all that time, and later when I was elected to the Michigan State House of Representatives, I had Martha Griffith's example to follow.

While she was one of America's greatest women leaders, she was also at the top of the list of consummate politicians and public servants of either gender.

In her work reinvigorating the fight to pass the Equal Rights amendment and in adding language banning sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Martha Griffiths set the stage for later generations of women in politics.

My own wife Laurie, who is the elected mayor of our hometown of Menominee, is one of the thousands of women who benefited from Martha Griffiths' trailblazing work in politics and public life.

Martha Griffiths added influential roles in business to her resume after she retired from the U.S. House, serving on five major corporate boards, including two--Chrysler Corporation and Consumers Power Company--which had up to that time been all male.

A Detroit Free Press editorial on the occasion of Martha's death April 24 of this year summed it up beautifully.

The Free Press said, ``Her very presence wielded power, especially when accompanied by her famously sharp tongue. Of course, her unabashed willingness to go toe-to-toe with the good old boys drew some detractors. An old man once wrote to Griffiths telling her to leave the political stage. `All you've ever done is succeed in making women more insolent,' he wrote.''

What this aging gentleman referred to as insolence we now applaud as assertiveness in such political leaders as Representative Nancy Pelosi, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and the many women in state and local elected office like my partner in life Laurie. The thousands upon thousands of women who have climbed higher in business, community service and government in recent decades are also beneficiaries of Martha's efforts.

I do not have daughters.

But should I be lucky enough to have a daughter-in-law or granddaughters, I will be more than proud if they emulate even some of the self confidence, intelligence, perseverance and fierce effort that Martha Griffiths brought to all her causes.

We can best honor her legacy by continuing to work for equal pay and equal opportunity in the work force, continued support for widows and heads of households in Social Security and pension benefits, labor rights and a refusal to accept sex discrimination in any form.

I am happy to pledge my efforts to those goals.

Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this celebration of women's issues and Martha Griffiths' contributions to those causes.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the extraordinary life of former Congresswoman, and my dear friend, Martha Griffiths. Martha was the matriarch of Michigan politics and one of the nation's greatest advocates for women's rights.

She grew up as the daughter of a rural mail carrier in Pierce City, Missouri, where she excelled in the art of debate. Her intelligence and strong spirit carried her all the way from Missouri to the steps of the University of Michigan Law School where she and her husband became the first couple to graduate together in 1940. After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, she and her husband founded the law firm Griffiths & Griffiths in 1946.

With a top notch law school education and the creation of a successful law firm under her belt, Martha decided to run for a seat in the Michigan State House, and like everything else she did, she succeeded. Martha Griffiths was one of two women who held a seat in the Michigan House from 1949-1952.

In 1954, Martha Griffiths was the first woman elected to serve the great state of Michigan in Congress, where she held the seat for 20 years. While in Congress, she became the first woman to sit on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, she served on the Joint Economic Committee and she was Chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Fiscal Policy.

During her tenure in Congress, Martha built her career fighting for equal rights for women. She fought to ensure the protections for women in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination in voting, public education, employment, public accommodations, and federally assisted programs. In 1970, she stalked the halls of Congress to obtain 218 signatures needed to file a discharge petition to demand that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had languished in a House committee for 47 years, be heard by the full Congress. Congress overwhelmingly approved the ERA in 1972. Unfortunately, it was ratified by only 35 states, three short of the number needed to add it to the U.S. Constitution.

She continued spearheading women's rights as Michigan's first female lieutenant governor in 1982. She also served on five corporate boards, two that had been all male and she was the only woman to serve in all three branches of government in Michigan.

In addition to her great accomplishments for women's rights, Martha was also the driving force in helping me obtain my seat on the prestigious House Judiciary Committee. Being an advocate for civil rights herself, she saw the great importance of having an African American on the very Committee that handles many important issues, including civil rights. As a freshman in the House, having Martha Griffiths as a mentor and a friend was invaluable.

Without the leadership, strength and courage of Martha Griffiths, women would not be where they are today and neither would I. Mr. Speaker, I would like to give special thanks to Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton for bringing this tribute to the floor. A tribute to a woman of such stature is long overdue.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my salute to a remarkable woman and former Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Martha W. Griffiths.

As a pioneering political activist woman, her life was a string of first. In 1953 she was appointed as the first female Detroit Recorder's Court judge; the following year, she was the first Democratic woman elected to Congress from Michigan; she was the first woman to serve on the Ways and Means Committee; she was the first woman lieutenant governor of Michigan.

Martha Griffiths passed away at the age of 91, just this past April and remains a legend in Michigan and National politics. She's been called a ``legendary feminist'' and ``one of the most effective women's rights lawmakers of her time.'' Her reputation was well-earned. She was effective because she was as tough as any of her formidable opponents and she had a sharp intellect. At home she campaigned block-by-block, taking a small group of women to visit other women at home during the day to discuss political issues. She was just as methodical, strategic and persistent in Washington. Her work was richly rewarded with the inclusion of gender discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and by the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. These efforts were watersheds in the progress of women's rights in America. From them, a multitude of Supreme Court decisions and Federal Laws have flowed in support of women.

Martha's progressive politics encompassed much more than women's rights, however. She was concerned about the welfare of all Americans. In the 1970's, she recognized the need for reforming our health system to provide universal health coverage and became an original co-sponsor of the landmark Kennedy-Griffiths Bill; she worked on regulating pension funds, closing tax loopholes and conducted a massive study of welfare, resulting in major overhauls to the system.

Martha Griffiths was, at once, ahead of her time and just right for her time. Her contributions to the evolution of human rights and dignity in this nation will be always remembered.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me.

Mr. Speaker, all of these women share one great quality, whether they are helping educate our youth, building houses for our families, creating jobs for our workers, or representing the people in the public arena. They all lead. These women are but a few women leaders from the congressional district that I represent.

I want to close by saying that there are so many other women that I could call on and mention in my remarks, but I know my time is short.

I do want to mention Joyce Dickens, president and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Edgecombe Community Development Commission and Andrea Harris, of Vance County, president of the Institute for Minority Economic Development. These and so many other women are blazing trails all over North Carolina and showing that women are great leaders, not only in North Carolina, but more particularly, in the First Congressional District.