A Matter of Simple Justice. Lee Stout

      FIGURE 19

      Virginia Allan, a Michigan native, was president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women when she was selected to chair the President’s Task Force on Women’s Rights and Responsibilities in 1969. A Few Good Women Oral History Collection, Penn State University Archives.

      However, at the same time, she acknowledged that this was a team effort and that Catherine East played a critical role. “She was the key to it.… Catherine was the one who had the knowledge. I mean, through BPW and so on, I knew what the problems were, but Catherine knew the people that should be working on this, brought in and recognized. We couldn’t have had what we did if it hadn’t been for Catherine. She was the center.”33

      The selection of the members for the commission took several months. Clapp recalls:

      We got suggestions from a lot of people, members of Burns’ staff went out to their own constituency, so to speak, for suggestions. Some Hill people were approached. It depended, of course, on the task force.… But they came from everywhere really. There were far more people suggested than we had places. And the selection was not always easy. My own position was more of a moderate than say Marty Anderson and Dick Burris and Tom Cole … on Burns’ staff. They were all pretty conservative people.… And they didn’t hesitate to make suggestions.…

      Now, on the women’s task force, politics played an important role there with me, for example. My feeling was that women’s issues had been controlled almost completely by the Democrats; that the Republicans didn’t have anybody with the pedigree or the credentials to lead in these matters.… It certainly would give Republicans a larger voice in these issues and more exposure, and it would not be so much the sole province of the Democratic Party. So I did, I have to confess that at least several of these people were selected by me, rightly or wrongly, based on what I regarded as the importance for the Republican Party of having qualified women with a credential who could go out and speak on women’s issues.34

      Clapp noted that almost all of the women selected for the task force were “committed to the development of the importance of women and the necessity of including women in public life.… I don’t know that these people were so intent on putting the Republican imprint on this as they were in the general philosophy of women needed more exposure, needed more opportunity, that sort of thing.”35 The importance of having a political balance was important to both Clapp and Allan. They worked together on selecting the members.

      Allan saw value in having a variety of backgrounds represented. Ann Blackham and William Mercer were business executives, as was Allan. Evelyn Whitlow was a lawyer and Betty Athanasakos a judge, Dorothy Haener of the United Automobile Workers represented labor, and Evelyn Cunningham and Vera Glaser were journalists. Katherine Massenburg was chairing the Maryland Commission on the Status of Women; both she and Pat Hutar had been active with Republican women’s groups. Alan Simpson was president of Vassar College, and Sister Ida Gannon was president of Mundelein College, a Catholic women’s college in Chicago. Dee Boersma was a graduate student at Ohio State, particularly selected by Allan because she had wanted to bring in young people’s views.

      Some were active in party politics; Clapp felt that the task force gave women like Pat Hutar, Ann Blackham, Kitty Massenburg, and Virginia Allan a chance to receive more public recognition. Evelyn Cunningham was also a good choice—she “was an assistant to Governor Rockefeller and Black and was very articulate and very useful because New York had accomplished a lot.”36 On the Democratic side, “Dorothy Haener represented the union and she was good. But she kept your feet to the fire, too.… [She] was concerned that Nixon might get more credit than he really deserved, something like that.”37

      Of the male contingent on the task force, Simpson probably had the greater appreciation of the issues, but as Clapp recalled, “[the men] had to be led along a little.”38 However, William Mercer, AT&T’s vice president for personnel, found his service particularly valuable. Patricia Hutar, native Chicagoan active in Republican politics from her college days, recalls that Mercer “was acutely aware of it because women were raising their voices in companies and expressing themselves very vigorously.… He was already recognizing these needs.”39 Mercer was later responsible for adding more programs for women in telephone companies than had existed in the past.