THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, June 2, 1995 TAG: 9505310238
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
The public figure who had the most impact on my life died last weekend.
At 97, Margaret Chase Smith had been out of public life for nearly a quarter of a century, yet hardly a week passed that I didn't think about the Lady from Maine.
I was 12 years old when she was elected to the United States Senate, the first woman to do so in her own right.
From the start, she was my idol.
When a woman's magazine ran a color photo of the senator wearing one of her trademark dressmaker suits with a single rose in a vial on her lapel, I clipped the picture, took it downtown in a quest for the perfect dressmaker suit and stopped at the flower shop to buy one of those little vases on a pin.
The dressmaker suits proved too costly and impractical, especially since they looked ridiculous with the saddle shoes that were standard teenage uniform then, but the lapel pin, at 50 cents, was a bargain.
For months I wore it, filled with whatever flowers I could buy or beg from the florist, borrow or snitch from neighborhood gardens.
It was my way of saying ``I like that lady in Washington,'' of letting the world know that I admired her taste, her politics and her spunk. I no longer wear the flowers, but my opinion of the woman who wore them has never changed.
It's a funny thing about Margaret Chase Smith. While her sex was news elsewhere, it was really of no great consequence in Maine.
Harsh weather, hard times, rough seas and rocky soil combined with common sense and an emphasis on good, practical education had long since blunted the sharp divisions between the sexes, which were found in other parts of the country.
I never remember hearing the words ``man's work'' or ``woman's work.''
Women doctors were numerous, among them our school physician who had graduated from medical school at the turn of the century and still maintained a busy private practice.
A goodly number of Bangor's businesses were owned and operated by women.
The members of the local Business and Professional Women's Club could hold their own on any board of directors and, for the most part, remain ladies while doing it.
My mother's friend, Cassie, owner of the local beauty school and frequent president of the BP and W, was once described as a holy terror in white gloves and a flowered hat. When Cassie spoke, Bangor's downtown businessmen listened - and cringed. The downtown business women were only slightly less intimidated.
While Cassie bellowed, another friend of mother's, Glenna, spoke softly and carried clout.
Sole owner of the family's jewelry store after the untimely death of her brother, the gentle, blond Glenna could see to it that a parking lot was added to the city budget or a building saved from demolition with the same ease that she could convince a tightfisted Yankee farmer to part with enough cash to buy a real diamond for his intended.
On the coast women fished beside their men. In the woods they hunted, trapped, felled trees and did whatever else was needed to assure survival.
And everywhere they farmed. My Aunt Eva's sister, Barbara, owned and operated the finest dairy farm in the Bangor area. A divorcee, when divorce for either sex was distinctly unfashionable, she did so with the aid of her three daughters and a series of hired men who were usually gone after their first transgression serious enough to trigger Barbara's wrath. A weekend binge was the most common reason. Leaving under such circumstances was essential to survival. It was widely known that Barbara packed a gun and knew how to use it. Nobody in town doubted that she would if the situation called for it.
Not even the Air Force, which had the misfortune to locate a major base adjacent to Barbara's property, a situation which kept her cows in a constant state of unrest and cut back on their milk production. Especially when a pilot, as happened from time to time, crashed on her land.
Base commanders were known to shake like hired men caught with a hayloft full of Ballantine empties when informed that Barbara was on her way through the gate with blood in her eye.
One area in which there was inequality, however, was in pay for teachers. There was one scale for female teachers with various levels of education and experience, another for males.
A couple of hundred female teachers, including Miss Mulaney, who was trying to cram first year algebra into my head that winter, remedied the situation. Dressed as suffragettes, they marched on Augusta while the legislature was in session and demanded equal pay for equal work. They got it.
That was in 1951, 20 years before the late Equal Rights Amendment ever saw the light of day.
Margaret Chase Smith was in her third year in the senate at the time. Already, as a freshman senator, she had made her ``declaration of conscience'' speech, decrying the tactics of her fellow Republican, Joe McCarthy.
It was a time that one could be proud growing up female in Maine.
Thanks to women like our mothers, aunts and grandmothers, the school doctor, Cassie, Glenna, Barbara, Miss Mulaney and Senator Smith - especially Senator Smith - we grew up in an essentially gender blind world, never realizing that all women were not treated as we were. by CNB