Martha Griffiths
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Martha Edna Wright Griffiths (January 29, 1912 - April 22, 2003) was an American lawyer and judge before being elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1955. Griffiths was the first woman to be on the powerful House Committee on Ways and Means. She was also the person most responsible for including the prohibition of sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Griffiths was also the first female Lieutenant Governor of Michigan.
Martha Edna Wright, was born in Pierce City, Missouri. She attended public schools, and went on to graduate with a B.A. from the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1934. She choose to continue her education by studying law, and graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1940.
She worked as a lawyer in private practice then in the legal department of the American Automobile Insurance Co. in Detroit from 1941 - 1942 and then as the Ordnance District contract negotiator from 1942 - 1946. She was elected to the Michigan state house of representatives, serving from 1948 to 1952. In 1953 she was appointed as recorder and judge of the Recorder's Court in Detroit and sat as judge from 1953 - 1954, she was the first woman to do so.
She sat as a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in 1956 and 1968 and was elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-fourth Congress and to the nine following Congresses (January 3, 1955 - December 31, 1974), she was not a candidate for reelection to the Ninety-fourth Congress in 1974.
Following her time in Federal politics, she practiced law and then served as the lieutenant governor of Michigan from 1982 - 1991. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1983 and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993.
Reference
- Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. GRIFFITHS, Martha Wright, (1912 - 2003) (http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=G000471)