Millicent Fenwick

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Millicent Fenwick

Millicent Fenwick , née Millicent Vernon Hammond (born February 25, 1910 in New York City , New York , †  September 16, 1992 in Bernardsville , New Jersey ) was an American Republican politician , civil rights activist and publicist . She was a longtime member of the US House of Representatives for the state of New Jersey. Fenwick advocated the protection of human rights and women's rights . She was a popular media figure because of her unconventional, enthusiastic nature.

Fashion journalist and publicist

Fenwick left Foxcroft School in Middleburg ( Virginia ) at the age of 15 and then attended the Nightingale-Bamford School, an exclusive boarding school for girls in New York, the School for Social Research and Columbia University . She was fluent in French, Spanish and Italian. As a young woman, she was mainly involved in the fashion industry. She worked as a model for Harper's Bazaar and was an editor for fashion magazine Vogue for 14 years . In 1948 she published Vogue's Book of Etiquette , which sold more than a million times.

Political career

She got into politics late in her life. Fenwick's political career began in the 1950s when she became involved in the civil rights movement. Her greatest political role models included Eleanor Roosevelt , Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King . Through the influence of her father, a longtime Republican, Fenwick also joined the Republican Party and rose quickly within it.

In 1957 she was elected to the local government of her home district of Bernardsville, where she served until 1964. In 1958 she was appointed a member of the New Jersey State Civil Rights Committee. She worked in this function until 1974. From 1970 to 1973 Fenwick served in the General Assembly , the lower house of the New Jersey state parliament. She then became head of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs (DCA). In 1974, Fenwick was elected to Congress for New Jersey at the age of 64 .

During this time, their increased awareness and began popularity in the media . She used this primarily to denounce and fight corruption within politics and to tighten firearms laws. Despite her membership in the more conservative Republicans, she was a very liberal politician. The American television journalist and news anchor Walter Cronkite called it "the conscience of the American Congress". Fenwick was a co-founder of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), a body that made agreements on human rights, economic, scientific, technical and environmental cooperation, security issues, and humanitarian cooperation issues.

In 1982 Fenwick ran for the US Senate , but lost 48% of the vote against the Democratic candidate Frank Lautenberg . Fenwick then left the New Jersey Congress. In the same year she was named representative of the United States in the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome by US President Ronald Reagan . This office, which she held from June 1983, had the rank of ambassador. In March 1987, due to her slowly deteriorating health, she resigned from office and said goodbye to public life.

Family and personal life

Millicent Fenwick was born the middle of three children into a wealthy, prominent family that had been politically and socially engaged in various ways for generations . Her father was Ogden Hammond (1869-1956), Republican state politician in New Jersey and later US ambassador to Spain . Like his daughter later, Hammond was an advocate of women's and human rights. Her mother, Mary Picton Stevens (1885-1915), was a great-granddaughter of Colonel John Stevens , who founded the city of Hoboken in New Jersey, and a great-niece of the railroad and steamship pioneer Robert Livingston Stevens . Mary did a lot of charitable work in support of orphans and war victims.

Fenwick was born in New York, but grew up with her siblings Mary Stevens Hammond (1908-1958) and Ogden Haggerty Hammond, Jr. (1912-1976) in their parents' villa on Mendham Road in Bernardsville, New Jersey. In 1915, her parents were on board the luxury steamer RMS Lusitania when it was sunk by a German submarine on the coast of southern Ireland. The father survived, the mother not. Ogden Hammond remarried in 1917, but the stepmother was never able to establish a loving relationship with the children.

Because of her father's diplomatic activities, Fenwick lived in Madrid in the late 1920s . After her sister Mary married the noble Italian diplomat Comte Guerino Roberti on August 8, 1931, she spent a lot of time in Rome.

In 1931 she met the married businessman Hugh McLeod Fenwick (1905-1991) know, who divorced her from his wife, Dorothy Cass Ledyard, a granddaughter of Lewis Cass Ledyard (President of the New York City Bar Association ). They were married on June 11, 1932 in Bernardsville. Fenwick's stepmother Margaret, a deeply devout Catholic , was appalled by the fact that Millicent had broken up a married couple and married a divorced man. She expelled her stepdaughter from the house and sabotaged the wedding by manipulating the cameras so that there were hardly any pictures of the wedding later. The couple wanted to spend their honeymoon in Alaska . They wanted a private plane via California to fly to Alaska, but the plane crashed shortly after takeoff in Norristown ( Pennsylvania ab), which made regional headlines. Both survived unharmed. The honeymoon ended up being spent in Bermuda with friends from Millicent.

The couple had two children: Mary Stevens Fenwick (born February 25, 1934) and Hugh Hammond Fenwick (born January 28, 1937). The marriage was initially happy, but Hugh had affairs, suffered from depression and also accumulated debts, which is why Millicent left him in 1938. The marriage was divorced in 1945. While Hugh remarried, she remained unmarried. In 1949 she had to have a mastectomy . In addition to the early loss of her mother, Fenwick experienced further blows of fate in close family circles. In 1958, her sister Mary lost the battle against cancer after long, grueling chemotherapy . In 1987, Fenwick's daughter, Mary Fenwick Reckford, died of leukemia .

Millicent Fenwick died of heart failure in 1992 at the age of 82. She left behind her son, eleven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Others

Millicent Fenwick was the template for the character Lacey Davenport in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury .

She was a cousin of the music producer and talent scout John Hammond (1910-1987), who promoted artists like Aretha Franklin or Billie Holiday . After her mother's death, Millicent was raised by John's mother.

Fenwick's son Hugh died on March 16, 2002 in Bernardsville. He left behind his widow Joyce K. Handy Fenwick and six children.

literature

  • Peggy Lamson: In The Vanguard. Six American Woman in Public Life. Houghton Mifflin, Boston MA 1979, ISBN 0-395-27608-X .
  • Office of the Historian, US House of Representatives: Women in Congress, 1917-1990 (= House Document 101, 238, ZDB -ID 778469-7 ). United States Government Printing Office , Washington DC 1991.
  • Esther Stineman: American Political Women. Contemporary and historical Profiles. Libraries Unlimited, Littleton CO 1980, ISBN 0-87287-238-6 .
  • Amy Schapiro: Millicent Fenwick. Her way. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ 2003, ISBN 0-8135-3231-0 .

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Fenwick, Millicent
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hammond, Millicent Vernon (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American Republican politician and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1992
Place of death Bernardsville , New Jersey