United States representative politician
Saint George was born in Bridgnorth, England, in 1894, to American parents. Her father, Hiram Price Collier, was a former Unitarian minister. Her mother, Catherine Delano Collier, was the younger sister of Sara Delano Roosevelt, mother of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Her family returned to the United States when she was two years of age. Saint George"s younger sister, Sara Collier, was named in their aunt"s honor. Saint George married George Baker Bligh Saint George, third son of the second Baronet Saint George (see Street George Baronets).
Their only daughter Priscilla Saint George was married first to Angier Biddle Duke (1915–1995), an American diplomat, and an heir to the Duke tobacco empire, from 1936 to 1940.
And second to State Senator Allan A. Ryan, Junior. (1903–1981) from 1941 to 1950.
Saint George and her family resided briefly at 2144 Wyoming Avenue in Washington District of Columbia before relocating to Tuxedo Park, New York, in June 1919, where she much later died at the age of eighty-eight, in 1983. She was chair of the Orange County Republican committee from 1942 until 1948.
She was a delegate to the 1944 Republican National Convention.
She was elected to Congress in 1946 and served from January 3, 1947, until January 3, 1965. A proponent of pay equity, Saint George was a supporter of the Equal Pay Acting of 1963. In 1962, Saint George proposed that legislation be passed to ensure that women received equal pay for equal work.
Her proposals were drafted into a bill and introduced by Congresswoman Edith Green, an Oregon Democrat.
During a debate regarding the bill, Saint George stated that opposing the bill was comparable to "being against motherhood". The bill met with stiff opposition from the United States Chamber of Commerce, but received support from the Kennedy Administration, the American Association of Women, the National Consumers League, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Federation of Labor-Congress-Chief Information Officer. The bill passed in both the House and the Senate, but it passed in different forms, and wasn’t ratified.
Undaunted, in 1963, Green re-introduced the bill, and this time it was successfully ratified into law.
She was a member of the town board of Tuxedo Park, New York, from 1926 until 1949.
