Mary Teresa Hopkins Norton

Background

Mary Teresa Norton was born on March 7, 1875 in Jersey City, New Jersey, United States. She was the daughter of Thomas Hopkins, a well-to-do contractor, and Marie Shea, both of whom were born in Ireland.

Education

Norton attended public and parochial schools, and had just graduated from Jersey City High School in 1892. Although her father opposed higher education for women, Mary Hopkins went to Packard Business College in New York City, graduating in 1896.

Career

For thirteen years Norton worked as a stenographer and secretary, finding life as an independent young business-woman both pleasant and exhilarating.

After nearly two years as a recluse, she plunged into child-care work. She helped form the Queen's Daughters Day Nursery in the parish, and was elected secretary in 1913.

When the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote, was ratified in 1920, Hague urged Norton to organize the women of Jersey City and to serve as the Hudson County representative on the Democratic State Committee. She did so, and was elected vice-chairman of the committee in 1921, was chairman (1932 - 1935), and then vice-chairman again (1935 - 1943).

In 1924, with the endorsement of the Hague machine, Norton won election to the House of Representatives from the Twelfth (later Thirteenth) District of New Jersey, which comprised Bayonne and part of Jersey City.

In Congress, Norton was confronted with the conservative attitude of many male representatives who were often gallant but frequently unfair. Women, like independents, were discriminated against in committee assignments and excluded from the leadership.

At the Democratic National Convention in both 1928 and 1932, she worked for Al Smith's nomination.

Norton also was elected to a number of important Democratic party positions. In 1932 she became head of the New Jersey Democratic Committee, which had responsibility for federal patronage in the state. She was the first woman in either major party to be elected head of a state party organization. She retained that position until 1935 (she resigned the year after her husband died in 1934) and held it again from 1940 to 1944. She became a member of the Democratic National Committee in 1944 and in 1948 chaired the Credentials Committee at the Democratic National Convention. In 1937, Norton succeeded to the chair of the House Labor Committee following the death of William P. Connery. A loyal New Dealer, she headed the committee for ten years.

She successfully steered President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Wages and Hours Bill through the House in 1938, despite the opposition of Republicans and southern Democrats. With Roosevelt's support she succeeded in petitioning the bill out of the Rules Committee and led the floor fight for what became the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. In subsequent years Norton defended New Deal labor legislation against conservative attack. During World War II, however, many of the labor bills were removed from her jurisdiction and sent to the military and naval affairs committees. Norton charged that this resulted from discrimination against her personally. She also predicted that after the war women would be forced to leave jobs they had been handling capably. When the Republicans gained a majority in Congress in the 1946 election, Norton resigned from the Labor Committee in protest against the new chairman, Fred A. Hartley of New Jersey. She helped to lead the unsuccessful fight against the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. After the Democrats regained control of Congress in 1949, she became head of the House Administration Committee. Norton retired from Congress in 1951, having served for twenty-six years, longer than any other woman. For the next two years she worked as a special consultant on women in industry to the Department of Labor.

In 1956 she moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where she died.

Like the ward politicians that Jersey City had often sent to Congress, she remained a party regular. This was in keeping with the predominantly Catholic, working-class, urban northeastern district that she represented. She was an outsider to her colleagues on Capitol Hill because she was a woman, and to the Washington elite because of her background.

Achievements

• Norton became president of the nonsectarian Day Nurseries Association of Jersey City, which cared for children of working women. She was elected the first woman member of the Hudson County Board of Freeholders, the county governing board. She was the first woman to be elected to Congress on the Democratic ticket and the first congresswoman from any eastern state. She was also the first member of Congress to introduce a bill to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. When the Democrats organized the Seventy-second Congress, Norton became head of the House Committee on the District of Columbia, the first woman to chair a major congressional committee. Since the committee governed the District of Columbia, she also became the first woman "mayor of Washington. "

Politics

Norton had strong ideas about women and politics. Most women did not identify with female political candidates, she said, and for that reason neither the women in the electorate nor those in the Congress voted together as a group. She opposed the formation of a women's bloc in the House, saying her immediate task was to represent her own district.

During her first decade in Congress, Norton became known as a "wet" and a loyal Democratic party regular from the urban Northeast. Although she insisted that Hague never asked her to vote against her conscience, she never voted against his interests. They apparently held similar views. As late as 1950 she helped Hague retain his seat on the New Jersey State Executive Committee. Norton supported labor legislation.

Views

Norton was one of a number of prominent Catholics who opposed the Gillett bill, which would have fostered the dissemination of birth-control information.

Quotations: "I'm no lady, I'm a member of Congress, and I'll proceed on that basis. "

"It will probably take another generation, to make women realize their own power. "

Personality

Genial and unassuming, Norton was cool, witty, and competent in debate.

Norton was neither a crusader nor a leader. She worked hard, climbed up through the party and the congressional seniority systems, and mastered the skills of legislative politics.

Quotes from others about the person

• "To snooty Washington society, she is a business school graduate, Tammany, and Catholic, and hence unacceptable. But then, so was Al Smith, and Mrs. Norton is proud to be in any category with him. " (Duff Gilford)

Connections

In April 1909 Norton married Robert Francis Norton, a widower who was an executive of a wholesale cooperage firm in Jersey City. This ended her business career. The death of her only child in infancy turned Norton's energies in other directions. "The bottom dropped out of my world for a time, " she remembered in her unpublished memoir, "something had to take the place of the children I could not have. "

Father:

Thomas Hopkins

contractor

Mother:

Marie Shea

Spouse:

Robert Francis Norton

References

• Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-2005
• Women in Congress 1917-2006 (House Document) Vernon J. Ehlers, Chairman