One of my friends came to the bridge table last week livid about the congressional hearing that she had been watching on TV. They really “grilled” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, she said, and I guess they did. My friend is a lovely product of the chivalrous South (chivalrous for some people, that is), but the days are long gone when anyone thought that a woman in such an office might dissolve into tears when treated less than courteously. By the time a woman reaches that pinnacle, she has passed test after test.
Kathleen Sebelius also was comfortable testifying because she truly knows from insurance. She moved up from the Kansas House in 1994, when the state’s voters elected her as insurance commissioner. She did such a good job protecting consumers that they went on to elect her governor in 2002: in this usually Republican state, her Republican opponent got a mere 45% of the vote. One of four women elected as governors that year, she easily won reelection in 2006. Governor Sebelius was one of the first choices that President Obama made for his Cabinet in 2009.
Nor was she the first female governor of Kansas: this quintessential heartland state had elected a woman, Joan Finney, in 1990. That year marked the mid-term elections during the George H.W. Bush administration, and it set a precedent with gubernatorial victories for three women, all Democrats. Finney of Kansas tied with Barbara Roberts of Oregon and Ann Richards of Texas as the ninth woman to hold that office.
Kansas and Oregon got overlooked in the media madness for Texas, so you probably never knew of Joan Finney. She got her political start rather late in life, as an aide to male Republican officeholders. She ran for Congress in 1972 and lost, but the experience made her realize that she really was a Democrat on the issues. She switched parties, and in 1974, Kansans elected her as state treasurer, a position that she held for the next sixteen years. Finney’s 1990 gubernatorial victory was spectacular: she defeated a former governor in the Democratic primary and the incumbent governor in the general election.
So the guy who wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the book that was so wildly popular with pundits a few years ago, simply got it wrong. What can I say? Why don’t my books become similar bestsellers? I suspect it is because most of them have “women” in the title, and not in a sexy way.
* * *
Nor was the “grilling” of Kathleen Sebelius a precedent. The second woman on the Cabinet, Republican Oveta Culp Hobby of Texas, received similar treatment. So brilliant that she graduated from the University of Texas while still in her teens, by age 20, she was the legislature’s parliamentarian. At 21, she codified state laws on banking. She married William Hobby, a former governor and Houston newspaper publisher at 26, bore two children (yes, all of the women I’m writing about also were mothers), and in 1960, she would be named by her peers as Publisher of the Year. In between, she headed the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II.
President Eisenhower got to know Hobby during the war, and he very much appreciated the way she built that corps from scratch. Despite a great deal of negative publicity, some of her WACs were in North Africa within months of the corps’ formation – and they went on with Eisenhower to the invasion of Italy and then to France and Germany. He repeatedly praised their abilities and devotion to their work, especially as phone operators, translators, and code breakers. (My book on this is American Women and World War II. It’s widely available on the internet, although no one sends any royalties.)
So because she had done such a fantastic job of taking a military unit from zero to a hundred thousand women all around the globe, Ike knew that Hobby had truly amazing executive ability. He understandably reached out to her when Congress created – in 1953 and for the first time! – a Cabinet position that truly dealt with the needs of ordinary citizens.
At that point, the Cabinet consisted of George Washington’s first five (Attorney General, Postmaster General, War, State, and Treasury), plus Interior (land and Indians), Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. The creation of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was a new direction for the country, and highly controversial. Education later was separated into its own department, and now the agency is Health and Human Services, or HHS. The Office of the Surgeon General remains a separate agency, still officially under the Army dating to its Civil War origins.
Aside from the controversy that arose from targeting the needs of women and children, HEW happened to begin at the same time that the nation had a serious epidemic of polio. I remember it on a personal level: of the thirty kids in my grade school class, four were crippled by polio. Swimming pools were closed because people thought the virus was spread by water, and parents were terrified to allow their children to have any contact with children who had the disease, even after hospitals released them. Newspapers and magazines were full of pictures of kids immobilized inside an “iron lung” that breathed for them.
When Dr. Jonas Salk, working under the aegis of the new March of Dimes, promised a polio vaccine in a news conference with Hobby in 1955, the nation was hopeful but anxious. Would the vaccine be safe? And would it be distributed fairly? The answer to the first question became clouded when a California laboratory manufactured a batch of contaminated vaccine that caused several deaths. Although Hobby immediately closed down the lab and sent experts to do a thorough review, she received more than her share of unfocused blame.
The question of equitable distribution was clouded by Eisenhower’s military background. As a man who enjoyed a lifetime of free medical care in the military, he breezily promised that every child would be vaccinated without concern for cost – and at the same time, he reassured his physician and pharmaceutical friends in the Republican Party that there would be no federal control of the privately produced vaccine. Hobby was expected to work out a policy from these contradictory views.
She did, and in the end, the nation in fact took the first steps to “socialized medicine.” Eisenhower and Congress came to see that the safety of children was more important than the sanctity of private enterprise, and millions of free vaccinations took place. Meanwhile my family had moved from Minnesota, where my crippled classmates were, to Arkansas, where one Sunday after church, we assembled in the school lunchroom for public health nurses to give us shots in the upper arm. The oral vaccine came out soon after that, and this time, we drank our shots.
Oveta Culp Hobby resigned on July 13, 1955, after the introduction of the first vaccine in April. I think she could have ridden out the political storm, especially given her record with the WAC, which also was controversial at its beginning. I believe that she resigned to give HEW a fresh start, as her departure did in fact allow the nation to lessen the blame game and get on with vaccinating its children. And she didn’t need the job or the grief that came with it.
Kathleen Sebelius has a much more clear-eyed boss in President Obama, and I think she will ride out this much more minor storm. Everyone today has enough experience with computer insanity to understand that the top ex is not the one who created the website. And no one has died from Obamacare.
* * *
Ok, if I don’t write about the first woman on the Cabinet, someone will ask why not. Some even may think that I skipped her because she did a terrible job.
She was Frances Perkins, who headed the Department of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s. After leading workers in overcoming the Great Depression, she then recruited the labor force that won World War II. You owe her for minimum wage and maximum hour laws, for basic health and safety in the workplace, for the right to join a union, and for unemployment insurance. She was the most important Secretary of Labor ever. No one before or since achieved so many momentous reforms in the work force.
Most of all, though, you owe her for Social Security, which now is under HHS but was birthed by Frances Perkins under Labor. Just think about the controversy of a woman running that department even without the innovation of Social Security. Then think about making a national commitment to take care of each other in old age or disability -- and making that promise at the depths of a worldwide depression! Think about implementing a system as complex as Social Security before computerization!
It worked. And so will Obamacare. We need to calm down and put things in context.
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.
Kathleen Sebelius also was comfortable testifying because she truly knows from insurance. She moved up from the Kansas House in 1994, when the state’s voters elected her as insurance commissioner. She did such a good job protecting consumers that they went on to elect her governor in 2002: in this usually Republican state, her Republican opponent got a mere 45% of the vote. One of four women elected as governors that year, she easily won reelection in 2006. Governor Sebelius was one of the first choices that President Obama made for his Cabinet in 2009.
Nor was she the first female governor of Kansas: this quintessential heartland state had elected a woman, Joan Finney, in 1990. That year marked the mid-term elections during the George H.W. Bush administration, and it set a precedent with gubernatorial victories for three women, all Democrats. Finney of Kansas tied with Barbara Roberts of Oregon and Ann Richards of Texas as the ninth woman to hold that office.
Kansas and Oregon got overlooked in the media madness for Texas, so you probably never knew of Joan Finney. She got her political start rather late in life, as an aide to male Republican officeholders. She ran for Congress in 1972 and lost, but the experience made her realize that she really was a Democrat on the issues. She switched parties, and in 1974, Kansans elected her as state treasurer, a position that she held for the next sixteen years. Finney’s 1990 gubernatorial victory was spectacular: she defeated a former governor in the Democratic primary and the incumbent governor in the general election.
So the guy who wrote What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the book that was so wildly popular with pundits a few years ago, simply got it wrong. What can I say? Why don’t my books become similar bestsellers? I suspect it is because most of them have “women” in the title, and not in a sexy way.
* * *
Nor was the “grilling” of Kathleen Sebelius a precedent. The second woman on the Cabinet, Republican Oveta Culp Hobby of Texas, received similar treatment. So brilliant that she graduated from the University of Texas while still in her teens, by age 20, she was the legislature’s parliamentarian. At 21, she codified state laws on banking. She married William Hobby, a former governor and Houston newspaper publisher at 26, bore two children (yes, all of the women I’m writing about also were mothers), and in 1960, she would be named by her peers as Publisher of the Year. In between, she headed the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II.
President Eisenhower got to know Hobby during the war, and he very much appreciated the way she built that corps from scratch. Despite a great deal of negative publicity, some of her WACs were in North Africa within months of the corps’ formation – and they went on with Eisenhower to the invasion of Italy and then to France and Germany. He repeatedly praised their abilities and devotion to their work, especially as phone operators, translators, and code breakers. (My book on this is American Women and World War II. It’s widely available on the internet, although no one sends any royalties.)
So because she had done such a fantastic job of taking a military unit from zero to a hundred thousand women all around the globe, Ike knew that Hobby had truly amazing executive ability. He understandably reached out to her when Congress created – in 1953 and for the first time! – a Cabinet position that truly dealt with the needs of ordinary citizens.
At that point, the Cabinet consisted of George Washington’s first five (Attorney General, Postmaster General, War, State, and Treasury), plus Interior (land and Indians), Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. The creation of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) was a new direction for the country, and highly controversial. Education later was separated into its own department, and now the agency is Health and Human Services, or HHS. The Office of the Surgeon General remains a separate agency, still officially under the Army dating to its Civil War origins.
Aside from the controversy that arose from targeting the needs of women and children, HEW happened to begin at the same time that the nation had a serious epidemic of polio. I remember it on a personal level: of the thirty kids in my grade school class, four were crippled by polio. Swimming pools were closed because people thought the virus was spread by water, and parents were terrified to allow their children to have any contact with children who had the disease, even after hospitals released them. Newspapers and magazines were full of pictures of kids immobilized inside an “iron lung” that breathed for them.
When Dr. Jonas Salk, working under the aegis of the new March of Dimes, promised a polio vaccine in a news conference with Hobby in 1955, the nation was hopeful but anxious. Would the vaccine be safe? And would it be distributed fairly? The answer to the first question became clouded when a California laboratory manufactured a batch of contaminated vaccine that caused several deaths. Although Hobby immediately closed down the lab and sent experts to do a thorough review, she received more than her share of unfocused blame.
The question of equitable distribution was clouded by Eisenhower’s military background. As a man who enjoyed a lifetime of free medical care in the military, he breezily promised that every child would be vaccinated without concern for cost – and at the same time, he reassured his physician and pharmaceutical friends in the Republican Party that there would be no federal control of the privately produced vaccine. Hobby was expected to work out a policy from these contradictory views.
She did, and in the end, the nation in fact took the first steps to “socialized medicine.” Eisenhower and Congress came to see that the safety of children was more important than the sanctity of private enterprise, and millions of free vaccinations took place. Meanwhile my family had moved from Minnesota, where my crippled classmates were, to Arkansas, where one Sunday after church, we assembled in the school lunchroom for public health nurses to give us shots in the upper arm. The oral vaccine came out soon after that, and this time, we drank our shots.
Oveta Culp Hobby resigned on July 13, 1955, after the introduction of the first vaccine in April. I think she could have ridden out the political storm, especially given her record with the WAC, which also was controversial at its beginning. I believe that she resigned to give HEW a fresh start, as her departure did in fact allow the nation to lessen the blame game and get on with vaccinating its children. And she didn’t need the job or the grief that came with it.
Kathleen Sebelius has a much more clear-eyed boss in President Obama, and I think she will ride out this much more minor storm. Everyone today has enough experience with computer insanity to understand that the top ex is not the one who created the website. And no one has died from Obamacare.
* * *
Ok, if I don’t write about the first woman on the Cabinet, someone will ask why not. Some even may think that I skipped her because she did a terrible job.
She was Frances Perkins, who headed the Department of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s. After leading workers in overcoming the Great Depression, she then recruited the labor force that won World War II. You owe her for minimum wage and maximum hour laws, for basic health and safety in the workplace, for the right to join a union, and for unemployment insurance. She was the most important Secretary of Labor ever. No one before or since achieved so many momentous reforms in the work force.
Most of all, though, you owe her for Social Security, which now is under HHS but was birthed by Frances Perkins under Labor. Just think about the controversy of a woman running that department even without the innovation of Social Security. Then think about making a national commitment to take care of each other in old age or disability -- and making that promise at the depths of a worldwide depression! Think about implementing a system as complex as Social Security before computerization!
It worked. And so will Obamacare. We need to calm down and put things in context.
Doris Weatherford writes a weekly column for La Gaceta, the nation's only trilingual newspaper. With pages in Spanish, Italian, and English, it has been published in Tampa since 1922.