Edith Nourse Rogers

Welfare Worker

  • Born: March 19, 1881
  • Birthplace: Saco, Maine
  • Died: September 10, 1960
  • Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

American representative (1925-1960)

The longest-serving female member of the U.S. Congress, Rogers worked to enact legislation, namely the G.I. Bill, to benefit veterans of the U.S. armed forces and to expand opportunities for women in the military. She was instrumental in the creation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, later known as the Women’s Army Corps, during World War II.

Areas of achievement Government and politics, military affairs, women’s rights

Early Life

Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1925 until her death in 1960, was born Edith Nourse in Saco, Maine to Franklin and Edith (Riversmith) Nourse. Her father was a wealthy textile mill executive. As a young girl, she was tutored at home but also attended Grove Hall, a private school. In 1895, the family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, a textile-mill town on the Merrimack River.

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At home in Lowell, Rogers spent many days playing with her friends at her father’s mill yard. She attended school at Rogers Hall School in Lowell. After graduation, she went to live with an aunt in France to study music. She also enrolled at Madame Julien’s finishing school in Paris. While in Europe, she continued a friendship by correspondence with John Jacob Rogers, a childhood friend who was studying at Harvard University and later Harvard Law School. The couple married in 1907.

After building a successful legal practice in Lowell, Rogers’s husband decided to enter politics, serving first in local government. In 1912 he was elected to the House of Representatives. In Washington, D.C., Rogers assisted the young congressman with his duties and served as his host. During World War I, John enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army and joined a group of members of Congress sent to inspect war conditions in Europe. Rogers accompanied him and, as a Red Cross volunteer, visited Army field hospitals in France. Upon returning to the United States, she continued her work with veterans, working at Walter Reed Hospital from 1918 to 1922. She became known as the Angel of Walter Reed because of her work at the hospital.

Life’s Work

Rogers’s political career began in March, 1925, when her husband died unexpectedly after an operation. Encouraged by the Republican Party and the American Legion, she reluctantly agreed to run in a special election to complete her husband’s term as the representative from the Fifth District of Massachusetts. She won a larger percentage of the vote than her husband had in his reelection in 1924. Rogers was only the sixth women ever elected to Congress and the first woman elected from a district in New England. She would be reelected eighteen consecutive times, winning by large margins in each election. With thirty-five years in the House, she had the longest tenure of any female member of Congress.

Rogers took her House seat on June 30, 1925, and served on many committees, including Foreign Affairs, Civil Service, and Veterans’ Affairs. From 1947 to 1948 and from 1953 to 1954 she served as the chair of Veterans’ Affairs. She also became the first woman to preside as House speaker pro tem.

During more than three decades in the House, Rogers sponsored more than twelve hundred bills, primarily on issues concerning veterans and the military. As a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, she took the lead in speaking out against the Holocaust. In 1939, she cosponsored the Wagner-Rogers Bill with Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York. The bill would have allowed twenty thousand German Jewish refugees under the age of fourteen to come to the United States, but the legislation failed in both chambers of Congress. She also played a major role in the drafting and passage of the G.I. Bill (1944) for World War II veterans and worked to expand the bill’s benefits to veterans of the Korean War (1950-1953).

Rogers introduced a bill in the 76th Congress in early 1941 to establish the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). She argued that WAAC would free up men for combat duty as it trained women to work in clerical positions. The bill died in the House in the face of strong opposition to allowing women to serve in the Army as fighters or as clerks. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought a new urgency, however, and Rogers was able to obtain strong support from Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to reintroduce the WAAC bill in the 77th Congress. Although an amendment to the bill that would have given women full military status had failed, the bill was passed by the House and the Senate. It was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on May 14, 1942.

In October, Rogers introduced a bill to make WAAC a formal part of the Army Reserve. Without General Marshall’s support, the bill failed initially, but by 1943, Marshall’s opinion had changed. “Auxiliary” was dropped from the name WAAC after President Roosevelt signed the bill on July 5, 1943, creating the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), no longer an auxiliary to the regular Army. The legislation creating WAC called for its disbandment six months after the end of World War II. However, in early 1946, Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower requested legislation to make WAC a permanent part of the Army. The bill was introduced in 1947 during the reorganization of the U.S. military. Rogers worked to support the bill and saw it signed into law by President Harry S. Truman on June 12, 1948.

During the early part of the Cold War, Rogers supported the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and sided with Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy during the anticommunist campaigns of the early 1950’s. An early supporter of the United Nations, she called for the organization to leave the United States (where it remains headquartered) after it voted to admit the People’s Republic of China in 1953. In 1954, she opposed a proposal to send American troops to Vietnam to help the French fight the communists in that country.

Rogers died in a Boston hospital on September 10, 1960, two days before the 1960 Massachusetts primary. Once again she had been running for another term her nineteenth in the House, and she was running unopposed.

Significance

Rogers, the longest-serving female member of Congress, is remembered for her work to support veterans and women in the military. Her work with veterans was recognized when the veterans’ hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, was named for Rogers. The Women’s Army Corps Museum, established in 1955 at Fort McClellan, Alabama, was renamed the Edith Nourse Rogers Museum on August 18, 1961. (It was renamed the U.S. Army Women’s Museum in 1977.) When she took her seat in 1925, Rogers expressed the hope that “everybody would forget that I am a woman as soon as possible.” However, as she wore her trademark orchid or gardenia on her shoulder, many of her colleagues found it difficult to forget that she was a woman. Her motto was “fight hard, fight fair, and persevere.” Rogers had an open-door policy that welcomed new female representatives from both parties to learn how the legislative process works and how it could be used to advance their policy proposals.

Bibliography

Chamberlin, Hope. A Minority of Members: Women in the U.S. Congress. New York: Praeger, 1973. Written by a journalist, this book presents biographies of each of the women who served in Congress before 1972.

Foerstel, Karen, and Herbert N. Foerstel. Climbing the Hill: Gender Conflict in Congress. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. A scholarly examination of the obstacles faced by the women of Congress. The authors briefly discuss Representative Rogers’s career in the House.

Kaptur, Marcy. Women of Congress: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1996. The author, a Democratic member of the House from Ohio, examines the lives and political careers of other women in Congress. The profile of Rogers is detailed and sympathetic.

Morden, Bettie J. The Women’s Army Corps, 1945-1978. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, United States Army, 1990. A detailed examination of the development of the Women’s Army Corps from the end of World War II through the end of the WAC. Examines Rogers’s role in creating the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and the fight for regular status.

Treadwell, Mattie E. The Women’s Army Corps. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1954. This first extensive volume reviews the history of the creation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, its transformation to the Women’s Army Corps, and the role of the corps in World War II. Includes discussion of the legislative histories of the bills introduced by Rogers.

U.S. House of Representatives. Office of the Clerk. Women in Congress, 1917-2006. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2006. This volume features biographical profiles of individual representatives and senators as well as images of women in Congress from 1917 to 2006.

1971-2000: 1970’s: Women’s Military Roles Expand.