Politics / Law / Civil rights & activism
Martha Griffiths
1912–2003 · lawyer, judge, politician
Detroit lawyer, first woman judge of the city's Recorder's Court and 20-year congresswoman who forced sex discrimination into the Civil Rights Act and pushed the ERA through the House.
- Born
Pierce City, Missouri- Died
Armada, Michigan
aged 91- Birth name
- Martha Edna Wright
- Detroit years
- 1941–1974
- Field
- Politics, Law, Civil rights & activism
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Martha Wright grew up in Missouri and met Hicks Griffiths at the University of Missouri; the couple both earned law degrees at the University of Michigan and settled in Detroit, where she worked for an insurance company's legal department and, during World War II, as a contract negotiator for the Army's Detroit Ordnance District. Elected to the Michigan House from a Wayne County district in 1948, she became in 1953 the first woman to sit as a judge of Detroit's Recorder's Court. The next year she won a congressional seat for northwest Detroit and its suburbs, holding it until 1974. She was the first woman on the Ways and Means Committee, fought to keep sex discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and in 1970 used a discharge petition to bring the Equal Rights Amendment to the House floor. She later served as Michigan's lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1991.
Highlights
- First woman judge of Detroit's Recorder's Court (1953)
- U.S. representative from Michigan, 1955–1974
- First woman on the House Ways and Means Committee
- Led the 1970 discharge petition that moved the Equal Rights Amendment
- Lieutenant governor of Michigan, 1983–1991