Indiana’s first woman to serve in the House, Virginia Jenckes, is shown here preparing to speak at the Toilet Goods Association annual meeting in May of 1936. She told association members that she would work to reduce or eliminate the 20 percent luxury tax on cosmetics, remarking that cosmetics were no longer a luxury, but a necessity for the woman who is forced to go out into the world to make her living. Jenckes was a widow and mother of a daughter when she entered Congress in 1933.
