Florence Price Dwyer, a New Jersey Representative who
described herself as a “progressive” Republican, pushed
for civil rights legislation, consumer protection measures,
and institutional reform during her 16-year House career.
Though she did not consider herself a feminist, Dwyer was
a consistent champion of women’s rights who supported
the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and an “equal pay for
equal work” bill modeled after one she had initially steered
through the New Jersey state assembly.
Florence (Flo) Louise Price was born on July 4, 1902,
in Reading, Pennsylvania. Educated in the public schools
of Reading and Toledo, Ohio, she briefly attended college
at the University of Toledo. Price left college to marry
M. Joseph Dwyer, the Toledo football coach and, later,
an industrial relations executive. The couple raised a son,
Michael, and moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. Florence
Dwyer’s role as a member of the local parent teacher
association initiated her interest in politics. She joined the
Republican Club in Elizabeth in the 1930s: “At the time
women were used to lick envelopes and take messages,”
she recalled.1
A delegate to the Republican National
Convention in 1944, Dwyer subsequently worked as
a lobbyist in Trenton, the state capital, for the New
Jersey Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. State
assemblyman Joseph Brescher, who served as majority
leader and speaker, hired Dwyer as his secretary. When
Brescher retired in 1949, Dwyer succeeded him, serving
from 1949 to 1957 and eventually rising to the assistant
majority leader post.
In 1956, at the urging of New Jersey Senator Clifford
Philip Case, Dwyer entered the Republican primary for
a U.S. House district just south of Newark. The district
coincided with the Union County boundaries and
encompassed the most industrialized part of the state.
Dwyer’s chief competitor was Irene T. Griffin, a former
assemblywoman. But Dwyer’s name recognition, her
support across the party from moderates to conservatives,
and her longtime base of support in Elizabeth, which sat
in the eastern section of the district, helped her secure the
nomination.2
She faced a two-term incumbent Democrat,
Harrison Arlington Williams Jr., in the general election.
Historically a Republican stronghold, beginning in 1951,
factionalism within the party had weakened the GOP’s
grip on the district. The 1956 campaign quickly became a
contest over which of the candidates could best court the
voters who supported President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dwyer centered her campaign on domestic issues such
as more funding for education and pressing for an equal-pay bill in Congress.3
Vice President Richard M. Nixon
campaigned for Dwyer, while Democratic presidential
candidate Adlai Ewing Stevenson III stumped for Williams.
Dwyer’s campaign literature read: “Ike Wants Flo” and “A
Vote for Flo Is a Vote for Ike.”4
The incumbent President
carried the district by nearly 80,000 votes, while Dwyer
edged out Williams by a little more than 4,000. (Williams
would go on to serve in the U.S. Senate for more than
two decades.)
Dwyer quickly proved she could get votes on her
own.5
In her next four campaigns, she won increasingly by
larger margins, garnering between 51 and 59 percent of
the vote. Redistricting in 1966 cost Dwyer her traditional
Elizabeth base, so she sought re-election in another newly
realigned district, which included part of Union County
and eastern Essex County to the north.6
In the middle-class, suburban district, she crushed her opponents by
margins of 33 to 50 percentage points.7
In all, Dwyer
won eight consecutive terms in the House. Throughout
her career, she described herself to voters as a “moderate
or progressive Republican” who did not follow the party
line “unless the measure benefits the people I represent
and the national interest.”8
The Congresswoman was not
afraid to stand apart from other Republicans. She once
told House Minority Leader Charles Abraham Halleck of
Indiana, “When you see me walk on the floor wearing pink,
you’ll know I’m going to step to the left and vote with the
Democrats. But if I’m wearing black or white, you’ll know
I’m with the Republicans.”9
Dwyer served on the Committee on Government
Operations throughout her term in the House. She
particularly concerned herself with institutional reforms. In
1961 Dwyer gained notoriety as the leader of the “saintly
seven,” a group of Republican Members who voted with
House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas and the Democrats
to increase the membership of the Rules Committee, which
controlled the flow of legislation on the House Floor.10 The
episode involved a bitter power struggle between Speaker
Rayburn and Rules Committee Chairman Howard Worth
Smith of Virginia. The “saintly seven” were actually part
of a group of 22 northern Republicans who supported the
reform and declared their intention to “repudiate” a GOP
alliance with southern Democrats “to attempt to narrow the
base of our party, to dull its conscience, to transform it into
a negative weapon of obstruction.”11 By a margin of 217 to
212, Rayburn prevailed. The vote changed House rules and
undercut the power of a coalition of southern Democrats
and conservative Republicans who used their influence on
the committee to prevent major social legislation—including
civil rights measures—from reaching the House Floor. In
1965 Dwyer authored legislation that called for a four-year
term for Members of the House. A longer term “could
greatly improve the quality of representation,” Dwyer told
the New York Times. “Under the present two-year system,
most House Members must spend an excessive amount
of time politicking and campaigning—simply to survive.
A term of three or four years would give us time to think
and plan and produce a more consistent and constructive
legislative program.”12 During consideration of the
Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970, she authored an
amendment requiring the recording of individual teller votes.
Prior to that rule change, Members merely walked down the
aisle and were counted, but their names were not recorded.
Congresswoman Dwyer was an early supporter of civil
rights reform. Just a month into her first term in 1957,
she introduced a version of the Dwight D. Eisenhower
administration’s civil rights bill.13 The measure called
for, among other things, the creation of a bipartisan
Commission on Civil Rights to secure voting rights
for African Americans in the South. It also provided
for an assistant attorney general at the Department of
Justice, tasked solely to civil rights issues. The New Jersey
Congresswoman supported a constitutional amendment to
outlaw the poll tax, which discriminated against African-American and poor white voters in the South. In 1960
Dwyer introduced a bill to create a “Commission on
Equal Job Opportunity Under Government Contracts,”
which aimed at providing for fair contract award processes
for minority businesses and individuals.14 She often cast
the necessity for civil rights reforms at home against the
backdrop of the Cold War abroad. “If freedom has any
meaning at all, if our opposition to world communism is
at all justifiable, then we have no alternative but to make
secure for all Americans—regardless of race or color or
religion or national origin or economic status—the practice
and opportunity of full freedom,” she said on the House
Floor. Equal opportunity in voting, education, work, and
housing were essential, she argued.15
Dwyer championed women’s issues in Congress in
a consistent but unadorned manner. True to her initial campaign promise, she pursued a pay equity bill for
women during her first term in the House. In March 1957,
Representative Dwyer and colleague Cecil Murray Harden
of Indiana introduced “Equal Pay for Equal Work”
legislation. “The need for equal pay is a matter of simple
justice,” Dwyer said. “Women are contributing more and
more to the economic life of our country. And yet they are
expected to accept a second-class role as far as wages are
concerned.”16 Dwyer also was a firm and early supporter of
the ERA, endorsing it during her first term in office on the
observance of Susan B. Anthony Day.17 Nevertheless, she
refused to run her campaigns by appealing to her gender.
“I am campaigning on my record,” Dwyer once told a
group of New Jersey women. “I have never campaigned
as a woman; if I can’t take on any man running against
me, I don’t deserve to represent the women and men of
the county.”18 When Nixon became President in 1969,
Dwyer and four other GOP women from the House urged
him to appoint more women to federal office. “None of
us are feminists,” Dwyer told Nixon. “We do not ask for
special privileges.… Our sole purpose is to suggest ways
and means by which women’s rights as citizens and human
beings may be better protected, discrimination against
women be eliminated and women’s ability to contribute
to the economic, social and political life of the Nation
be recognized.”19
Dwyer decided not to run for re-election in 1972
to the 93rd Congress (1973–1975). Health issues, her
age (she was 70), and yet another reconfiguration of her
district convinced her to leave the House “with some
reluctance.”20 Dwyer maintained, “The time has come
to rearrange my priorities—to spend more time with
my family and to devote myself to a number of matters
which have not received my attention during my years
in Congress.”21 Dwyer retired as Ranking Republican on
the Government Operations and Banking and Currency
committees. In the 1972 elections she campaigned actively
for Republican candidate and state senator Matthew John
Rinaldo, who won the seat to succeed her. Dwyer retired to
Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she resided until her death on
February 29, 1976.22
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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