The first woman to represent Washington state in the U.S.
House of Representatives, Catherine Dean May, entered
public service after her father insisted that she not repeat his
example of avoiding the political arena. Congresswoman
May established herself as a moderate. She advocated for
the needs of her agrarian district, congressional ethics, and
women’s rights, supporting such measures as the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA) and the inclusion of the sex
discrimination clause in the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Catherine Dean Barnes was born on May 18, 1914, in
Yakima, Washington, to Charles H. Barnes, a department store
owner and real estate broker, and Pauline Van Loon
Barnes. She attended Yakima Valley Junior College and,
in 1936, graduated from the University of Washington
with a BA in English and speech. Catherine Barnes taught
high school English in Chehalis, Washington. In 1940
she pursued a radio broadcasting career in Tacoma and
Seattle. On January 18, 1943, she married James O. May.
The following year, while waiting for her husband to be
discharged from the U.S. Army, Catherine May worked
as a writer and assistant commentator for the National
Broadcasting Company in New York City. The couple
returned to Yakima in 1946, where James May established
a real estate and insurance business while she worked as a
women’s editor for a local radio station. The Mays raised a
son and daughter: Jamie and Melinda. The couple became
active in politics after Charles Barnes, whose department
store went bankrupt in the Great Depression, revealed
that his great regret in life was not participating in local
government to address public problems.1 The Mays
joined the Young Republicans and became active precinct
workers. In 1952, at James’s urging, Catherine May ran
for a seat as Yakima’s representative in the Washington
legislature.2 Elected as a Republican, she served for six years.
When eight-term U.S. Representative Otis Halbert
Holmes declined to seek re-election for his U.S. House
seat in 1958, May entered the race against heavily favored
Democrat Frank Le Roux (who had nearly unseated Holmes
in 1956). The sprawling Washington state district was
bordered by Idaho to the east, Oregon to the south, and
the Cascade Mountain range to the west and extended
into the Columbia River basin in the north. Running on
a lean budget, May resorted to distributing handbills and
going door-to-door to meet voters, while Le Roux bought
billboards to reach the district’s thinly spread electorate.
May turned Le Roux’s advertising against him, challenging
him to a debate (which he declined) and delivering
campaign speeches in which she declared: “Come out
from behind those billboards.”3 May defeated Le Roux by
a margin of 10,000 votes, tallying 54 percent of the total.
That was the closest race Congresswoman May encountered
in six successful campaigns, as she steadily increased her
margins of victory: 59 percent in 1960, 65 percent in 1964,
and 67 percent in 1968.4 The 1964 election was especially
noteworthy since the strong turnout against Republican
presidential candidate Senator Barry Morris Goldwater of
Arizona cost four incumbent Washington Republicans their
House seats.
May entered the 86th Congress (1959–1961) as
the first Washington woman ever to serve in the U.S.
Congress. Part of her campaign pledge to the farmers and
poultry producers had been that she could secure a seat
on the prestigious House Agriculture Committee. May’s
break came when Representative Katharine St. George of
New York won a seat on the Republican Committee on
Committees. As a committee member, St. George could
cast her state delegation’s votes to select membership to
various committees. For the Republicans, states were
awarded a number of votes equal to the number of that
delegation’s GOP representatives. Committee members
typically reserved their votes for Members of their own state
delegations; however, St. George made an exception for
May. With the clout of the largest congressional delegation
at the time—including 25 Republicans—St. George
secured May one of just three openings on the Agriculture
Committee, where she served throughout her career.5
May also served briefly on the Committee on the District
of Columbia, earning that appointment at the opening
of the 91st Congress (1969–1971) in January 1969. She
left the District of Columbia Committee after just six
months when she was offered a seat on a panel she had
long sought because of the important Hanford Nuclear
Power Plant located in her district: the Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy. May established a record as a moderate
Republican who generally backed the economic policies
of the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon
administrations and sought to curb the Great Society
programs of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.6 In
1965 she was rewarded for her party loyalty with spots on
the Republican Policy and Research Committee, which
determined GOP positions on future legislation, and the
Committee on Committees. Only on rare occasions, usually
when agrarian and western power and utility issues were
involved, did May break with her party.
Much of Congresswoman May’s agenda focused on
her assignment to the Agriculture Committee, where she
tended to her district’s farming interests. She championed
domestic beet sugar production, a key agricultural industry
in Washington. She favored establishment of a special fee on
imported sugar and, in 1964, proposed a higher permanent
quota for domestic beets. May cosponsored a joint
resolution in 1967 to establish the U.S. World Food Study
and Coordinating Commission, which examined the market
structure of the food production industry. In addition,
May also took an interest in using agricultural surpluses
to help feed poor families and children. She amended the
1966 Child Nutrition Act to include children in overseas
American-run schools in the school milk program. In 1970
Representative May sponsored the Nixon administration’s
proposal to provide free food stamps to families with
monthly incomes of less than $30.
Another focus for May was the Hanford Nuclear Plant
located on the Columbia River in her district. Originally
built in secret to provide plutonium for the Manhattan
Project and subsequent weapons projects, the Hanford
Plant was targeted as a facility to produce nuclear energy
for Washington state. In the early 1960s, May sought to
preserve the reactor from reduced output or deactivation—a
move urged by environmentalists concerned about the
effects on local aquatic life. May countered that it provided
cost-effective electric power and jobs. The reactor remained
open, though the plutonium reactor was eventually
shut down (the creation of steam power from uranium
continued).7 Eventually, opposition from coal power
interests in Congress led the Nixon administration to
deactivate the plant in the early 1970s.8
In the fall of 1966, May sponsored a measure to
establish the House Select Committee on Standards of
Official Conduct, serving on it briefly before it became a
standing committee in early 1967. A series of congressional
scandals—May specifically cited proceedings related to
New York Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s misuse
of congressional funds as “the tip of the iceberg”—and
her own experience with lobbyists and outside interest
groups convinced her that the House needed an ethics
committee.9 “It concerned me,” May later recalled, “I
certainly had no claim to morality, I didn’t feel superior,
but I knew it was hurting Congress and that it was going to
hurt the very institutions of freedom themselves.”10 Noting
that the late 1960s was a time of social unrest in the United
States, May emphasized that Americans needed to be able to
trust their public officials: “The great danger was the people
of America losing faith in their institutions—that is the
beginning of the end of a nation.”11
May supported women’s rights legislation during her
House career, noting after her first election that she had a
“tremendous feeling of responsibility toward all women.”12
Nevertheless, she avoided defining herself as an activist. In
part, she had to educate herself about discrimination at the
national level. “I wondered what women were screaming
about when I went to Congress, because we had had equal
rights in the state of Washington for years,” May recalled,
concluding, “Boy, I learned.”13 She became active in a
legislative sense, fighting on behalf of the Equal Pay Act
of 1963, and joined a group of women lawmakers who
demanded access to the then-all-male House gym. May
supported the insertion of Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights
Act that prohibited employment discrimination based on
sex. She also backed the ERA, which remained bottled up
in the Judiciary Committee for most of her House career.
Asked if America was a “woman’s country” early in her
career, May replied, “No, if it were a woman’s country, it
would give priority to the humane side of problems that
seem like details to men. But sometimes these details have
big implications in regard to the safety, comfort, or health of
the people.”14
Like other Washington state Republicans in the 1970
election, May faced voter discontent with the stagnant
local economy and rising jobless rate for which Democrats
successfully blamed the GOP and the Nixon administration.
She lost her re-election bid to Democrat Mike McCormack,
a former Hanford scientist, by about 7,000 votes out
of more than 125,000 cast, a 55-to-45 percent margin.
Months before the election, May had divorced her husband
after six years of legal separation. She married a management
consultant, Donald Bedell, in November 1970. President
Nixon appointed her as chair of the U.S. International
Trade Commission, where she served from May 1971 to
1981. In 1982 the Ronald Reagan administration named
May a special consultant to the President on the 50 States
Project, an ef fort to weed out gender-discriminatory state
laws. Catherine May Bedell passed away in Rancho Mirage,
California, on May 28, 2004.15
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