The Courant's Rinker Buck reports: Granted, it was a slow news day, but Connecticut journalists really were excited Friday morning when they received an email blast from the Janet Peckinpaugh campaign with this headline, "PECKINPAUGH WOULD BE FIRST WOMAN IN CONGRESS IN CT-02."
The release from Peckinpaugh's press contact Danica Pecirep, replete with a full chart of all Second District reps going back to the Whig days of the 19th century, documented how "35 men have represented the Second Congressional District in the U.S. House" since 1835. This would make "journalist, single mother and small businesswoman" Peckinpaugh the first woman elected to the House from the Second.
Regrettably, however, frenzied efforts to run this news prominently on websites and perhaps rethink Saturday's front pages had to be abandoned. An hour after she released her "Peckinpaugh Would Be First Woman" bombshell, Pecirep conceded that her initial release was wrong.
In fact, as Pecirep's first release showed, a rather distinguished woman, Chase Going Woodhouse, a Connecticut College professor, economist and well-known New Dealer, served two terms in the House from the Second District in the 1940s.
"We're revising the release," Pecirep said. "Now we're saying that, if elected, Janet will be one of only two women to have served in the House of Representatives from the Second."
The Peckinpaugh campaign snafu presents an opportunity, however, to revisit the resume of a distinguished woman who stood out long before modern feminism smoothed the way for female careerists. Woodhouse, the daughter of an Alaska miner, graduated from high school in Kentucky in 1908 and then studied econAfter marrying a Yale professor, Woodhouse and her husband held down joint academic appointments at Smith and the University of North Carolina. Woodhouse won recognition as a pioneering economist studying such fields as the status of women in the workplace and trends in employment. She entered politics after moving to Connecticut in the 1930s, largely out of frustration with the ongoing impact of the Great Depression.
In 1940 Woodhouse was elected Connecticut's Secretary of the State and she later served on the Connecticut Minimum Wage Board and the War Labor Board and chaired the New London Democratic Town Committee. During her two non-consecutive terms in Congress, from 1945 to 1947 and 1949 to 1951, Woodhouse served on the powerful Committee on Banking and Currency and was later an unusually outspoken critic of McCarthyism.