[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 61 (Thursday, May 14, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E859-E860]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      TRIBUTE TO MARJORIE LANSING

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. LYNN N. RIVERS

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 14, 1998

  Ms. RIVERS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to insert into the 
Congressional Record an obituary of Marjorie Lansing, which appeared in 
the New York Times on Monday, May 11, 1998.

       Marjorie Lansing, a political scientist and sometime 
     politician whose scholarly delineation of a gender gap in 
     American voting patterns helped change the shape of political 
     campaigns and spurred women into politics in the 1980s.
       Ms. Lansing died on May 1 at a hospital near her home in 
     Ann Arbor, Michigan. She was 82 and had been a professor of 
     political science at Eastern Michigan University. Her family 
     said the cause was cancer.
       Though Dr. Lansing was not the first to investigate women's 
     voting patterns, the issue received little serious attention 
     until she published the first persuasive statistical evidence 
     that women form a distinctive voting

[[Page E860]]

     bloc. The dominant view had been that if women did not mimic 
     their husbands' voting patterns, their attitudes at least 
     reflected the same mix of socioeconomic and ethnic factors. 
     If it seems surprising that those quaint views survived into 
     the 1970s, it must be at least partly because Dr. Lansing 
     came late to scholarship.
       A native of Geneva, Florida, Dr. Lansing, who was born 
     Marjorie Tillis, graduated from the old Florida State College 
     for Women in Gainesville, taught high school and made a life-
     changing trip to Europe. Attracted to the political left 
     since college, she raised money for the Spanish loyalist 
     cause from fellow passengers on the voyage over, and after a 
     heady tour of the continent returned to the United States 
     eager to attend graduate school. After receiving a master's 
     in sociology from Columbia in 1940, she worked as a 
     government researcher in Washington and met and married a 
     young economist named John Lansing. She set up housekeeping 
     in Cambridge, Mass., while he completed his doctorate at 
     Harvard and she plunged into the local leftist political 
     scene, campaigning for Henry Wallace in the 1948 presidential 
     race.
       A high-spirited woman with an engaging manner, Dr. Lansing 
     made a powerful impact on at least one political associate. 
     According to family legend, after a single political meeting 
     in Boston, the actor Zero Mostel was so taken with Dr. 
     Lansing that he followed her to a bus stop, pretended he was 
     her abandoned husband and in an impromptu performance worthy 
     of the Broadway stage made an impassioned plea that she 
     return to him and their babies.
       In 1949, the Lansings moved to Ann Arbor, where he became a 
     professor of economics at the University of Michigan and she 
     became active in the Democratic Party while rearing three 
     children, studying for a Ph.D. in political science at 
     Michigan and teaching at Eastern Michigan.
       She is survived by two sons, Steve, of Ann Arbor, and 
     Philip, of Boise, Idaho; a daughter, Carol, of Santa Barbara, 
     California, and six grandchildren.
       By the time she obtained her doctorate in 1970, Dr. Lansing 
     had come up with the findings that would make her reputation. 
     But it had taken some doing. When she proposed as a doctoral 
     dissertation a study that she expected would establish that 
     women's voting patterns were significantly different from 
     men's, her professors were so convinced there was no 
     difference that they tried to discourage her. She persisted, 
     and the dissertation she turned in was essentially the same 
     book she and a statistician, Sandra Baxter, published in 
     1980. One reason for the delay between the dissertation and 
     the book was that after her husband died in 1970, she 
     concentrated on her teaching while stepping up her political 
     activities, unsuccessfully running for several offices, 
     including a House seat.
       To those who had assumed that women followed men's voting 
     patterns, her most surprising finding was that the greatest 
     sex difference was not on home-and-hearth issues like the 
     economy and education but in foreign affairs, particularly 
     military issues, with women being distinctly less hawkish 
     than men.
       Although dozens of similar studies have since been 
     published, Dr. Lansing's work is still cited by scholars. It 
     is a measure of Dr. Lansing's prescience, if not of her 
     influence, that three years after her landmark study, ``Women 
     in Politics: The Invisible Majority,'' was published by the 
     University of Michigan Press, a revised edition carried the 
     subtitle ``The Visible Majority.''

     

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