ORLANDO, Fla. — Paula Hawkins, the feisty, self-described "housewife
from Maitland" who in 1980 became the first Mormon woman elected to the
U.S. Senate, died Friday, Dec. 4. She was 82.
Hawkins had been in poor health recently, having suffered a
stroke and a fall, said U.S. Rep. John Mica, a close friend. She died at
Florida Hospital in Orlando surrounded by her family, he said.
During her single six-year term in the U.S. Senate, the
Republican positioned herself as a media-savvy champion of children and working
mothers and an enemy of drug dealers. She lost her bid for a second term in
1986 to then-Gov. Bob Graham in a race that pitted two of Florida's most
popular politicians.
Hawkins entered public office at a time when doors that
previously had been closed to women were being opened. Ideologically, she never
considered herself a feminist, but she championed equal opportunities for
women.
"Paula Hawkins' pioneering spirit earned her the
respect of Floridians, her fellow senators and all who worked alongside her,"
Gov. Charlie Crist said.
She was the first woman senator elected from the South and
the first woman from any state elected to a full Senate term who was not the
wife or daughter of a politician. Nebraska businesswoman Hazel Abel, who also
had no political family ties, was elected from that state in 1954 to serve the
final two months in the term of a senator who had died in office.
"I think it showed other women that you could do this,"
Hawkins said in a 1997 interview for an oral history program at the University
of Florida.
Hawkins backed legislation that helped homemakers enter the
job market after divorce or widowhood. She supported equalizing pension benefits
for women by taking into account their years spent at home raising children.
She fought to get day care for the children of Senate employees and pushed for
tax breaks on child care expenses.
She even forced fellow senators to don bathing trunks when
swimming in the Senate gym so she could work out at the previously all-male
bastion during daytime hours.
But there were slights. At one of her first news conferences
in Washington as a senator, a television reporter asked who was going to do her
laundry if she was busy working in the U.S. Senate.
"I kept saying (to myself), this is 1980 and I can't
believe that anybody is asking me this, especially a grown man from a national
network," Hawkins said in the 1997 interview. "I do not think there
was a women in the room ... That was my introduction."
Yet at the same time, Hawkins opposed the Equal Rights
Amendment and abortion-on-demand. She refused to join the Congressional Woman's
Caucus because she thought childcare, pension equity and other matters were "family
issues" and not just of concern to women.
"I did not like the Equal Rights Amendment," she
said. "I predicted that it would bring about the downfall of the father's
responsibility to support the family."
__IMAGE1__Hawkins began her political career in the late 1950s when
she and a group of other young housewives fought City Hall in order get sewers
in their neighborhood in Maitland, an Orlando suburb. The women ran three
reform candidates who defeated the mayor and two commissioners in the next city
election.
Hawkins was elected to the Florida Public Service Commission
in 1972, becoming only the third Republican since Reconstruction to win
statewide office in what was then a strongly Democratic state. She became the
commission's chairwoman and served as a Republican National committeewoman.
During the 1970s, she failed to win races for state
legislature and lieutenant governor. After leaving the commission in 1978, she
became a vice president at Air Florida.
Hawkins was elected to the Senate in 1980, first winning a
six-candidate primary and a runoff and then defeating Democratic Insurance
Commissioner Bill Gunter. She was part of a wave of conservatives who came to
Washington as part of the Ronald Reagan landslide.
She was instrumental in passing the Missing Children's Act
of 1982, which established a national clearinghouse for information about
missing children.
In 1984, she startled her Senate colleagues, friends and
family members by disclosing during a congressional hearing that she was
sexually molested as a child. Her admission was greeted with widespread public
sympathy.
She pushed legislation that cut aid to countries that did
not reduce their drug production. She helped initiate the South Florida Drug
Task Force and assisted in creating the Senate Caucus on International
Narcotics Control.
Detractors called her a shoot-from-the-hip lightweight who
took a superficial approach to complex issues.
Her first major initiative in the Senate was a political
gaffe. During a luncheon of Florida agribusiness leaders featuring steak,
asparagus and strawberries, she announced plans to jail food-stamp cheaters.
During her re-election campaign in 1986, Hawkins said a
Graham victory could help "tax-and-spend liberals" retake the Senate.
Graham portrayed himself as a pragmatic Democrat and said Hawkins' efforts to
fight child abuse and drugs amounted to being a cheerleader for causes no one
opposed.
After her defeat, she told Floridians: "I want you all
to know that I look back, not with regret, but to six years ago when we
promised the people of Florida that if I went to Washington, you'd know I was
there and I would make a difference."
After her Senate career, Hawkins served as a chief delegate
to the United Nations Drug Conference in 1987 held in Vienna, Austria. She was
also a delegate to the United Kingdom/United Nations Cocaine Summit held in
London in 1989.
Hawkins was plagued by neck and shoulder problems starting
in 1982, the year she was hit by a prop and knocked unconscious at the WESH
television studio in Orlando. She spent the following years in pain, in and out
of traction, and in need of painkillers and regular visits to physical
therapists. Hawkins and the television station reached a settlement in 1987.
Hawkins was born in Salt Lake City in 1927. She attended
Utah State University before marrying her husband, Gene Hawkins. They had three
children.
Headline photograph was of Sen. Paula Hawkins
(R-Fla.), during a Aug. 8, 1984, news conference on Capitol Hill in
Washington. AP photo by J. Scott Applewhite.