Mary Rose Oakar, who in 1977 became the first Arab American woman in Congress and a champion of women’s rights during her 16 years in the House representing a working-class district of Cleveland, died on Saturday in the suburb of Lakewood, Ohio. She was 85.
Her family said she died in a nursing home.
Ms. Oakar, a Democrat who grew up poor on Cleveland’s West Side, was one of just 18 women among 435 House members after her election in 1976. In her first term, she successfully introduced legislation creating a $1 coin to honor the American suffragist Susan B. Anthony, and she went on to help found what is now the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus.
As an observant Roman Catholic, her opposition to abortion rights put her crosswise with national women’s groups, despite her liberal outlook on other issues. She put herself through college working as a telephone operator, and her feminism was grounded in economic parity.
“Economic security is the truly liberating issue for women,” she told The New York Times in 1985. She sponsored bills to guarantee women the same pay as men for jobs of comparable worth, an issue strongly opposed by Republicans.
She clashed with the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, who called Ms. Oakar’s proposal to raise salaries in the traditionally female fields of nursing and teaching an attack on blue-collar men. Ms. Oakar countered that raising women’s pay would strengthen families.
At a heated House hearing on the issue in 1985, the chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., called Ms. Oakar’s equal-pay proposal “reparations for middle-class white women.”
Ms. Oakar said Mr. Pendleton, a conservative who became the first African American chairman of the commission after his appointment by President Ronald Reagan, had “tarnished” the commission, and that he was following the same line of reasoning as supporters of “slavery, child labor and those who didn’t want women to be given loans or credit by banks.”
Bills introduced by Ms. Oakar to ensure pay equity did not advance. She was more successful winning equal access for women to the congressional gym and pool.
In 1985, Ms. Oakar was elected secretary of the House Democratic Caucus, one of the few women in leadership in either party. She gained power as a close ally of Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. of Massachusetts. Ms. Oakar was able to channel significant sums to urban renewal projects in Cleveland, as well as helping to bring the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to the city.
Ms. Oakar’s potential to emerge as a national leader of the Democrats and on women’s issues was limited by her opposition to abortion rights. She lamented that groups such as the National Organization for Women had made abortion rights what she called a “litmus test.” She was denied campaign support by women’s organizations because of the issue.
Her rise was also thwarted by an issue closer to home: In 1992, Ms. Oakar was exposed as one of some two dozen members of Congress who were the most egregious abusers of a House banking system; she wrote 213 checks that overdrew her account, though there were no penalty fees for doing so.
Reportedly fearing embarrassment, her party forced her resignation as a highly visible co-chairwoman of the Platform Committee at the 1992 Democratic National Convention, held in New York City. Her replacement was a rising party figure: Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the future House Speaker.
That same year, while seeking a ninth term, Ms. Oakar drew the first serious primary challenger of her career. She won, but went on to lose in the general election to the Republican nominee, Martin R. Hoke, a millionaire cellular phone company founder and political neophyte. Her defeat was also credited to the redrawing of her district, which had made Ms. Oakar an unfamiliar name to two out of every five of its voters.
After leaving Congress, she was indicted on campaign finance charges, including hiding contributions that exceeded the legal limit. She pleaded guilty in 1997 to two misdemeanors, paid a fine and received two years’ probation.
Mary Rose Oakar, whose parents were of Lebanese and Syrian descent, was born in Cleveland on March 5, 1940. She was the youngest of five children of Joseph and Margaret (Ellison) Oakar. Her father was a laborer.
She graduated in 1958 from Lourdes Academy, a private Catholic high school for girls in Cleveland, then received a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from Ursuline College in Pepper Pike, Ohio, and a master’s degree in fine arts in 1966 from John Carroll University in Cleveland. She taught English literature at Cuyahoga Community College from 1968 to 1975 and won election to Cleveland’s City Council in 1973.
Three years later, she plunged into an 11-candidate Democratic primary for an open House seat in West Cleveland and its southern suburbs. James Oakar said in an interview that his sister got into politics because she was passionate about protecting the neighborhood they grew up in, then largely Irish American, and her involvement deepened from there.
She campaigned for Congress in a rose-covered convertible and passed out rose-decorated pens to remind people of her name, and she urged voters to send more women to Washington.
Ms. Oakar won the primary and easily carried the general election in her heavily Democratic district.
After her 1992 defeat, she was appointed by President Bill Clinton to serve on the White House Conference on Aging. She also did consulting work. Starting in 2000, she served a single two-year term in the Ohio House of Representatives and made an unsuccessful bid in 2001 for Cleveland mayor.
In 2003, Ms. Oakar became president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights group, which she led as Arab Americans faced rising hostility after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Under her leadership, ADC confronted government overreach, defended community members from discrimination and profiling, and strengthened the organization’s national voice at a time when it was most urgently needed,” the committee said in a statement this week.
Ms. Oakar commuted between the group’s Washington office and Cleveland, where she lived in her childhood home. Her brother is her only immediate survivor.
In 2012, not done with electoral politics, Ms. Oakar sought and won a seat on the Ohio Board of Education and served a four-year term.
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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