Fenwick, Millicent, 1910-1992

Millicent Vernon Hammond Fenwick (February 25, 1910 – September 16, 1992) was an American fashion editor, politician and diplomat. A four-term Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from New Jersey, she entered politics late in life and was renowned for her energy and colorful enthusiasm. She was regarded as a moderate and progressive within her party and was outspoken in favor of civil rights and the women's movement.

Born Millicent Vernon Hammond, she was raised in comfortable circumstances in Bernardsville, New Jersey, attending the exclusive Nightingale-Bamford School in nearby Manhattan and Foxcroft School in rural Virginias before attending college at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. She met Hugh McLeod Fenwick in 1931, marrying him the following yerar after his divorce from his first wife. The Fenwicks separated six years later, and they eventually divorced in 1945. Millicent Fenwick refused financial assistance from her family and, instead, found work to support her children. She modeled briefly for Harper’s Bazaar and then took a job as associate editor on the staff of Condé Nast’s Vogue magazine. From 1938 to 1952, Fenwick worked on several Nast publications. In 1948 she wrote Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, a 600-page “treatise in proper behavior.” It sold more than a million copies. Fenwick left Vogue in 1952 and inherited a fortune when her father passed away a few years later.

Fenwick served on the Bernardsville, New Jersey, board of education from 1938 to 1947. She supported Wendell Willkie for President in 1940 and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1946. She worked on the 1954 campaign of Republican Senate candidate Clifford Case. She also chaired the Somerset County legal aid society and the Bernardsville recreation commission. From 1958 to 1964, she was a member of the Bernardsville borough council and served on the New Jersey committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1958 to 1972. Her first campaign for state office was in 1970 when she won a seat in the New Jersey assembly at the age of 59. In 1974, when her friend Peter Frelinghuysen Jr. decided to retire from the affluent congressional district in north central New Jersey which he had held for 22 years, Fenwick entered the race for his open seat. After narrowly prevailing in the primary, she handily defeated her Democratic opponent.

Over the course of her eight years in the U. S. House, Fenwick was known for her opposition to corruption by both parties and special interest groups, she was called "the conscience of Congress" by television newscaster Walter Cronkite. Though a fiscal conservative, she differed from a majority of her Republican colleagues in her support of women’s issues such as the ERA, federal funding for abortions, and the food stamp program. In 1982, Fenwick chose to forgo re-election to a fifth term to seek the Senate seat vacated by Pete Williams that April. Though she won the Republican primary, she narrowly lost the general election to Frank Lautenberg. After leaving the House of Representatives, she was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as United States Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy. She held this position from June 1983 to March 1987, when she retired from public life at the age of 77. She died of heart failure in her hometown of Bernardsville, New Jersey five years later.