St. George, Katharine, 1894-1983

Variant names

Dates:

Birth 1894-07-12

Death 1983-05-02

Active 1939

Active 1979

Gender:

Female

Nationality: Americans,

Language: English,

Biographical notes:

Katharine Price Collier St. George (July 12, 1894 – May 2, 1983) was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from New York, and a cousin of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Born Katharine Delano Price Collier in Bridgnorth, England and raised in Tuxedo Park, New York, she was later schooled in France, Switzerland, and Germany. In April 1917, Katharine Collier married George St. George who, by 1919, operated a wholesale coal brokerage on Wall Street. Katharine St. George opened and managed a highly successful kennel business that bred setters and pointer and was active in civic affairs as a longtime chair of her local Red Cross chapter, a member of the Tuxedo Park town board from 1926 to 1949, and a member of the local education board from 1926 to 1946.

Out of deference to her cousin, St. George distanced herself from Republican politics during his first two terms as President. Her opposition to his third term in 1940 marked her re-entry into politics. In 1942 she lost her bid for the Republican nomination to the state assembly but would go on to defeat incumbent Augustus Bennet in the Republican primary for his US House seat in the Hudson River Valley in 1946, easily dispatching her Democratic opponent in the general election and winning a further eight terms, becoming a champion of equal rights and equal pay for women.

The polarizing candidacy of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 ended with eight Republican incumbents in New York losing their seats in November, St. George among them. She returned to Tuxedo Park, where she remained active in local politics as chair of the Republican town committee, dying there in 1983.