Mankin, Helen Douglas, 1896-1956

<p>Helen Douglas Mankin (September 11, 1896 – July 25, 1956) was an American politician. She was the second woman to represent Georgia in the United States House of Representatives.</p>

<p>Mankin was born September 11, 1896, in Atlanta, Fulton County, Georgia. She grew up there, attending public and private schools. She graduated with an A.B. from Rockford College, Rockford, Illinois, in 1917. She graduated with an LL.B. from Atlanta Law School, Atlanta, Georgia, in 1920. During and after the First World War, Mankin served as an ambulance driver in the American Women's Hospital Unit No. 1, a Red Cross unit attached to the French army in 1918 and 1919. She was there as a civilian and was not officially a military veteran.</p>

<p>After the war and earning her law degree, Mankin entered private practice as an attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. She entered politics, and served as a Democratic member of the Georgia House of Representatives from 1937 until 1946.</p>

<p>In 1946, Mankin was elected as a Democrat to represent the fifth congressional district of Georgia in the 79th United States Congress, filling the seat left vacant by the resignation of Robert Ramspeck. She took her seat February 12, 1946. She was an unsuccessful candidate in that year's Democratic Party primary election when she sought renomination to run for reelection. She won the popular vote, gaining major support from Atlanta's African-American community, but lost in the county unit system, a voting system similar to the presidential electoral college that Georgia then used for primary elections. The county-unit system gave disproportionate weight to the votes of rural counties, severely discounting the votes of large urban areas, such as Atlanta's Fulton County. Mankin then was an unsuccessful write-in candidate in the general election of 1946.</p>

<p>Mankin's term of office concluded January 3, 1947. She continued to live in Atlanta, and she died there on July 25, 1956.</p>

<p>During her brief U.S. House term, Helen Douglas Mankin of Georgia brought national attention to her longtime political cause: advocating on behalf of poor and disenfranchised southern voters. “I earnestly believe that the election of a woman from this State to the House of Representatives will mean to the rest of the country another note of progress out of the South,” Mankin declared after her victory in a February 1946 special election in which she benefited from the support of African-American voters.1 Mankin’s bid for re-election later that summer, however, revealed the limits of voting reform in the South: the political machine of segregationist Governor Eugene Talmadge blocked her renomination to a full term.</p>

<p>Helen Douglas was born on September 11, 1896, in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of Hamilton Douglas and Corrine Williams Douglas. Her parents were teachers who had studied law together at the University of Michigan. Corrine became involved in education when the family moved to Georgia, where state laws prevented women from joining the bar. Hamilton eventually founded the Atlanta Law School. Their home was an intellectual parlor for the likes of reformer Jane Addams and former President and Supreme Court Justice William H. Taft. Helen Douglas attended Rockford College in Illinois, following in the footsteps of her mother and maternal grandmother. She graduated in 1917 with an AB but interrupted her law studies to join the American Women’s Hospital Unit No. 1 in France, where she served as an ambulance driver for more than a year. When Douglas returned to the United States, she resumed her academic career, graduating from Atlanta Law School in 1920. A year later, the state of Georgia admitted her to the bar along with her 61-year-old mother when the state legislature lifted the bar’s ban on women. For two years, she and her sister toured North America by car before she opened a law office in 1924, specializing in aid to poor and Black clients while supplementing her income as a lecturer at the Atlanta Law School.</p>

<p>Her first political experience came as the women’s manager of I. N. Ragsdale’s campaign for mayor of Atlanta in 1927. That year Helen Douglas married Guy M. Mankin, a widower with a seven-year-old son, Guy Jr. After traveling to several overseas locations following Guy Mankin’s job assignments, the family settled in Atlanta, where Helen Mankin resumed her legal career in 1933. In 1935, as chair of the Georgia child labor committee, she unsuccessfully urged the state legislature to ratify a proposed child labor constitutional amendment. The next year she won a seat in the legislature, serving for a decade as a critic of Governor Eugene Talmadge’s administration and as a supporter of constitutional, educational, electoral, labor, and prison reforms. In the process, she became an ally of liberal Governor Ellis Arnall, who had succeeded Talmadge in 1942. In 1945 Mankin and Arnall successfully steered a measure through the Georgia house of representatives to repeal the poll tax, a method southern states frequently employed to disenfranchise African-American voters too poor to pay a requisite fee in order to vote.</p>