The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, N.Y. Democrat who championed women’s rights, dies at 88

She was the oldest sitting member of Congress

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March 16, 2018 at 5:23 p.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Harrison Smith.

Rep. Louise M. Slaughter, a New York liberal who championed women’s rights and American manufacturing for more than three decades as a Democratic congresswoman, died March 16 at a hospital in Washington. She was 88 and the oldest sitting member of Congress.

Over the course of her career, she also became a top lieutenant for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the first and only woman to lead the powerful Rules Committee.

The death was announced by her chief of staff, Liam Fitzsimmons. Rep. Slaughter had been hospitalized and treated for a concussion after falling at her home in the District, The Washington Post reported Wednesday .

The daughter of a blacksmith in a Kentucky coal mine, Rep. Slaughter traced her lineage to Daniel Boone and attacked her political opponents with a marksman’s accuracy and, not infrequently, a disarming grin.

A microbiologist with a master’s degree in public health, Rep. Slaughter moved to western New York with her husband in the 1950s and entered politics two decades later.

She served in the Monroe County Legislature and New York State Assembly before being elected to Congress in 1986 and soon established herself as a defender of blue-collar constituents who worked for Xerox or Kodak.

Initially one of just 29 women in the House of Representatives, Rep. Slaughter was an advocate of women’s access to health care and abortion. She was a co-author of the Violence Against Women Act, a landmark 1994 law aimed at curbing domestic abuse and aiding its victims.

In 1991, she was part of a group of seven Democratic congresswomen who marched to the Senate to demand a delay in the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

In a legislative assault she later likened to the World War II battle of Iwo Jima, she and her fellow legislators prevailed on their Senate colleagues to hear testimony from Anita Hill, a former Thomas aide who had accused him of sexual harassment.

“There’s no monolithic way that women respond to this,” she said at the time, referring to the harassment allegations. “But we are the people who write the laws of the land. Good lord, she should have some recourse here.”

Among her greatest achievements was helping shepherd the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, during which she said she received a death threat and her district office window was smashed with a rock.

Rep. Slaughter described herself as the only microbiologist on Capitol Hill, and in recent years fought to establish stringent restrictions on the use of antibiotics in healthy cattle — a leading factor, she argued, in the rise of drug-resistant bacteria. She often pointed toward a Food and Drug Administration report which found that in 2009, out of all the antibiotics sold for use by people and livestock, 80 percent went to animals.

Rep. Slaughter was unable to pass restrictive antibiotics legislation. But her proposal, introduced in each congressional session since 2007, helped draw national attention to the issue. In 2015, President Barack Obama announced a $1.2 billion, five-year plan to identify emerging “superbugs” and increase funding for new antibiotics and vaccines.

Dorothy Louise McIntosh was born in Harlan County, in southeastern Kentucky, on Aug. 14, 1929. She graduated from high school in Somerset, about 100 miles west, and said she decided to pursue microbiology after her sister died of pneumonia.

She studied at the University of Kentucky, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1951 and a master’s in 1953, and was working in Texas when she met Robert Slaughter at a motel pool.

They married in 1957, and he died in 2014. Survivors include three daughters; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson.