New York congresswoman, 88, oldest sitting lawmaker in D.C.

WASHINGTON» Rep. Louise Slaughter, a folksy New York liberal who championed women’s rights and American manufacturing for more than three decades as a Democratic congresswoman, and who became a top lieutenant for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as the first and only woman to lead the powerful Rules Committee, died March 16 at a hospital in Washington. She was 88 and the oldest sitting member of Congress.

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

The daughter of a blacksmith in a Kentucky coal mine, Slaughter traced her lineage to Daniel Boone and attacked her political opponents with a marksman’s accuracy and, not infrequently, a disarming grin. “She’s sort of a combination of Southern charm and back-room politics, a Southern belle with a cigar in her mouth,” Jane Danowitz, executive director of the Women’s Campaign Fund, told The Post in 1992.

A microbiologist with a master’s degree in public health, Slaughter moved to western New York with her husband in the 1950s and entered politics two decades later, after fighting to preserve a stand of beech-maple forest near their home in the Rochester suburbs. 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 bluecollar constituents who worked for Xerox or Kodak.

Breaking with Democratic Party leaders, she argued that international trade agreements did little more than drain the United States of manufacturing jobs. When President Bill Clinton asked her to support the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), according to the Almanac of American Politics, she replied, “Why are you carrying George Bush’s trash?”

Initially one of just 29 women in the House of Representatives, Slaughter was a flinty 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.

Dorothy Louise McIntosh was born in Harlan County, in southeastern Kentucky, on Aug. 14, 1929.

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.