In a black and white video clip from the 1948 Democratic National Convention, television host Rex Marshall leans forward in his seat and motions to a woman in a knit beret.
“Now I’d like to turn our attention to Miss Blatt of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” he says.
The camera pans and zooms in on Genevieve Blatt, who, at 35, has already earned three degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and worked for the city’s civil service commission and solicitor’s office. She’s attending the convention as a delegate, a role she will fill for 36 years.
“We know lots of lawyers have gotten into politics,” Marshall continues. “Is that how you got into politics? Did you just sort of slide into it?”
Blatt’s mouth turns up slightly, as if amused by Marshall’s question, and she fixes him with a steely gaze.
No, she replies evenly. I deliberately studied law so I could be a more effective politician.
The answer is pure Genevieve Blatt: direct but not impolite; diplomatic but never to be underestimated.
Blatt is known as the “First Lady of Pennsylvania Politics,” and for good reason. She was the first woman to hold statewide elected office, the first woman to be nominated by a major party to run for Senate, and the first to be seated on the state’s Commonwealth Court. By at least one historian’s account, if you add up all the votes she received in the 17 times she ran for local and state office, she would have more than any other person in Pennsylvania history.
Blatt was born in Clarion County, the eldest of her parents’ five children. As a preschooler, she contracted a mysterious illness that forced her parents to homeschool her for a year. That experience, friends and family say, likely accounted for her cleverness and love of learning.
She attended Pitt during the Great Depression, earning degrees in political science and law, before going to work for the city of Pittsburgh. In 1954, she became the first woman to win statewide office when she became Secretary of Internal Affairs.
Friends say she was well-read, well-traveled and well-dressed—in 1964, the Millinery Institute of American named her one of the “best-hatted” women in the country for her vast collection of extravagant, flowered headpieces. She was also devout, earning three papal honors, including the Lady Grand Cross in the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem.
But her enduring legacy is the 1975 landmark ruling on Title IX. Writing for the majority on the Commonwealth Court, Blatt was, predictably, blunt in her assessment of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association’s bylaws, which prohibited girls from competing against boys. She deemed the bylaws unconstitutional and declared, “none of the justifications for it offered by PIAA, even if proved, could sustain its legality.”
Today, millions of female athletes, including those at Pitt, benefit from Blatt’s ruling.
-April Johnston