"First Woman on NLRB" Betty S Murphy Hand Signed FDC Dated 1950 For Sale

Up for sale the "First Woman on NLRB" Betty S. Murphy Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1950. 

ES-4333

Betty Jane Southard Murphy (March

1, 1933 – October 16, 2010) was an American attorney who was the first woman to

serve on the National Labor Relations

Board, serving as the agency's eighth chair from 1975 to 1977. She was also the first woman to

lead the United States Department

of Labor Wage and Hour Division,

and co-founded the National Women's Political

Caucus and the Republican

National Lawyers Association. She

was born on March 1, 1933, in East Orange, New Jersey,

to Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Theodore Southard. Her father was a businessman, and she

had two brothers (Samuel and Harry). Shortly after she was born, her family

moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey,

where she was raised. Samuel became a pediatrician, and Harry a high school

teacher. She earned her undergraduate degree

at Ohio State University, and later studied at the Sorbonne and the Alliance Francaise in

Paris, France. After graduating from college she worked as a freelance foreign correspondent and later worked

for United Press International as

its reporter in Washington, D.C., where

her coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court fostered

an interest in law. She ultimately enrolled at Washington College of Law and

was awarded a law degree in 1958. Pursuing a new career as an attorney, she

worked for a year at the NLRB as an enforcement attorney.[3] She left government service and

joined the law firm of Wilson, Woods & Villalon, representing clients in 19

states and arguing cases before nine of the 11 United States courts of

appeals. campaign funds for his personal use. Dodd

was later censured by

the Senate and lost re-election, and the Supreme Court of the

United States refused to review a lower court's ruling that the

suit was improper. Murphy was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the first

female Administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor in its Wage and Hour

Division in June 1974. In

February 1975, when Murphy was sworn in to serve as the first woman to chair

the National Labor Relations Board, President Gerald Ford said he chose her as "the most qualified

and best respected person" for the job and not because of her sex. The AFL-CIO declined to oppose her nomination, noting that

she had represented both management and labor fairly during her legal career. While

on the NLRB, the five-member board handed down rulings regarding rules for collective bargaining and

union organization in the healthcare field, allowing separate bargaining

units for clerks, maintenance workers, medical technicians and

nurses, in which Murphy cast the deciding vote. Harking back to her journalism

career, she cast the only vote against a 1976 decision regarding the rights of

newspaper employees to form unions, noting her dissent that the skills required

to be a reporter were "the essence of professionalism".She was

succeeded as NLRB chairman by John H. Fanning in 1977 and served on the board until

1979 when she turned down an interim appointment by President Jimmy Carter.