A Matter of Simple Justice: The Untold Story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and a Few Good Women by Lee Stout (review)

One key challenge that historians face when writing about women leaders in politics and public policy is balancing the need to document the presence of women in government with providing analysis of their roles, responsibilities, and contributions in a larger political context. In Lee Stout’s A Matter of Simple Justice: The Untold Story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and a Few Good Women, the author does an excellent job meeting this challenge. Stout avoids the pitfall that too often entangles historians who, while trying to write women back into a political narrative, overlook a full probing of their agency and impact and fail to weave their contributions into the general political landscape. In A Matter of Simple Justice, however, the author does a masterful job of both recording women’s placement in key roles and showing how their contributions have connected with larger political and social developments.

Stout accomplishes his task by dividing his book into two sections. The first focuses specifically on the role of women in the Nixon administration and the president’s appointment of Barbara Hackman Franklin as the White House’s key person on women’s appointments. Franklin’s position came in response to recommendations from Nixon’s Presidential Task Force on Women’s Rights and Responsibilities, a group he created after reporter Vera Glaser challenged Nixon on his appointment record. Through his analysis, Stout shows that neither Franklin nor the women who served on the president’s task force were token appointees. Further, their appointments increased four-fold the number of women serving in the administration and provided dedicated service to the White House and a variety of government departments. He shows that these efforts had the support of key Nixon insiders such as Fred Malek, special assistant to the president for personnel, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant to the president for urban affairs. Stout also demonstrates that many within the administration recognized that increasing women’s appointments was a “golden opportunity” politically for the Republican Party and championed Franklin’s work to locate qualified women across the nation and place them in high-level appointed posts (23). Their political instincts in this regard proved true. In the 1972 presidential election, Nixon won 62 percent of women’s votes compared with 59 percent of men’s votes. Based on these results, Stout argues that, despite the conventional perception, the Nixon administration made significant progress on women’s issues and women voters responded positively to his efforts.

In the second part of his book, Stout documents the biographies and careers of women presidential appointees from the Nixon era. This portion of the book contains extensive excerpts from interviews Stout and others conducted. For this reason, from an oral history perspective, the book is a treasure trove of eyewitness accounts told by those directly involved with events of the era. The information these biographical sketches provide not only gives a valuable glimpse of outstanding women appointees but also provides a window into the oral history resources housed in the Penn State University Library. Stout spent twenty-seven years as University Archivist at Penn State. In this role he approached Franklin, a Penn State graduate, about acquiring her papers. In the course of those discussions, Stout realized that many of the women appointees with whom Franklin worked were still living and had enjoyed long and productive careers in public service. Franklin readily agreed when Stout suggested that they undertake an oral history project to document these key women’s stories. The result was the A Few Good Women Oral History Project on which Stout’s book is based. Researchers interested in learning more about women government leaders in the Nixon era and related topics will find that Stout’s work provides unusually high-quality oral history resources. Obviously, through this project Stout and Franklin became colleagues. Nevertheless, the...