Word: fenwick
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...this kind of genteel compassion and it's real," says one admirer. "It's sad that there aren't more like her." Indeed, there are very few like Fenwick. Like Lacy Davenport, the Doonesbury character modelad after her, she roams around the House floor clutching her big red handbag and charging to the microphone when the occasion calls for it. Long interested in social problems, she fought for civil rights years before it became fashionable. She warned of the bad housing conditions in Newark before riots there broke out. As vice chairman of the New Jersey advisory committee...
...Fenwick's familiarity with the problems of poor people should not be surprising. She has also felt the pressure of making ends meet. Odd circumstances led to the daughter of a rich New Jersey banker funding herself in the depressed job market of the late 1930s...
...educated herself, reading widely and becoming fluent in Spanish, French and Italian. After returning to the U.S. in 1929, she studied philosophy under Bertrand Russel at Columbia, where the two became fast friends and weekly dinner partners. But Fenwick didn't appreciate Russell's anti-American sentiments, and the friendship soon ended...
Although she didn't need to work, she began modeling for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. In 1934 she married Hugh Fenwick, but the marriage ended in divorce four years later, a matter she regards to this day as a personal failure. Left with two children and a load of debts, she had little choice but to go hunting for work. The Depression was still on. She finally got a job as a feature writer for Vogue, but only after a long search that opened her eyes to the problems of the poor. One department store refused...
...know how scatterbrained I am," Fenwick recalls saying. "I just forgot to pay the taxes...