March is Women’s History Month and schools around the country will be championing women of acclaim both past and present. Here’s one woman that school children may not know, even though she was one of the most acclaimed and accomplished women of the 20th Century.
Born in 1903, Clare Boothe Luce blazed many trails for women during her lifetime, becoming editor of Vanity Fair magazine, a female European and Asian war journalist in the WWII era, an acclaimed author and playwright, a two-term U.S. Congresswoman, and the first woman to be appointed U.S. Ambassador to a major nation.
Her stunning beauty was matched only by her razor-sharp mind and ambition. By age 16, one biographer wrote, she had set her life goals: “to be fluent in four languages, marry a publisher, and write something that would be remembered. She would achieve all three.”
Shortly after finishing school, 18-year-old Clare spent a brief period working as assistant to militant feminist Alva Belmont, founder of the National Women’s Party. Belmont saw in Clare’s “intelligence, speaking ability and charm” an opportunity to “help destroy the notion that feminist activists had to be rich chesty old matrons or disgruntled, plain spinsters,” as one biographer noted. But militant feminism was not for Clare, and their association was short-lived.
At age 20, Clare married socialite playboy George Tuttle Brokaw and gave birth to her only child, Ann, a year later. When the marriage ended six years later, Clare began work as a writer, first writing captions for Vogue magazine, and later as Assistant Editor and Managing Editor of Vanity Fairmagazine, where she was lauded for her innovative ideas and editorial skill.
Leaving Vanity Fair, Clare turned her attention to playwriting in 1933. She wrote 10 plays in six years, three of which received wide acclaim. Her most famous work, The Women, ran for 657 performances on Broadway and was twice made into a movie (1939 and 2008). Another work, Come to the Stable, gained her an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing: Motion Picture Story.
In 1935, Clare married Henry “Harry” R. Luce, founder, publisher and owner of Time and Fortune magazines. Individually influential and successful, they were an ideal match in intellect and interest in political and world affairs.
As troubles grew in Europe in the late 1930s, Clare spent several months touring Europe as a roving journalist for Life magazine. She became dismayed by the complacency she witnessed. Italy was unconcerned by German’s occupation of Austria and Poland. The French believed war was coming, but that they were amply protected by the Maginot Line of fortified eastern border defenses. Britain, too, felt secure. Clare believed otherwise, that they—and America—were being lulled into a dangerous illusion.
As Germany invaded Denmark, Norway, and Sweden and advanced through Belgium into France, Clare wrote and published Europe in the Spring in 1940. Reprinted 8 times, her book, noted one biographer, “helped shape public opinion as Americans tried to make sense of the escalating crisis in Europe.”
Clare spent much of next two years reporting from Asia, logging over 75,000 miles of air travel in 1942 alone. In uncanny timing, her in-depth interview of General Douglas MacArthur ran as the cover story in Life magazine on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
By now, Clare was an outspoken critic of FDR’s handling of world affairs. She won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1943 representing her largely Democratic Connecticut district. Clare garnered national attention when media focused on this single line in her debut speech in Congress: “But much of what [Vice President] Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney.”
On January 11, 1944, Clare’s 19-year-old daughter, Ann, was killed in a car crash while driving back to Stanford University after a visit with her mother. A devastated Clare asked Catholic Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, If God is good, why did he take my daughter? The question would lead to many conversations with Sheen and culminate in Clare’s conversion to Catholicism in 1946. One life-long friend described the transformation: “Twenty years ago she was like a diamond—beautiful, brilliant and cold. Now she is beautiful, brilliant and compassionate. She has become a kind and remarkably unselfish woman.”
In December 1944, Clare was chosen Woman of the Year by an Associated Press poll of American newspaper editors, because, as one editor explained, “no legislator had won greater renown in a single term.” Over her two terms in office, Clare was credited with 18 major initiatives espousing the causes of human rights. In its first annual international poll in March 1948, Gallup ranked Clare the fourth most admired woman in the world.
As WWII came to a conclusion, Clare foresaw a new threat to democracy: communism and the Soviet Union. In nationally-broadcast debates, Clare argued that communism was as totalitarian as Nazism, and that the United States’ post-war mission would be to prevent the spread of communism throughout Europe.
During the 1952 presidential campaign, Clare made no less than 100 personal, radio and television appearances on behalf of GOP candidate Dwight Eisenhower. When President-elect Eisenhower asked what post she would like in his administration, she replied, “Naturally, what I can’t get: Rome.” Such a major post had never been given to a woman. In a daring move, Ike awarded her the post.
Confirmed unanimously by the Senate, Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce arrived to face the skepticism of both Italians and the embassy’s Democratic senior staff hold-overs. Italy in 1953 was at a tipping point between democracy and communism, and the new ambassador was tasked with apprising Italians that the good will of the United States depended on Italy remaining democratic: a message she diligently conveyed to government and business leaders at every opportunity.
Italy was also embroiled in a bitter battle with Yugoslavia over control of the Adriatic port of Trieste. Ambassador Luce proposed a plan for a Trieste resolution, which received the endorsement of the Eisenhower administration. After 18 months of hard negotiations, Yugoslavia and Italy signed the final Treaty of Trieste.
The Treaty won her praise in Italy and at home. One of Italy’s oldest newspapers, Corriere della Sera, editorialized: “Perhaps never in the whole of history has a great nation owed so much to so small, fragile and gentle a woman.” The New York Times wrote, “The Trieste agreement is a victory for Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, who floated the problem off the reef on which it had foundered some years before her arrival in Italy …Her achievement is the more remarkable because the agreement is, in effect, a carbon copy… of the US-British declaration of October 8, 1953. This declaration … was originally suggested by Mrs. Luce and was made as a result of her insistence.”
Ambassador Luce left Italy in 1956 far better off than she found it: strongly democratic and economically stable. TheWashington Post praised her work: “Judged by the pragmatic test of results, her mission was extremely successful … She worked fantastically hard, even to the detriment of her health, and there was no doubt of her warm friendship for Italy. She brought both dignity and intelligence to her position. Her efforts command the gratitude of her countrymen.”
Although she would continue to serve on presidential advisory boards, she and Harry, who died in 1967, largely retreated from the public eye. Upon her death in 1987, Time magazine eulogized the writer, editor and politician as “the preeminent Renaissance woman of the century.”
Through hard work and determination, Clare Boothe Luce shattered many misguided notions about women and their leadership potential. Once complemented for having a “masculine mind,” Clare retorted, “Thought has no sex. One either thinks, or one does not!”
She deserves to be championed during Women’s History Month.
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