Eleanor Holmes Norton
| Eleanor Holmes Norton | |
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| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the District of Columbia's At-large district |
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Assumed office January 3, 1991 Delegate |
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| Preceded by | Walter Fauntroy |
| Chairperson of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission | |
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In office May 27, 1977 – February 21, 1981 |
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| President |
Jimmy Carter Ronald Reagan |
| Preceded by | Lowell Perry |
| Succeeded by | Clarence Thomas |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Eleanor Holmes June 13, 1937 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Edward Norton (1965–1993) |
| Children | 2 |
| Alma mater |
Antioch College Yale University |
| Religion | Episcopalian |
Eleanor Holmes Norton (born June 13, 1937) is a Delegate to the United States Congress representing the District of Columbia. As a non-voting member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Norton may serve on committees as well as speak on the House floor; however, she is not permitted to vote on the final passage of any legislation.
Eleanor Holmes was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Vela (née Lynch), a schoolteacher, and Coleman Holmes, a civil servant. She attended Antioch College (B.A. 1960), Yale University (M.A. in American Studies 1963) and Yale Law School (Law 1964).
While in college and graduate school, she was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the time she graduated from Antioch, she had already been arrested for organizing and participating in sit-ins in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Ohio. While in law school, she traveled to Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Summer and worked with civil rights stalwarts like Medgar Evers. Her first encounter with a recently released but physically beaten Fannie Lou Hamer forced her to bear witness to the intensity of violence and Jim Crow repression in the South. Her time with the SNCC inspired her lifelong commitment to social activism and her budding sense of feminism. She contributed the piece "For Sadie and Maud" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. Norton was on the founding advisory board of the Women's Rights Law Reporter (founded 1970), the first legal periodical in the United States to focus exclusively on the field of women’s rights law. In the early 1970s, Norton was a signer of the Black Woman’s Manifesto, a classic document of the Black feminist movement.
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