Maryon Allen (née Pittman; November 30, 1925 – July 23, 2018) was an American journalist who served as United States Senator from Alabama for five months in 1978, after her husband, Senator James B. Allen, died in office. She held no public office prior to her appointment to her husband's old senate seat. She was appointed by Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace.
Early life
Maryon Pittman was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1925. The following year the family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where her father established a tractor dealership and where she grew up and attended public school. From 1944 to 1947, she studied journalism at the University of Alabama but did not graduate. In 1946, while a student, she married Joshua Mullins. The couple had three children, who were still young in 1959 when the marriage ended in divorce.
Following her divorce, she went to work, first as an insurance agent and later as the editor of the women's sections for five weekly newspapers in the Birmingham area. That experience led to a position as a staff writer for the Birmingham News. It was in that capacity that she met James "Jim" Allen, then lieutenant governor of Alabama, in 1964, when she interviewed him in connection with a speech he had delivered to the Alabama Federation of Women's Clubs. She and Allen, a widower with two children, were attracted to each other and married in August 1964, after a courtship of just four months.
In 1967, the same year that her husband finished his term as lieutenant governor, Maryon Allen discovered that she had tuberculosis and underwent several months of treatment. The following year she wrote a series of articles for Alabama newspapers in which she described her experiences. Her articles described the care programs in Alabama hospitals and urged readers to get tuberculin tests and chest X-rays.
In 1968, Jim Allen won election to the United States Senate. When he took office in January 1969, Maryon accompanied him to Washington, D.C. She continued working as a journalist, writing a syndicated news column called "The Reflections of a News Hen" for newspapers in Alabama.
Like her husband, Maryon Allen was very conservative even by Alabama Democratic standards of the time. In October 1978, she voted for a proposal to allow states that had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to rescind their ratification. At the time, 35 states had ratified the ERA, three short of the total that would be needed before March 1979 in order to add the ERA to the U.S. Constitution. The proposal to allow states to rescind their ratifications failed to win a majority, and the Senate went on to join the House in voting to give states three additional years to ratify the ERA, but no additional states ratified it, so it failed.
Later years
After the end of her brief service in the Senate, Allen worked for a time as a columnist for The Washington Post.
See also
- Women in the United States Senate