Maryon Pittman Allen

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. ==Political spouse==

Upon her second marriage, Maryon Pittman Allen became a political wife. As lieutenant governor, Jim Allen had to preside over the Alabama State Senate in a special session of the state legislature that Governor George C. Wallace had called three days before the wedding. In a newspaper article published shortly thereafter, she wrote that the legislative session had resulted in the couple's having "the most public, political honeymoon in history". 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. The column won Alabama Press Association awards as "best original column". ==U.S. Senate==

Jim Allen died suddenly on June 1, 1978, the victim of a heart attack. One week later, on June 8, 1978, Alabama Governor George Wallace appointed Maryon Allen to succeed her husband in the Senate. Allen was the second of the four Senators to serve during the twenty-seventh Senate term for Alabama's Class 3 seat, from January 3, 1975, to January 3, 1981, after her husband. 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==