May Craig’s list of accomplishments over a 40-year career in journalism would be pretty impressive even if a section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had not been named for her.

The “May Craig Amendment” prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex. Craig had suggested the amendment to a Virginia congressman on an episode of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where she was a frequent panelist. Craig, who covered every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson for Maine’s Guy Gannett newspapers, knew firsthand the major roadblocks facing women in the workplace.

During her career, she had often protested the unequal treatment of women in journalism and broke down barriers to access. During World War II, she fought against restrictions barring women from ships and war zones and reported on bombing raids in London and the invasion of Normandy. She visited Hitler’s mountain retreat after it had been abandoned.

She’s notable not only for her impact on women’s history but also as a reminder of the important role journalists have played as watchdogs of the American government.

“She was a great symbol to other women, that they could aspire to be journalists,” said Maurine Beasley, a retired journalism professor at the University of Maryland and author of the 2012 book “Women of the Washington Press.” “She worked at a time when people appreciated journalists more than they do today. Right now we have a president who thinks that journalists should be mouthpieces for his particular view. (Craig) was more allied with the Democrats, but you would have found Republicans who admired her, too.”

A SENSE OF MAINE PRIDE

When Craig began covering Roosevelt in the 1930s — she was the first woman to attend his news briefings — only about 5% of the reporters covering national politics in Washington were women, Beasley said. There were other women who wrote so-called “society” stories from Washington or for women’s sections of newspapers, Beasley said. It was a time when many small newspapers had their own Washington correspondents, and with no internet or even widespread television available yet, having a Washington reporter was a way for local newspapers to bring national news directly to readers while highlighting issues of local interest.

When Craig retired from journalism in 1965, Johnson sent her a congratulatory telegram. When she died in 1975 at the age of 86 in Silver Spring, Maryland, U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine had a tribute to her written into the congressional record. Muskie said Craig’s “schoolmarm looks cloaked a brilliant mind, a tenacious and peppery manner, and a sensitive and generous heart.” Her obituary in The New York Times said she was “almost as famous for her flowered hats as for her penetrating and persistent questioning at presidential news conferences” and that a colleague had referred to her as a “nemesis of all evasive politicians.”

Though she wrote mainly for the Portland Press Herald and other newspapers owned by Guy Gannett in Augusta and Waterville, she gained a national profile from her frequent appearances on “Meet the Press” and from presidential news conferences. In an audio recording of a John F. Kennedy news conference in February 1963, Craig can be heard asking the president about his administration’s efforts at “managed news.” She asks for a definition of his policy on dealing with the media, and in a lively back and forth that elicited laughs from the gathered crowd, tells him she thinks reporters should get “everything we want.” Kennedy responds, “I think you should, too.”

“There was very much a sense of Maine pride, to see her recognized as a senior member of the press corps, in those wonderful televised news conferences with Kennedy,” said Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., 76, who grew up in Portland and is Maine’s state historian. “I remember they would usually begin with a question from her.”

Though Craig was strongly identified with Maine and its newspapers and spoke with what sounds something like a New England accent, she never lived in Maine full time. She was born near Beaufort, South Carolina, where her father worked in a phosphate mine. Her mother died when she was young, and she was taken in as a foster child by the wealthy family who owned the mine and raised largely in Washington, D.C.

She published poems and articles in her high school newspaper but studied nursing at George Washington University. She had long been interested in politics and women’s rights and marched in a women’s suffrage parade at Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913.

When she was 21, against her foster family’s protests, she married Donald Craig, who was the Washington correspondent for the New York Herald. The couple had two children. Donald Craig also wrote columns for the Guy Gannett newspapers in Maine. After he was hurt badly in a car accident in 1923, Craig began helping her husband with his columns. She became a Washington correspondent for the Maine newspapers in the mid-1930s, after Donald’s death. She also had a radio show on Maine stations. She was often referred to by colleagues and politicians as “tough as a lobster.”

She became friends with Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, but protested the women-only news conferences the first lady held, saying it was unfair to exclude men. She also became known for asking FDR tough questions in news conferences and for her quick retorts. The New York Times reported that after Craig asked a question of Roosevelt that he had trouble answering, he said to her, “May, you must have stayed up all night thinking up that question.” Craig’s quick reply was, “As a matter of fact, I did.”

During World War II, she traveled to Europe, writing about soldiers from Maine and covering historic events like the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Paris. In late 1945, after the German surrender, she wrote a piece called “Hitler’s Mountain,” in which she described her visit to Eagle’s Nest, the home in the Bavarian Alps where the German dictator stayed for much of the war.

She got military officials to overturn or temporarily rescind several prohibitions on women reporters traveling on ships or planes, often in place because there were supposedly no “facilities” or restrooms available to women. After the war, in 1947, she made national news when she was excluded from traveling with President Harry Truman on the battleship Missouri, as he returned from the Inter-American Defense Conference in Brazil. She was the only woman journalist assigned to travel with Truman and was told the battleship had no restrooms for women. She protested but was flown home.

Two years later, the Navy allowed Craig to become the first woman reporter on a battleship at sea, when she covered air-sea maneuvers on the aircraft carrier Midway. A few years after that, she was likely the first woman allowed to cover the Korean War truce talks, according to The New York Times.

Craig’s stature as a senior member of the White House press corps gained her a regular spot on the NBC news show “Meet the Press,” which began on TV in 1947 and was created by pioneering broadcast journalist Martha Rountree. Over nearly two decades, Craig appeared on the show 243 times, more than other journalist in the show’s 77-year history except for David Broder of The Washington Post. She could be seen sitting at a table, often wearing a flowered hat, asking rapid-fire and specific questions of politicians and government officials.

‘TV’S MOST UNUSUAL STAR’

Craig’s suggestion of an amendment to the Civil Rights Act showed her political savvy. At the time, the bill was causing controversy and opposition, especially from Southern politicians who opposed it. Craig made her suggestion on the day that Virginia U.S. Rep. Howard Smith was on “Meet the Press,” knowing he was against racial integration. Smith decided to take Craig’s suggestion and add the word “sex” to the section prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin. It became known as the “May Craig amendment” and Smith thought it might stir up opposition and help defeat the bill, Beasley said. But it didn’t and the bill passed.

Craig’s appearances on “Meet the Press” prompted Look magazine to call her “TV’s most unusual star.” Craig was likely chosen to be on “Meet the Press” because of her serious demeanor and probing questions, at a time when many women on TV news programs were “weather girls,” Beasley said. Craig said of her own on-air persona that she’d rather be seen as “grim than giggly.”

Craig often wore decorative hats and gloves on TV, conforming to some of the norms for women in journalism at the time.

“She was known as a hardcore journalist, asking good questions, but she was in the same bind that all women were at that time,” Beasley said. “They had to show they were capable journalists, but feminine. It was important they didn’t look like lesbians.”

About a year before she retired, Craig wrote a column with the headline “Decline of the United States — And Fall,” which prompted a flood of telegrams and telephone calls from people around the country, many thanking her. The column was reproduced in its entirety in the March 2, 1964, issue of U.S. News & World Report magazine.

The column was a broad outline of problems facing the nation’s people and officials, including cheating, mounting debt, “get rich quick” mentalities, a failing foreign policy in Southeast Asia and immorality. All these things, she said, could lead to a diminished position for the U.S. on the world stage.

“We are losing the respect of the world and respect is more necessary to a nation, as to a person, than affection,” Craig wrote. “First every one of us has to clean out weakness and selfishness and immorality of all types. Then choose leaders who with strength and principle and intelligence will lead us to where we can have self-respect and respect of others.”