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The
Honorable Mary
Gardiner Jones, Esq.,
Mary Gardiner Jones, past president of the board of directors of the Mental Health Association of the District of Columbia and a champion advocate for children’s mental health services, was a pioneer and trailblazer for women’s rights. Her family had a long history of public service dating back to the 17th century, including her aunt, Rosalie Jones, who was a Senator's wife and suffragette, and the first woman lawyer to pass the District of Columbia bar exam. Ms. Jones attended private schools and graduated from Wellesley College where she studied history and political science. She taught briefly at the George School (near Philadelphia) then in the 1940s joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1946 she entered Yale Law School, one of only two women in her class, where she was Law Journal editor. After graduation, her interest in policy issues and in international and antitrust law eventually led to a position with the Justice Department's Anti-Trust Division (1953-1960). In 1960 she left to take a position as antitrust litigator with the New York law firm of Webster Sheffield, where she worked for four years. In 1964 the Johnson Administration, who under Johnson's leadership was actively recruiting talented women for various positions, was searching for a politically-neutral candidate for Federal Trade Commissioner and offered her the appointment. Jones strove to get the FTC more involved in social justice issues, such as the higher prices and questionable marketing practices experienced by low-income inner-city consumers. During her tenure the Commission produced the Kerner Report, a study done just after, and partly in response to, the Watts Riots of 1965, which explored fraud, deceptive pricing, the resale of installment contracts, and other inner-city problems. The FTC also brought a series of cases in an attempt to address some of these practices that primarily affected the urban poor. She saw the FTC as "a very small, but significant tool to impact these larger issues." She also campaigned vigorously, and successfully, to get the FTC the power to impose sanctions on businesses rather than being limited to simple "cease and desist" orders. Two of the most useful sanctions were corrective advertising and ad substantiation (documentation of claims prior to using them in advertisements), both of which significantly strengthened the FTC's ability to act on the behalf of consumers. After leaving the FTC in 1973, Jones taught briefly at the University of Illinois' law and business schools. In 1975 she became vice president in charge of consumer affairs for Western Union, which brought her back to Washington, D.C. for seven years until she officially retired in 1982. She then founded the non-profit Consumer Interest Research Institute, which existed briefly before folding due to lack of funding. However, the Alliance for Public Technology, of which she was co-founder and president, throve in the technology-rich environment of the early 1980s, and still actively promotes consumer interest in telecommunications today. In 1998 she became President of the Mental Health Association of D.C. where she instituted programs as diverse as children's services and mental health education for senior citizens in African-American churches. Jones was the author of numerous articles and papers as well as 21st Century Learning and Health Care in the Home: Creating a National Telecommunications Network and the autobiographical Tearing Down Walls, One Woman's Triumph. In 2003 she received the Florence Kelley Consumer Leadership Award from the National Consumer's League for her efforts on behalf of consumers. She is also the recipient of distinguished service awards from the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals, an honorary member of the American Home Economics Association, and was the Colston E. Warne Distinguished Lecturer at the Association of Consumer Interests (1992). In a review of her book, Tearing Down Walls: A Woman’s Triumph, former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote: "Mary Gardiner Jones not only tore down walls that kept women out of positions of power and influence - she smashed them to smithereens. And in so doing, she created opportunities for future generations who never knew how high and thick the walls once were. Hers was an exemplary life, offering men as well as women a lesson in what one person's indomitable spirit can accomplish."
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