Florence "Twink" Willett is a Perfect Size 12

Did you know that Birmingham was among the first cities in Michigan to have a female mayor? In her 1960 acceptance speech, Florence “Twink” Willitt stated “I hope to do a good job. I want the women in the community to be proud of the manner in which I perform- and the men too.”  And while she sought to do that good job for the city, the media often paid far more attention to her appearance, clothing and family life. Far more than they did for her male peers anyhow. The story of Florence Harris Baker Willet is the culmination of a journey started by women in Birmingham before women even had the right to vote. But its also the start of another one that led to greater representation for women on Birmingham’s city commission, various boards and leadership roles within city hall.

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For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.

Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Transcript

Did you know that Birmingham was among the first cities in Michigan to have a female mayor? In her 1960 acceptance speech, Florence “Twink” Willitt stated “I hope to do a good job. I want the women in the community to be proud of the manner in which I perform- and the men too.”  And while she sought to do that good job for the city, the media often paid far more attention to her appearance, clothing and family life. Far more than they did for her male peers anyhow. The story of Florence Harris Baker Willet is the culmination of a journey started by women in Birmingham before women even had the right to vote. But its also the start of another one that led to greater representation for women on Birmingham’s city commission, various boards and leadership roles within city hall.

                This is Birmingham Uncovered, a podcast by the Birmingham Museum, where we are exploring the diverse and compelling lives that built Birmingham Michigan into the community that it is today. First, some background on Birmingham: we are a city of approx. 20,000 people over 4.73 square miles, approximately halfway between Detroit and Pontiac in Oakland County. This area was occupied by members of the Three Fires Confederacy of Indigenous People before white settlement in the area started in the late 1810s. Birmingham became a city in 1933 and today is known as a prosperous and multi-faceted community with a thriving cultural scene.

            First, lets get two things out of the way at the top: Yes, one of the first four landowners in Birmingham was named Elijah Willits and his son, Washington Willits, was a former podcast subject. Elijah’s last name is spelled with one “t” and an “s” (although sometimes newspapers would print differently spellings which makes research take a lot longer than you might expect), while Florence’s last name has one “e”, two “t”s and no “s”. Is it confusing? Yes. Will I do my best to pronounce it “Willett” and not “Willits” this episode? I swear to do my utmost. Are the Willits and the Willetts related? If they are, it’s pretty distantly.

            Secondly, do I know what “twink” means nowadays? I do, yes thank you for asking. Did Twink know what her nickname came to mean? According to Oxford Dictionaries, the word “twink”, referring to a gay man with a youthful appearance, slim physique and little to no body hair, comes about in the gay subculture in the 1970s. Although the origin of the word is disputed and may have arisen earlier. Twink was given her nickname by her parents early on in her life and, spoilers, she was born in 1915. Her mother was also named Florence, so a nickname was often given in those cases to give the child their own identity and to limit confusion. But, she died in 2002 so…maybe? If you knew Florence Willett and know if she knew, please get in touch. I’m just nosey. I often wonder about a woman in Birmingham’s past named Pussie Robinson as well.

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Florence Harris Baker was born on June 5, 1915 in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1925, her family moved to Detroit. Florence attended Miss Newman’s Private School in Detroit. Miss Newman’s was a small private girls school that, from what I can gather about it, appeared to have prepared its graduates for lives as women in high society.  Capable women who could manage a household, throw a garden party worthy of the society pages, and sit on the board of several charities- but not dirty their hands in politics by becoming mayor or sitting on a commission.

On April 24, 1934, 18 year old Florence married George Howard Willett, who was 22 and worked as a salesman-possibly at the fuel company his dad owned. Their wedding was described in detail in the Detroit Free Press in the Sunday issue. This wasn’t an announcement or notice that us common folk might submit to the paper. This was a play by play of how the church in Grosse Pointe was decorated (white silk with white spring flowers and ferns), what the bride wore (Ivory satin gown with a high cowl neck, long train, veil and a cap of rose pointe lace trimmed with calla lilies and orange blossoms), who was in the bridal party and what they wore, how the reception was decorated, what Florence wore when they left for their honeymoon and where the couple was planning on going for their honeymoon, which was a road trip out East.

Time passed, George became president of the Standard Engineering Company in Detroit. In 1947, Florence and George moved to Pilgrim Avenue in Birmingham to raise their three children: Anne, born in 1938; George, born in 1941 and Gordon, born in 1946.

So what did Birmingham look like in 1947? Firstly, Birmingham had been a city for only 14 years by that point. If you missed the intro, or have just heard it so many times by now that it’s become background noise, that’s ok, but Birmingham became a city in 1933. In 1947, The Village Players (who we previously talked about in our recent episode on Ruth Shain) were celebrating their 25th season. 215 seniors graduated from Birmingham High that spring. The population was estimated to be 14,500, up nearly 4,000 residents from the 1940 census. The city had two banks, 15 churches, 2 movie theaters, 7 public schools and 1 parochial school, 18 firefighters and 21 police officers and the Baldwin public library contained 31,025 volumes.

Birmingham was rapidly growing. World War II was over and the post-war economy was centering on families, housing and education. In several oral histories, Birminghammers who lived in the city in the years immediately after WWII reported that it seemed as though every house had a baby in it. New subdivisions, like Residence Park (now called Little San Francisco) were being developed and attracting young families away from cities like Detroit. The new “wider Woodward” bypass meant that folks could easily travel by car from Birmingham to Detroit or Pontiac, making it possible to work in either of those cities while still enjoying the feel and charm of living in a smaller city, aka a “bedroom community”.

In the 1950 census, Florence’s occupation was listed as “keeping house”, but it wouldn’t be for long. She rose to the challenge to do something about a neighborhood issue. If there’s one thing that can unite modern Birmingham residents across all religious, political and racial backgrounds it’s this: these darn Birmingham streets are awful.

As I mentioned, Florence and her family lived in the Quarton Lake Estates on Pilgrim Avenue, and they and their neighbors believed that the road badly needed resurfacing. Sound familiar? So, Florence started attending city commission meetings and making a case for her cause. The commission took notice and Pilgrim got resurfaced. And honestly, if those commission meetings were anything like the ones I’ve been to in the variety of cities I’ve worked and lived in, the council was probably just really happy to have somebody coming and speaking at their meetings who had a demand that was normal, not full of conspiracy theories, and that could be met by the resources available to the city.

And the commission weren’t the only ones to take note. Fellow citizens and the League of Women voters urged Florence to consider running for the commission. She did and in April 1955, became Birmingham’s first woman to sit on the city commission. Florence Willett won the majority of votes in every precinct but one, many she won by huge margins. She also served as a member of the planning board. And a slight note here: there had been a woman on the village commission before Birmingham became a city. In 1927, Hope Ferguson Halgren was appointed to a vacancy on the commission and then elected to a two year term in 1928. Hope Ferguson Halgren, now Lewis, was still politically active and on the Oakland County Board of Supervisors when Florence Willett was elected to the city commission. We can only wonder at what she thought of the 25 plus years it took for another woman to follow her.

Florence called her time on the commission “times of testing”, as she didn’t have much experience in public speaking and learned by trial and error. At the end of her mayoral career in 1963, she was quoted in an article in the Detroit News about her fears as “…I felt I might make it harder for other women to earn public office”. She likened her time in office as a daughter-in-law coming in and finding her place in a new family.

Likening a community and local municipal body to a family appears to be part of the reason for Willett’s success in government. As she said, “The experience women get from raising families is a big help in government work. You learn to handle people as individuals and to know the limitations of temperaments. In government, you have to sell individuals on ideas to get anything done. And timing is important. Women tend to be sensitive to the emotional climate.”

Her fellow commissioners respected her work enough to appoint her mayor pro-tem in 1959 and then later unanimously elected her mayor in 1960. In his nominating speech, fellow commissioner Carl Ingram said, “I’ve served with her for several years and watched how she has worked. I am a great admirer of her attention to city matters. She can do a good job. Because of her work, she is entitled to be mayor for the coming year.”

Birmingham’s government follows a commission-manager structure, similar to a corporate board of directors. This means that all members of the commission are elected by the voters of the city and then those commissioners elect a mayor, usually from among themselves, who functions as a chair of the commission. The commission, which is unpaid, then hires a city manager to handle the day-today operations of the city and to report to the commission. This form of government became popular after WWI and it remains the most popular for cities across the United States. 

Florence Willett was mayor three years, from 1960-1963. At the end of her third term as mayor and after eight as a member of the commission, she announced that she was stepping down and returning to life as a private citizen. This led to a slew of articles that got…well, a little weird. Take the 1963 Detroit News article I quoted Florence from a few minutes ago. The first three words in it are “Birmingham’s attractive Mayor”. Don’t worry, 1963 readers, Florence Willett isn’t one of those uggo lady politicians, she’s an attractive one. The article also takes pains to mention that she’s 47. A lot of articles went out of their way to mention her age. Manley Bailey, who owned a Birmingham funeral home, and who was elected to the commission at the same time as Florence didn’t have his age mentioned in the 1955 Eccentric article about their election. But Florence’s age was.

A lot of these articles also couldn’t decide how to refer to her. In the 1955 Birmingham Eccentric article about her election, she is referred to as “Mrs G Howard (Florence) Willett.” And I know what some of you are thinking, that its a stylistic choice of some news sources to refer to people as “Mr” or “Miss/Mrs”. However, this was not the style employed by the Eccentric at the time because Manley Bailey is not referred to as a “Mr.”

And I really don’t want anyone to think I am a Manley Bailey hater. We have many lovely photos from the funeral home and he seemed like a cool dude. One of my favorite photos in our entire collection is Manley Bailey giving a cat a drink out of a mason jar on a hot day. I’ll post it on the website. I’m using him as a way to contrast just how differently Florence was treated in the press, even in the exact same article published in a local Birmingham paper.

Credit where credit is due, I guess. In that same article, Hope Halgren Lewis, the first woman elected to the village commission in 1928, is only referred to as “Mrs Cyril Lewis”. She didn’t even get her own name or even the her legal name at the time when she was elected to the commission in the 1920s in parentheses.

So, what else can we learn about the attitude of the press, and maybe the public, toward Florence from the kinda weird articles about her, aside from the fact that she wasn’t an uggo and was a proper married lady to a man with a name?

I’m so glad you asked, because now I can talk about my favorite article about Florence. It’s from the October issue of Detroit Free Press Magazine and titled “The Private World of the Lady Mayor of Birmingham”. You want a photo of Florence standing outside her house in a tweed skirt suit, gloves and a hat? This article has it. You want to see her with her grandson with whom she shares a birth month? We got a candid shot of these two Geminis with a teddy bear.

 It also starts with the line “The Lady Mayor of Birmingham is a perfect size 12”. The article then goes on to explain that she makes most of her own clothing. Here’s the thing about making your own clothes, particularly the tailored tweed suit in the photo that Florence made herself: everything is made to your specific body measurements so the sizes that you see on clothes in the store mean nothing. So why is this the opening line? Did Florence describe herself this way? Did the writer think including her clothing size was super important and so guesstimated? I don’t know and this question haunts me. But maybe the implication here is less on the size itself than on how “perfect” it is. Perhaps the “perfect size 12” was what women were striving to be in 1963 as the epitome of the ideal figure. And if that’s the case, good job Florence…?

Importantly, the article goes on to tell us that Florence loves the color blue and hand mixed much of the blue paint that decorates her home. She loves to cook in her purple kitchen, she collects antiques and her favorite perfume is Chantilly. Florence comes across as a charming woman with a range of interests that, much more importantly than her political office, tend towards the traditionally feminine.

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Why were all these articles and Florence herself constantly reminding readers that she was a traditionally feminine and attractive woman? A big clue is found in the same article in the line “This delightful woman, Florence Willett, in the last year of her third term, fits comfortably into the setting of Detroit suburbia.”

If you’ve started gritting your teeth at all this, let’s take a step back. We historians sometimes say things like “society was changing then”, which is silly because society is always changing. There hasn't been one time in the history of our species when society has been static. Having said that though, Florence’s political career took place during a time of fairly seismic changes happening in American society. Especially in suburbia.

Women, particularly minorities and lower-class women have always worked outside the home, especially after the late 19th century. Before that, they worked inside the home but also ran small businesses and were merchants, printers and ran cottage industries. After World War II, the country was trying to adjust again, and a particular image of societal bliss was being shaped.  Our picture of the “traditional” modern structure of the family with a male breadwinner, his stay-at-home wife and their 2.5 children in suburbia comes from the dominant culture of white upper and upper middle class families during this brief window of time. It was never truly the American norm. In fact, the demands of government, industry and the military during WWII (think Rosie the Riveter) brought increasing numbers of middle class, white women into the work force. A lot of those women found that they liked it and wanted to continue even after the war ended.

At the same time, labor saving devices, like dishwashers, made housework less time intensive. A chore like doing a load of laundry took at least two days in the 1880s and now took a few hours, with much of the work of scrubbing being done by the machine itself.

And while many women were forced out of the jobs they may have held during wartime because men wanted them back, the expansion of the economy in the late 1940s and 1950s in the United States meant that there were more jobs out there.

But that doesn’t mean that suddenly women were free to do whatever they wished. There was still strong societal pressure to get married and raise children as a woman’s primary occupation. The media, at the time, pushed the ideal of the nuclear family. The United State's government got involved pushing the ideal of the nuclear family as well, in contrast to the collectivization ideal of the USSR's society. This was the period of the Cold War, the space race and the stand off between America’s free-market capitalism and the Soviet Unions' communism. No one truly knew, at this time, who would come out on top or even if we could avoid a nuclear conflict with each other. Weirdly, the stand-off included how families were organized in both societies. 

The television sitcom reflected this view of the ideal American family structure too. We could be here all day talking about all of them, but I don’t feel like doing that, so I’ll just mention one of my favorites. In 1955, the year Florence began her political career, I Love Lucy was the second most watched primetime tv program in the country. If you aren’t familiar, the show follows the adventures of Lucy Ricardo, played by Lucille Ball, her husband and another couple that share their apartment building. Many of Lucy’s adventures involve trying to get into showbiz, often by getting onstage with her singer and performer husband, Ricky. But, at it’s heart, the show is a domestic comedy about the life of a 1950s idealized nuclear family. And I’m not saying that to knock it, its still one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time, has a lot of heart and humor that holds up today if you allow for the portrayal of Lucy as a traditional housewife first, and an independent woman second.

Lucille Ball and Florence Willett were both extremely talented and dedicated women walking the tightrope between what was expected of them and what they themselves wanted to do. Despite being a savvy actress and businesswoman, Ball created a character and a show that would, in parts, uphold that ideal of the middleclass housewife and nuclear family. Yes, Lucy Ricardo’s desire for fame is subversive of that ideal but Lucy, although frustrated and sometimes whiny, remains determined and is never shown as unhappy or rejecting her life with Ricky and their son Little Ricky.

Florence seems to have had to downplay her ambition and sometimes, even her competence. In an article covering her election in 1955, she is careful to note that her husband signed off on her running for office. She also states many times in her mayoral career that the job only takes about 20 hours a week and she still finds the time to cook, clean and decorate- implying that the job was entirely secondary to being a traditional wife and mother. In 1955, her youngest child was about 9 years old, so she couldn’t be seen entirely as abandoning young children at home. And, during her last year as mayor, she had many photo-ops with her grandson, driving home the point that her children were older and had children of their own, so it was “okay” for her to be mayor.

It’s hard not to picture Jackie Kennedy, who was also scrutinized by the public in a similar way, but with obviously much more pressure. People turned Jackie into an icon of ideal American womanhood, from what she wore and how she dressed to what she served on her table. In our local version, Florence Willet’s perfectly tailored skirt suits, coiffed hair, gloves and hats were also an adherence to an ideal and possibly a statement against the growing counter-culture that threatened to undermine it. This was the 1960s, and a groundswell of young Americans were pushing a new set of social norms about identity, roles and appearance. Was Florence deliberately making a statement about values and tradition? Perhaps not, we all behave everyday in ways that are subconscious and automatic but do broadcast messages to those around us. We are all constantly taking in the social messages that surround us. Sometimes, we take those in without a second thought, and others we might stop and question.

And just to add even more nuance to an already fairly complicated picture of America in the 1960s: it wasn’t just that women from the middle class were redefining their roles in society. The Civil Rights Movement was changing the very landscape that those women could be found in, as the culture was changing for men and women alike. On June 23, 1963, the largest march for Civil Rights up to that point was held in Detroit. At this march, Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave an early version of his “I have a dream” speech and the between 125,000 and 160,000 participants protested against the segregation and inequality Black Americans faced both in the north and the south. Redlining, the practice of banks not supplying mortgages to majority non-white neighborhoods deemed as more “risky” and outlined in red on their maps, and deed restrictions prohibiting homes from being sold to non-white buyers were not made illegal until the latter 1960s. But even before then, Black Americans and Americans of color pushed back and moved into white suburbs, often facing intense backlash from their neighbors.

So Florence “fitting comfortably into Detroit suburbia” wasn’t just a statement about her gender role identity, but also a media glorification of the dominant white culture and its values. It’s tempting to boil down Florence’s political accomplishments to the simple narrative of her being the first woman to become Birmingham mayor. But, there’s a lot more context to consider to understand what that means.

Florence didn’t stop serving her community after 1963, she was involved with numerous non-profits and charities until her death in 2002.

Florence “Twink” Willett didn’t start out with political ambitions, she just wanted to fix a darn road. Which is something I think we can all relate to. She built on the foundation that women like Martha Baldwin, Hope Halgren Lewis and others had laid down as far back as the 1870s. In her last year as Mayor, two more women were running for the city commission in Birmingham and women haven’t stopped since then. It’s currently July 2026 and Birmingham’s mayor is a woman named Therese Longe, who succeeded female mayor Elaine McLain.

Join us next time for our last episode of this season where we go back to a time when clowns weren’t the stuff of serial killers or terrifying novels and movies and when one clown from Birmingham ruled the local airwaves. We’ll dive into the life of Clare Cummings and his alter-ego, Milky the Clown. The secret password is Twin Pines.

I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos and other documents related to Florence Willett, check out our website, the link is in the shownotes. For questions, comments and episode suggestions, feel free to reach us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.