Feminist, Political Activist Fought for Equal Rights

Flora M. Crater, 94, a feminist and political activist who waged a decades-long campaign to persuade Congress and the Virginia legislature to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, died of a brain tumor Feb. 1 at her daughter's home in Hockessin, Del.

Ms. Crater, founder and editor of the Woman Activist newsletter and the Almanac of Virginia Politics, led a group of women known as Crater's Raiders to lobby for the ERA during the 1970s and 1980s. She was still working for the amendment with various organizations until her death.

Although the Virginia legislature has never ratified the ERA, and a leading legislator in 1984 called equal pay for comparable work "a communist concept," Ms. Crater never gave up the fight.

"We keep continuing the fight," she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2000. "This isn't symbolic, either. You've got to remember that 35 states ratified it."

She was the first president of the National Organization for Women's Virginia chapter and was the first coordinator of the Virginia Women's Political Caucus as well as former chairman of the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

Indefatigable in her efforts to promote women's issues, Ms. Crater ran as an independent for lieutenant governor in 1973, capturing 10 percent of the vote.

The race cost her only $15,000, leading her to quip, "I got more votes for the buck than any other statewide candidate."

Four years later, inspired by the National Women's Conference in Houston, she ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate but lost.

"People tell me you can't talk about such things as collective bargaining and hope to survive in Virginia politics, but I don't believe that," she told The Washington Post at the time. "If we Democrats remain silent, we are putting ourselves in a bind, a trap, a cage. If we don't talk about the issues that are important to us and our constituency, we are not going to bring our constituency to the polls."

Flora Marina Trimmer was born April 19, 1914, in Costa Rica, near her family's home in Nicaragua. Her mother was Nicaraguan and her father was an American accountant in the sugar industry.

She lived in Cuba, New York and Washington before her family settled in Orange, a town between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville where she spent most of her childhood.

She attended Strayer College in Washington, but it wasn't until she was 67 that she graduated from college, at George Mason University.