70s Laws give ammo to Women\'s rights

When women today grapple with gender inequity they often find themselves turning to a rich 10-year-period of modern history: the 1970s. That decade, said Ariela Migdal, a senior staff attorney at today's Women's Rights Project of the ACLU, "gave us the tools for how we can continue uprooting the bias." US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the leading sex-discrimination litigators and strategists of the 1970s, says the culture was ripe for legal reforms. "There was a spirit that things were not right and they should be changed," Ginsburg told a symposium at Columbia Law School here in February. Ginsburg, hired as the first tenured woman law professor at Columbia Law School in 1972, simultaneously guided the American Civil Liberties Union Women's Rights Project, which she co-founded. In the 1970s she argued six pioneering sex discrimination cases before the then all-male U.S. Supreme Court; winning five. By 1980--the same year that Ginsburg was named a federal judge by President Jimmy Carter--the legal landscape for women's rights and opportunities had changed for the better. US courts were charged with scrutinizing at a heightened level whether laws that relied upon sex classifications or sex stereotyping violated the constitution; women used Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to crack open jobs that were previously barred. New laws were passed, too: Title IX (of the Education Act) in 1972 required equal opportunity in educational settings, and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 blocked discrimination, refusal to hire, dismissal or other negative employment sanctions based on pregnancy. All these laws are still seeing active court duty. The government, for instance, recently developed new Title IX guidelines to press colleges to establish tougher standards on campus sex assault and in November, three female workers at a North Carolina seafood factory received back pay in a settlement under Title VII and other laws of their claims that they were illegally restricted by gender to lower-paying jobs. Newsweek Broke Ground The era began in 1970 at the offices of Newsweek Magazine, where two categories of employees sat poised before typewriters. Men, who were writers. And women, who were researchers--not surprisingly, a lesser status and pay scale. This strict division began to break down only when 50 female employees, teamed with women's rights lawyers, challenged the sex-segregated jobs under Title VII. Newsweek settled the claims in 1973 and agreed to new hiring standards. Harriet S. Rabb, an attorney for female employees on the Newsweek case, now serves as vice president and general counsel of Rockefeller University in New York. She said that the magazine and other plaintiffs who stepped forward "opened those doors in the 1970s through which many fortunate and deserving women have followed." The legal pushback against sex discrimination in the singular decade of 1970s was pivotal to realigning women's role in society. Hundreds of laws and hiring practices in the United States that had quashed women's full enjoyment of equal employment, credit, housing, education, public benefits and civic participation were challenged as discriminatory and cast aside. The 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to all entities with 15 or more employees--gave women new possibilities for questioning employment bias. "The bill was opposed by many in Congress, including the Virginia representative who caused it to be amended to add sex, perhaps expecting that the addition of women workers would result in killing the bill," said Rabb. She oversaw an employment rights clinic at Columbia Law School that opened in the 1970s and breathed life into the law by helping women pursue discrimination claims.