For those of you who don't know me, my name is Rebecca, and I work with Elizabeth Sackler at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, and we provide additional support to the Sackler Center for Feminist Art and its wonderful staff here at the museum. And I'm absolutely thrilled today to welcome and introduce Serena Mary, who has recently published the book, Reasoning from Race, Feminism, Law and the Civil Rights Revolution, and it's a book I thoroughly enjoyed. I recommend you pick it up. It's wonderful. So the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art opened in 2007. It's an exhibition and education facility dedicated to the past, present, and future of feminist art. As a permanent home of the iconic work, The Dinner Party, by Judy Chicago, the center strives to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions to educate new generations about the meaning of feminist art and to maintain a dynamic learning facility and present feminism in an approachable and relevant way. The Feminist Gallery, which currently features Eva Hesse Specter's 1960, is only one piece of the center's program. At its core, it's a space for open and free discourse conversations and the exchange of ideas. Dr. Sackler could not be here today because of an ongoing health issue, but I know she's delighted to have Serena join us today at the Sackler Center. Dr. Mary's brilliant research illuminates the complex relationship between the civil rights movement and the women's movement. Her work refocuses our understanding of the connections between gender, race, and class, and with specific attention on the people who bridged these revolutions, she reveals a new model to understand historical feminism and the law. Serena Mary is a professor of law and history at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Mary's scholarship focuses on the historical impacts of progressive and conservative social movements and on legal and constitutional change. The book, Reasoning from Race, was published by Harvard University Press in 2011. She's currently at work on a new project investigating challenges to the primacy of marriage as a legal institution from the 1960s to the present. Mary is also the author of several law review articles, as well as chapters in books and collections, including civil rights stories, women and law stories, and public opinion and constitutional controversy. She is taught courses in women's legal history, social movements in the law in American history, employment, discrimination law, and family law. Prior to coming to Penn in 2006, she was a Samuel L. I, excuse me, Samuel I Goliab Fellow in legal history at the New York University School of Law. She served as a law clerk to judge Guido Calbrasi on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, an alumna of Harvard and Radcliffe College. She graduated from Yale Law School and earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale. Her dissertation received the Learner Scott Prize for the Organization of American, excuse me, from the Organization of American Historians and Yale's George Washington Eggleston Prize. Please help me welcome her. Thank you so much, and I wanted to thank Dr. Sackler and Jess Wilcox and Rebecca for being such wonderful hosts. So in February 1964, Congress was considering the most significant piece of civil rights legislation proposed in almost a century. As the bill came before the House, Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, backed by members of the National Women's Party and the few women in Congress, introduced an amendment to Title VII, the bill's employment discrimination provision. The amendment would ban discrimination based on sex alongside race, religion, and national origin. Smith, an inveterate segregationist, hoped that the sex discrimination provision would be a so-called killer amendment, dooming the Civil Rights Bill. Much of the debate in the House framed the sex amendment as protecting white Christian women of United States origin from discrimination. Martha Griffiths, Democratic Representative from Michigan, warned that white women would be last at the hiring gate if the Civil Rights Bill passed without a sex discrimination prohibition. As the amended bill went to the Senate, in stepped Polly Murray, a veteran of the Civil Rights struggle, and the architect of an emerging feminist legal renaissance. A North Carolinian descended from slaves and slave owners. Murray had attended Hunter College here in New York, graduating to Bleak Economic Prospects in 1933. After a stint at the WPA, where she befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, Murray applied to the University of North Carolina's graduate program in sociology in 1938, hoping to study race relations in one of the South's most progressive academic departments. State officials, however, pledged to build a separate Negro graduate school rather than admit Murray to UNC. Instead, she moved to Washington in the early 1940s to attend Howard University's law school. She led sit-ins in the nation's capital and fought on behalf of a black sharecropper on death row. She also excelled academically. At Howard, Murray received excellent civil rights training as well as a lesson in the evils of sexism, which she labeled Jane Crow. In 1944, Murray applied for the Rosenwald Fellowship at Harvard Law School, traditionally awarded to Howard's top graduate, which Murray was. Harvard sent a terse rejection based on her photograph and college transcript, which demonstrated that she was, quote, not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School. To Murray, the letter was a piercing reprise of her earlier correspondence with UNC officials, who had informed her that members, quote, members of your race are not admitted to the university. This blow was even more devastating, however. Harvard's rejection was, quote, a source of mild amusement to many of my male colleagues who were ardent civil rights advocates, Murray later wrote. The harsh reality was that I was a minority within a minority. Despite intervention from FDR himself, Harvard did not relent. Fast forward to 1962. Murray is pursuing her doctorate in law and serving on President Kennedy's commission on the status of women. For almost four decades, feminists have been bitterly divided over the Equal Rights Amendment to the federal Constitution, proposed in 1923 by suffragist Alice Paul. Labor advocates feared that declaring men and women formally equal would invalidate protective labor laws like minimum wage and maximum hours laws for women. The commission asks Murray, as the resident civil rights expert, to report on alternative strategies for legal and constitutional change alternatives to the ERA. The result was a pivotal and widely circulated memorandum that proposed a litigation campaign for women's rights modeled on the NAACP's successful struggle against racial segregation.  This analogy to race, Murray believed, could help expose policies that excluded women from economic and political life as pernicious and discriminatory rather than benign and protective.  But in the years since women's rights advocates had collaborated with abolitionists both before and after the Civil War, such analogies had lain mostly dormant. Why? Well, for one thing, advocates on both sides of this ERA controversy were wary of comparing race and sex. Those whose sympathies lay with labor and civil rights worried not only about the invalidation of protective labor legislation, but of the perils of comparing sex to race in an era of civil rights, defeats, and racial oppression. Meanwhile, some ERA proponents pursued opportunistic alliances with segregationists throughout the 50s and into the early 60s. So against this backdrop, Murray's analogy between race and sex bridged two important divisions. First, pursuing litigation under the 14th Amendment to the existing federal constitution circumvented this device of ERA controversy. Second, and more importantly to Murray, tying race and sex together held out the promise of overcoming the rift between the civil rights and women's movements and uniting the two movements around a common cause. So let's return now to 1964 and the debate over the sex amendment to Title 7 of the Civil Rights Bill. With segregationists and Congress women on one side and civil rights advocates on the other, Murray wrote another pivotal memo. In response to the argument that omitting the sex amendment would profit African Americans at white women's expense, Murray offered a very different vision. What is more likely to happen, she wrote, is that in accordance with the prevailing patterns of employment, both Negro and white women will share a common fate of discrimination. Title 7 without the sex amendment would benefit Negro males primarily and thus offer genuine equality of opportunity to only half of the potential Negro workforce. Armed with these arguments, which placed Black women at the center of civil rights advocacy, Murray and her allies succeeded in saving the sex amendment. So Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 severed this opportunistic alliance between feminists and segregationists. And by the end of the decade, feminists had more or less united around the Equal Rights Amendment. But even as women's advocates increasingly found common ground, they still had two important audiences to convince. The civil rights establishment and legal decision makers, the lawmakers, judges and agency officials who support they needed to achieve the transformative changes they sought. A major obstacle standing in Pauli Murray's way was the ethos expressed in the 1965 Moynihan report. Moynihan diagnosed in America's urban ghettos a vicious cycle of poverty and instability. The Moynihan report catalogued the symptoms of this decay. A quarter of marriages dissolved, a quarter of births illegitimate, a quarter of Negro families headed by women and a quote startling increase in welfare dependency. Moynihan traced what he called this tangle of pathology to what he referred to as the matriarchal structure of Black communities. Now, though many critics objected to Moynihan's unflattering portrait of Black families, his report did reflect a liberal consensus at this time that employment opportunity for African American men to restore them to their proper role as heads of household was the key to racial progress. Pauli Murray and other Black feminists, including Eileen Hernandez, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Patricia Roberts Harris fought back. They argued that rather than emulating the sort of white middle class male breadwinner female homemaker model, Black women and men should pioneer egalitarian relationships that would serve as a model to white families. As feminists pressed their case in the halls of government and in the streets, civil rights advocates began to recognize that women, especially white women, commanded a strength in numbers and potential political power that narrated a civil rights feminist alliance. By 1973, the feminist cause had won many civil rights converts and the category that's so familiar to us today, the category women and minorities unthinkable just a few years earlier had entered the American political lexicon. Meanwhile, in the early 1970s, a young white feminist lawyer took up the fight for egalitarian male female partnerships through the 14th Amendment litigation campaign that Pauli Murray had proposed a decade earlier. She was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a native of Brooklyn. Born two decades after Murray, Ginsburg was part of the first wave of women to attend Harvard Law School in the 1950s. She eventually transferred to Columbia where she graduated at the top of her class to limited job prospects. As she put it, being a woman, a mother and a Jew was just too much for most judges and law firms. Indeed, when she applied for a position at one of New York's most progressive firms, Paul Weiss in the mid 50s, Ginsburg was told that the firm already had a woman lawyer and didn't need another. The female associate turned out to be Pauli Murray. In 1963, Ginsburg became only the 20th woman in the United States to hold a law professorship when she joined the Rutgers faculty. She began as a scholar of comparative law and civil procedure with a particular focus on Sweden. But in 1968, a group of female law students asked her to teach a course on women in the law.  Now at first, Ginsburg's constitutional strategy relied heavily on the race sex analogy that Murray had pioneered. She argued to the Supreme Court in a series of early 70s cases that laws that distinguished between men and women should be subject to the same strict constitutional scrutiny as race-based legal classifications. This argument reached a tie watermark in a 1973 case called Frontiero versus Richardson. Sharon Frontiero, an Air Force lieutenant, challenged a law that provided a housing allowance and other benefits to all service men, but to service women only if they could prove that their husbands were dependent upon them for more of more than half of their income. Comparing sex to race helped judges and others to perceive formerly routine legal distinctions between men and women as wrongful and discriminatory rather than as a natural reflection of innate biological differences. In Frontiero versus Richardson, Justice William Brennan's plurality opinion embraced a race sex analogy. A solid majority of the Supreme Court justices were persuaded by the core argument that Professor Ginsberg was advancing, that the government could not presume a male breadwinner, female homemaker, family structure, and thereby penalize women and men who stepped outside these traditional roles. By 1973, anti- discrimination law incorporated analogies between race and sex to an unprecedented degree. These analogies provided a common language and strategy for feminist legal activism. They helped to convince skeptical civil rights advocates of the benefits of coalition and helped to persuade legal decision makers to see sex inequality as a problem that needed to be addressed. African-American feminists in particular reasoned from race as part of a larger effort to resist the imposition of patriarchal family structure as a panacea for poverty and racial inequality. But for all of its benefits, this analogy-based strategy proved double-edged. Ginsberg came up one vote short of the strict scrutiny standard she was seeking. Justice Lewis Powell couched his reluctance to endorse strict scrutiny for sex classifications in terms of democratic legitimacy, noting that the Equal Rights Amendment was still pending before the states, and so the court should step forward and enacted by judicial fiat. But his personal papers actually reveal that Justice Powell's reluctance to join Justice Brennan's opinion may have had more to do with his deep and enduring reluctance to endorse these parallels between race and sex discrimination. He wrote privately to Brennan, I see no analogy between the type of discrimination which the black race suffered and that now has started with respect to women. In another memo he noted that, quote, women certainly have not been treated as fungible with men, thank God. Yet the reasons for different treatment have in no way resembled the purposeful and invidious discrimination directed against blacks and aliens, meaning foreign citizens. So in retrospect, 1973 was both the high watermark of race-sex parallelism and a moment suffused with hints of the hazards that lay ahead. So reasoning from race had just begun to pay political dividends when economic and political upheaval threatened to obliterate the hard-won gains of the category women and minorities. The recession of 1974 and 75 deepened resistance to aggressive enforcement of equal employment opportunity policies.   The polarization effect cannot be underestimated, declared Eleanor Holmes Norton from her civil rights post here in New York, where budget cuts had eliminated one-third to one-half of city jobs held by white women and people of color. Former national organization for women president Eileen Hernandez warned her colleagues that affirmative action and other remedies for discrimination only newly established would be very much under fire in the years ahead. Norton and Hernandez were right. The politics of scarcity fractured the already fragile democratic coalition which had depended upon economic prosperity and tenuous inter-regional and interracial alliances. These tensions helped conservatives frame the civil rights revolution as too much too fast. Opposition to government intervention and race relations swelled in the 1970s. One legal scholar identified 1974 as the year when color blindness overtook anti-discrimination law. As courts attempted, quote, to make the problem of racial discrimination go away by announcing that it had been solved. The efficacy of reasoning from race of analogies between sex and race inequality depended upon a robust conception of civil rights. Analogies to race became increasingly problematic as Americans entertained second thoughts about remedy and racial injustice. So as a result of all this, in the mid-70s, feminists confronted a series of crises that made analogies between race and sex both politically and legally problematic. These crises took a lot of different forms. I'm going to focus on the way that conservatives used race-sex analogies against feminists. And in particular, on the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Stuart Schlafly. So apart from its political valence, Schlafly's life and career would have been the enemy of many a feminist. After turning down a full scholarship to a local Catholic women's college, Phyllis Stuart earned her way through Washington University in St. Louis by working eight-hour night shifts testing firearms in the munition factory during World War II. Columbia, Radcliffe and Wellesley all offered her financial aid for graduate study. She chose Radcliffe and so impressed her professors that one offered to sponsor her application to Harvard Law School. The fact that Harvard did not admit women in the mid-40s apparently did not deter Stuart, but the steep cost of legal education did. She headed to Washington to seek a job in the federal government. Eventually, Stuart found work in the private sector with the American Enterprise Association, the precursor to the American Enterprise Institute, and her career in conservative politics was underway. During the next several decades, Stuart married attorney Fred Schlafly and moved to Illinois, wrote A Choice Not an Echo, the book that helped launch Barry Goldwater's presidential candidacy, became a voice for anti-communism and aggressive nuclear preparedness and earned a law degree. Eventually, she helped lead a movement to transform the Republican Party.  Hers was a remarkably egalitarian marriage to a man who supported and encouraged her activism. Despite a rigorous schedule of public speaking, writing, and traveling, Schlafly raised six children and taught each of them to read, a feat that she touted as her most cherished accomplishment. Schlafly spent most of the 70s in an all-out effort to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, part of a wide-ranging crusade against feminism and liberalism. Now, for Schlafly, the race sex analogy became a convenient shorthand for everything that was wrong with the ERA and with feminism more generally. Schlafly's model, Positive Women, she wrote a book called The Power of the Positive Women, published in 1977. Her Positive Women rejected the argument that sex discrimination should be treated the same as race discrimination. She predicted that the consequences of reasoning from race would be dire. She foresaw the integration of military combat, athletic teams, restrooms and prisons, and presently the legalization of same-sex marriage.  Schlafly had excoriated affirmative action for women as a threat to the American family and its traditional division of labor. She chastised women's livers for, quote, trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career by convincing them that they were second-class citizens and abject slaves. Feminist Schlafly wrote, are promoting free sex instead of the slavery of marriage. They are promoting federal daycare centers for babies instead of homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families. Schlafly professed to believe an equal employment opportunity for men and women, but she denounced equal employment laws and the activists who promoted them charging that they undermine the political economy of the family. She said that rules prohibiting employers from considering sex and marital status was cruel and clear and cruel discrimination against a husband and father trying to support his family. She called for an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to authorize employers to give preference to the principal wager in each family and complained that affirmative action infringed on a husband's right and ability to fulfill his role as provider and on the right of his wife to be a full-time homemaker. Women, Schlafly argued, should be grateful to serve spouses rather than employers. She wrote, if you complain about servitude to a husband, servitude to a boss will be more intolerable. According to Schlafly, workplace gender integration was partly to blame for the demise of sexual morality and marital fidelity. She quoted one police chief as saying, quote, after we put 11 women on the street, three of the four married women among them subsequently filed for divorce, and four of the men who had been teamed with the women also started divorce proceedings. If you put two women together in a squad car, they fight. If you put a male and a female together from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., they fornicate. Adultery, illegitimacy, and broken homes were the inevitable result of affirmative action, she contended. So Schlafly's critique focused on sex-based affirmative action rather than race-based policies. It would have been more difficult for Schlafly to argue that affirmative action for African American men undermined the male-bren-winner female-homemaker model. Or that Hispanic men, for example, should or did choose lower-paying jobs because they wished instead to fulfill domestic responsibilities. The possibilities for interracial sex in integrated work settings were more likely targets of conservative reaction. But mainstream activists generally avoided such lightning rods by the mid-70s. It was much easier to argue that women were weaker than men, that they voluntarily chose low-paying, low-satis jobs, and that their entry into the workplace would disrupt sexual mores. It was easier to do this than it would have been to contend the same for men of color. Focusing on affirmative action for women allowed cultural conservatives, particularly women like Schlafly, to make arguments against cultural change that were no longer acceptable when deployed against racial integration. Schlafly often referred to affirmative action policies that covered both women and minority men without distinguishing between them. So in an inversion of feminist argument that equal access to jobs and training would help women to achieve economic independence and self-sufficiency, Schlafly associated equal employment opportunity with a rise in welfare dependency. Job preferences, she said, meant that, quote, more people go on welfare, which in turn increases the taxes that all of us must pay. But when she mentioned race explicitly, Schlafly usually cited others.  The result will be untenable for all thinking people. Chronically, cultural conservative arguments against affirmative action for women resembled the Moynihan model that had influenced so many liberals in the 60s and 70s. In Schlafly's narrative, the beleaguered man was presumably white and opposed to government intervention. In Moynihan's account of a decade earlier, the burden of female empowerment rested on the shoulders of African-American men who had a prior claim on government assistance. Nevertheless, the moral of these stories was similar. Equal employment and affirmative action for women threatened to emasculate men and to unfairly penalize spouses who conformed traditional gender roles. According to cultural conservatives, these roles were the only means of maintaining economic security for white families. Liberals of an earlier era had seen affirmative action for African-American men as crucial to restoring stability in Americans' public and private lives. In the 70s, conservatives regarded all affirmative action as a threat to family survival. Schlafly recast criticism of the Civil Rights Revolution as anti-feminist critique. She warned in 1976, quote, the agitating women's-live lawyers are following the exact same pattern of bureaucratic regulation and court litigation as the civil rights lawyers have done. The analogy was damning indeed since the ERA's foes held federal courts responsible for nearly all of America's social ills. Civil rights rulings in the areas of forced busing, reverse discrimination, state's rights, and the rights of criminal defendants as well as abortion, school prayer, and national security foreshadowed expansive judicial interpretations of the Equal Rights Amendment. Perhaps most damning, Schlafly warned that reasoning from race would lead down a slippery slope toward homosexual rights.  Schlafly was prescient, although many of the gay rights advocates' arguments she foreshadowed did not become prominent until decades later. In the meantime, gunshot ERA proponents usually denied that the amendment would mandate same-sex marriage, rejecting the view that gay rights inevitably followed from sex equality. Schlafly's race-sex analogies not only countered feminism, but shaped its contours. Now, feminists did not stand idly by while conservatives turned race-sex analogies against them. In the mid to late 70s, they reconfigured their arguments to accommodate changing political and legal conditions. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for instance, successfully persuaded the Supreme Court to distinguish between sex-based classifications that harmed women and those that had the genuine purpose and effect of helping women to achieve greater economic independence and opportunity. Supreme Court finally got it in a rather obscure case called Califano versus Webster, which identified a constitutional difference between discriminatory classifications and genuine affirmative action, a distinction that the justices were increasingly reluctant to draw in the race context. They were becoming much more skeptical of race-based affirmative action, even if benignly intended. Ginsburg immediately seized upon the Webster case as a model for thinking about race-based affirmative action. She began to advance a sort of reverse race-sex parallel. The Webster opinion contained what legal scholars call an anti-subordination principle. It focused on whether the policy in question perpetuated historic discrimination against a disadvantaged group or instead was genuinely designed to address past discrimination. The sex equality cases were relatively unconcerned about the burden that such policies imposed on men. Rather, they focused on whether women were stigmatized or degraded. And finally and perhaps most importantly, Webster and the other sex equality cases suggested that general life societal discrimination was an adequate justification for affirmative action. You shouldn't need to show that a particular employer or university had engaged in formal discrimination in order to enact an affirmative action program. This reverse race-sex parallel played an important role in the federal government's brief in a high-profile case that came before the Supreme Court in 1978. In Regents of the University of California versus Bakke, Alan Bakke's challenge to UC Davis Medical School's affirmative action program, Ginsburg argued that the court should use Webster and the other sex equality cases, many of which she had litigated, as a model for thinking about race-based affirmative action. But just as he had in Frontiero versus Richardson, the case that I talked about earlier, Justice Powell denied feminists their majority. Powell's opinion for the court drew on his long-standing conviction that sex and race discrimination were fundamentally different. Race-based classifications, he wrote, have a lengthy and tragic history that gender-based classifications do not share. Of course, race and sex were much more intertwined than Justice Powell recognized. Reading court opinions might lead one to believe that race and sex were two separate categories, perhaps analogous, perhaps not. Polly Murray knew better and African-American women and their lawyers carried on her tradition in a number of 1970s cases, many of which have been lost to history. One such case was Katie May Andrews lawsuit against the school district of rural Drew, Mississippi. Katie May Andrews was 22 when she applied for a teacher's aid position in the Drew, Mississippi schools in 1972. Andrews was a local success story in the Mississippi Delta Sunflower County. She had finished college after giving birth to a child while still in her teens. Andrews was overqualified for the teacher's aid position, but the school district's new superintendent, George F. Petty, had instituted a rule banning the employment of unmarried parents in any position involving contact with students. When school officials discovered that Andrews had a child and no husband, she was denied the job. At least four other women also lost their jobs or the opportunity to apply for teaching positions because they had so-called illegitimate children. Andrews found a lawyer, Charles Victor McTeer, fresh out of law school at Rutgers and new to Mississippi to file a suit in federal district court in Greenville, Mississippi. Many of school districts around the country that prior to the early 70s refused to employ unwed mothers as teachers. But in Drew, this rule was enforced against a backdrop of civil rights backlash. Andrews and the four other women denied employment were African Americans. The superintendent and other administrators who enforced the rule were white, as was the married woman hired in Andrews' stead. Resistance to segregation in Drew and the surrounding towns was fierce. In the immediate wake of desegregation orders in the late 60s, whites had decamped to private segregation academies but increased their control over public school administration. Southern states had long used morals regulation as a weapon in defense of white supremacy. Petty's rule against hiring unmarried mothers followed this tradition by pursuing by superficially neutral means what can no longer be achieved by law. Only black women were affected by the policy. Young white women who became pregnant before marriage traditionally were sent to homes for unwed mothers and then relinquished their children for adoption. But neither of these options were available to most African American women who expected to raise their nonmarital children often with the help of extended family. Knowledge about and access to family planning remain limited in rural black communities and in towns like Drew recorded nonmarital birth occurred almost exclusively among black women. Superintendent Petty claimed to be concerned about a rise in what he called schoolgirl pregnancies. He justified his rule by arguing that unwed mothers were poor role models for children. But to Drew's African American community his rule was clearly part and parcel of a campaign to forestall integration. Katie May Andrews lawyer Vic McTeer had grown up in a black middle class neighborhood in Baltimore and he came to Mississippi from Rutgers where his mentor was Morty Stavis of the Center for Constitutional Rights here in New York. He was 24 years old and Andrews was his very first client. McTeer's opponents in contrast were seasoned defenders of southern states and localities. The school district's attorney Champ Churny was the son-in-law of segregationist Mississippi Senator James Eastland. He called as an expert witness Ernest Vandenhoog a prominent defender of segregation in the 1950s. But McTeer was not to be outdone. He used his Rutgers and civil rights connections to bring Ronda Copeland and other feminist lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights into the case. He also secured the testimony of two civil rights luminaries the social psychologist Kenneth Clark of Brown versus Board of Education Dahl Studies fame and Fannie Lou Hamer also a civil rights icon. Mrs. Hamer's testimony in particular became a lesson in race, gender, and political economy. She condemned a policy that prevented young black women from achieving economic independence through gainful through education and gainful employment. These young women are not really on trial she testified. You are trying all of us because when you say we are lifting ourselves up and you tell us to get off of welfare then when people try to go to school to get off of welfare to support themselves this is another way of knocking them down. Mrs. Hamer also debunked the notion that extramarital sexual relations occurred more frequently among African Americans. If Petty's rule truly applied equally to blacks and whites and to men and women she said quote when you get back to Drew tonight lock up the doors there won't be any school. Clark's testimony emphasized not so much the racial motivation behind the policy as was his expertise that he had often invoked in other cases but he rather emphasized the sexual subordination of women. Clark called Petty's policy part of quote a long history of discrimination against females in matters of sex and sexual behavior designed to subordinate females to an essentially inferior role. Now Andrews had filed suit at the peak of the law's efficacy for addressing equality claims the Supreme Court in the early 70s was newly receptive to sex discrimination and abortion rights cases. Roe versus Wade had just come down and Ruth Bader Ginsburg had just argued frontier versus Richardson in the Supreme Court. Legislative amendments had made Title VII applicable to public employment. Several lower courts had invalidated mandatory maternity leaves and other pregnancy-based discrimination. Some judges were starting to define race discrimination more expansively to include not only intentional discrimination but also policies that had a disparate impact on a disadvantaged racial group. And the Supreme Court was for the first time looking skeptically at laws that classified children based on their parents' marital status in the so-called illegitimacy cases. Toronto Copeland and the Feminists of the Center for Constitutional Rights Andrews was an ideal case. Sex discrimination, reproductive rights and racial equality were often separate in constitutional law and feminist advocacy. The Andrews case combined these issues in one package. Feminists made ambitious constitutional arguments in Andrews. They argued that a policy that had such a disproportionate impact on African-Americans was per se unconstitutional regardless of the intent behind the policy. Although in this case the intent was pretty clear. They emphasized how the school district's policy inevitably punished women for behavior that both men and women engaged in, namely extramarital sex. And the plaintiffs also made reproductive freedom arguments. The Feminists of the Center for Constitutional Rights were already deeply involved in abortion rights litigation. And they argued that the Andrews case implicated the flip side of the abortion coin, the right to bear children without losing one's livelihood. And indeed, both Katie Bay Andrews and Fannie Lou Hamer were opponents of abortion and expressed this during their testimony. Jan Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights explained, quote, we are arguing that all women should have the freedom to choose whatever the choice is to bear the child or to abort. Katie May Andrews won her case in the district court and the school district appealed all the way to the Supreme Court where her case was argued by Vic McTeer and Rhonda Copeland in 1976. But the case was dismissed for procedural reasons before the Supreme Court ever issued an opinion. And as a result it's been largely forgotten. Most of the sexy quality cases that reached the Supreme Court in the 70s and became part of the sort of constitutional canon featured white plaintiffs often married couples or widowers seeking to equalize the benefits of marriage. Andrews instead featured African American plaintiffs challenging a policy deeply intertwined with white supremacy and with a history of punitive measures that subordinated black women and limited their reproductive autonomy and their ability to earn fair compensation for their labor.  In many ways then Katie May Andrews case was more typical than not. So as it happens Miss Andrews had married by the time her case reached the Supreme Court and Mrs. Katie May Andrews Peacock served as a beloved teacher and librarian in the Mississippi public schools until her death in 2009. So by 1977 an assertive and inclusive brand of feminism was in the air. As feminists gathered for the International Women's Year National Convention in Houston they fought to dispel depictions of the women's movement as monochromatic upper middle class and narrow in its aspirations. First ladies Lady Bird Johnson Betty Ford and Rosalind Carter joined women from across the nation from all walks of life. Women of color asserted their place in the feminist movement uniting for the first time on a national scale overwhelming majorities of the conference participants embraced the ERA Medicaid funding for abortion and lesbian rights. The political climate too seemed promising. Democrats controlled the White House and Congress after eight years of Republican presidents and divided government. Carter promised he would be to women's rights what LBJ had been to civil rights he pledged to appoint women to high office to fight for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and to fund daycare programs. Less than four years later feminists were reeling. Carter's presidency had been a colossal disappointment. Ronald Reagan's victory in 1980 was an even more devastating blow. Reagan's triumph offered in an ushered in a civil rights counter-revolution that threatened to undercut the fragile advances women and minorities had won. Supreme Court decisions ratified a narrow vision of sex equality and the ERA fizzled. But the new era proved far from an unmitigated catastrophe. As conservatives made anti-feminism an important front in their battle for political supremacy they helped galvanize feminists and actually strengthened ties among advocates for women people of color and the poor. The first women on the courts Justice Sandra Day O'Connor salvaged significant feminist constitutional gains and the ERA's defeat arguably proved liberating as well as demoralizing to advocates. Even so though by the early 1980s the analogies between race and sex pioneered by African-American feminists in the name of unity became the targets of scathing critique from a new generation that emphasized differences between men and women and among women. Reasoning from race seemed like a substantive and strategic failure but the reality was far more complicated. So Polly Murray followed feminists encounters with the law from the pulpit. In 1973 she had left her hard won tenured position at Brandeis University to enter seminary and fulfilled her vocation in the church. In a 1977 ceremony at Washington's National Cathedral Murray became the first African-American female priest in the Episcopal Church. After her inaugural sermon delivered in the Chapel Hill Sanctuary where her enslaved great-grandmother had been baptized more than a century earlier Murray offered a prayer for the ERA's speedy passage. She continued to speak and write about race, sex, and the law moving smoothly from statutory and constitutional text to scripture and from legal to religious doctrine. After the ERA failed more or less for good in 1983 Murray wrote to feminist leaders to propose a new human rights amendment that she said would encompass all downtrodden, weak, and subordinate groups and allow all minorities to come together in a coalition. But the time for constitutional amendment had passed. Many advocates believed that feminists had run all the social change they could from the federal constitution and looked primarily to other venues like legislation, lobbying, state constitutional litigation, and local activism. In the coming years feminists would defend their gains in court and focus on new avenues of legal change in diverse areas from violence against women to pay equity to family leave to reproductive freedom. They convinced the Supreme Court to recognize sexual harassment as a violation of the law and to permit employers to engage in voluntary affirmative action for women. They struggled to form coalitions in the face of difference to sustain a progressive vision in a conservative era. It's charged then and since that feminists thought a narrow version of formal equality in the 1970s based on a sort of simplistic and exploitive analogy between race and sex.  Given the justices narrow conception of race discrimination, the enduring legal and social meaning ascribed to sex differences, and the erasure of the experiences of women of color, small wonder that reasoning from race seemed a discredited and bankrupt strategy. But these shortcomings reflected the constraints that feminists face more than any poverty of ambition. Ironically, by the early 80s, the substantive equality that feminists were demanding resembled the racial justice movements most expansive aspirations perhaps more than ever before. In seeking what feminists called equality in fact through disparate impact and in reuniting reproductive freedom with equality law, feminist goals mirrored those of the civil rights struggle to an unprecedented degree. But the Reagan counter-revolution made the short-term success of both movements more tenuous than ever. Civil rights and feminism converged just as the civil rights era drew to a close. Thank you. If people have questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Yeah. Yes. So at the very... You're referring to Patricia Hill Collins, Paula Giddings, and Angela Davis. I'm... And even Josie Wright. Yes. So these are voices that are emerging right around the end of my story in the early 80s and continuing through the 90s. And I think oftentimes people... And these are scholars who are... And activists who are bringing out really key insights about what scholars now call intersectionality, the way that race and gender and class and other categories intersect in ways that are meaningful for our definitions of all of those different categories. And so what... I guess where they fit into my story is that I think to some degree not to take anything away from the insights that they provide, which are increasingly sophisticated and historically informed, there's a history to that analysis. And that's part of what I'm trying to uncover here, that there were precursors to these theories. And that, in fact, African-American feminism was played a really important formative role in what we now think of as a very white middle class women's movement. And particularly in the legal context, I think. And that's, I think, where Polly Murray comes in, that her strategies... And Eleanor Holmes-Norton is also... I didn't talk in great detail about her, but she's also, I think, a very important figure in this regard, that they're really not just people who are trying to bring several rights and feminism together, which they are, which is extremely important in trying to build coalitions, but they're also people who are really formulating some of the legal strategies that evolve over time, to be sure. But I think, in part, because we think of this period so much as being inflected by this very white middle class bias, we forget about these women's really important contributions. And so, in some ways, our characterization of feminism as so exclusive during this period is almost sort of commits the very sin that it accuses feminism of by excluding the voices of African-American women who play it such a prominent role. Does that...? Yeah. Please. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, interestingly, Sojourner Truth is actually a fairly important figure in a lot of the legal briefs that are being written in the, particularly in the early part of this period. So, and then I think, I didn't actually specifically trace where that kind of originated, but I suspect there's sort of a, there's one constitutional brief that kind of forms the basis for a lot of the briefs that come later in the early 70s. And it was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but she drew very, and gave credit to Pauli Murray and others, including Dorothy Kenyon who had worked on earlier cases. And it contains actually quite a long sort of long passages about Sojourner Truth and about the troubled alliance between abolitionism and feminism in the 19th century. And interestingly, it's not picked up by the Supreme Court at all. They just sort of talk about women and blacks as if they're two separate groups and there's not really any relationship between them. And that pretty much continues to the present day. I mean, we have no real Supreme Court decision that sort of accounts for any intersection between race and sex even now. But the other thing that I wanted to mention since you brought up Sojourner Truth is that one of the things that Pauli Murray did really throughout her career beginning in the, probably in the 1940s, but sort of accelerating in the 60s was she really wanted to rescue this history of feminist, abolitionist alliance. But also to point out how divisive it was for activists in the 19th century to separate race and sex from each other and how the ways in which many white feminists abandoned the values of abolitionism and their struggle for suffrage and the way that many abolitionists, certainly not all, and Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass are really important exceptions. Actually, it's really white abolitionists who did this, abandoned feminism if they had ever embraced it in the 19th century. She's really reaching out both to African American and white audiences in the 60s and 70s and saying, we need to avoid this mistake today. So she's actually quite historically conscious about this sort of history of troubled but important coalition between these groups. Sure, thank you. Great questions. I'm so glad you asked that. I'm so glad you asked that.  And as far as I know, he, I think, I'm trying to remember, I hope I'm not confusing him with someone else, but I think he also ended up playing a big role in President Obama's campaign. And he's a prominent figure locally as well. There's a great oral history that he did a number of years ago where he talks about this, the Andrews case, as pretty much his first client walking through the door. He's, you know, 24 years old, just out of law school and very new to Mississippi. He had moved to Mississippi largely because of his great admiration for people like Danny Lou Hamer. And he moved actually to an all-black town called Mount Bayou in Mississippi. And I can't remember if he still lives there, but I believe it's near Greenville and he lives somewhere in that area. And his daughter actually was the first African-American, definitely the first African-American woman to be mayor of Greenville. And maybe the first African-American. I'm not 100% sure about that part. And I think she may still be mayor. She was elected a few years ago and then re-elected. I'm not, I haven't kept up with her in the last year or so, but her name is Heather McTeer Hudson and she's part of the, I think it plays a major role in the National Conference of Mayors and other. So I appreciate your asking. We can come back. Yeah. There was a ban on the termination of abortion based on, termination of pregnancy based on either gender or race, discrimination. Have you heard of this? Vaguely. I'm not aware of that particular law, but but I was just sort of, what I had heard was it seemed as if it was preferred to stop the termination of pregnancies when people found out they were having a female child and so I was just, I think that was what it was before. And so to me it was interesting that these two things, grace and sex, were built together within this law. And I don't know, I just, and of course reproductive freedom comes into that as well. So I don't know, I just wonder if people might think about it having an opinion on the efficacy of that building those two together. Yeah, that's really interesting. I don't know very much about that particular instance. I, my understanding, and this is not based on any research that I've done, but just from reading these paperlings, like you have, is that those measures tend to be part of a sort of, part of a strategy by the anti-abortion movement to to place whatever limitations they can on abortion, but that they're particularly designed to reach out to communities of color and say that abortion is, and is in some sense, I don't want to put it in too strong terms, but I think these are the terms that are sometimes put as sort of a genocidal conspiracy based on race. And that's an argument that, you know, that has been made for at least since the 1960s, but possibly before that. But it's interesting. I mean, there's, there are so many different contexts in the law where race and sex are yoked together, sometimes with a lot of thought behind them and other times not, just sort of automatically. So, which is the other part of your question is there's sort of automatically grouped together and there's not a lot of, which is, which that is, I think really a quite a moderate phenomenon that, that, you know, and one that really came to fruition during the period that I'm talking about, that, you know, before that, people would not necessarily have have thought about these categories as having any comparability at all and in some sense, which is not to say they had never been compared before, certainly they had and certainly they've been compared by both sort of progressives and conservatives for a variety of purposes. But there's a lot of, and there's been a lot of, I think struggle over the years about adding sex, usually, it's usually adding sex to a race discrimination prohibition or, so for example, adding sex to hate crimes legislation. And I think today there's, even today you'll see these analogies made both in legal context and political context and sometimes they're, you know, made in a, in a sort of critical and thoughtful way and other times they're, perhaps not, but, but they're, I think still quite ubiquitous today and that was part of, part of what interested me in the, in this whole topic, in the first place was some of the more modern invocations of these analogies in various contexts like school segregation and other things. So let me tell you what we wanted to have around the recent stage of eight or nine, that there's some sort of law situation that says the father has the right to know or not know this child from a child who reaches 18 and the child may, I guess, approach the father from a letter or something that sort and then he'll decide whether he wants to know this child or not. And so this friend is rapidly feminist but watching it from a distance it seems like that the typical paradigm actually exacerbates the patriarchy because it gives a man the freedom to bear the children sort of all over the place and then decide whether at some much later date he must have responsibility. So I was just wondering and this seems like a whole new phase of ideas and I'm just wondering what are the kind of discussions in the legal world around these things and what is your opinion that it is actually helping the people or is that just complication about the 10 times? Really, really interesting question and one in which I don't have a lot of expertise. I teach family law so I teach about a lot of legal dilemmas that arise from alternative reproductive technologies like what you're talking about. Although this is actually something where in some sense forms of that particular alternative reproductive technology has been around for a while so it's not entirely new where some of the other forms are wholly new and the legal questions sort of abound about. But I think it's a fascinating question that you asked is sort of is this progress or not in the sense for feminism? And I think as your question suggested I guess I think that you're absolutely right that it can go either way very much can go either way and I think it's also the case that with respect to race it can go either way. There's a wonderful book that was published in the mid 90s by Dorothy Roberts called Killing the Black Body in which she offers a very robust critique of among other things the way race has been used and the way certain with the way people of color and low income people have been excluded from a lot of this reproductive technology. And she just recently came out with a new book in which she sort of revisits that question really only I guess 15 to 20 years later and notes that the landscape has completely changed and yet some of the some of the same questions still persist about sort of access to these technologies. Not to mention the point you bring up about how they might seem to increase women's control over their reproductive autonomy but at the same time leave open these possibilities for as you point out sort of male control over them. So I think it's not an area that I have a lot of expertise in but I think it's it's one of the areas in which one of several areas in which these questions kind of are reborn and we're sort of re-challenged to rethink I think a lot of our assumptions about about the degree to which reproductive freedom is necessarily necessarily service feminist and what we would do to make it so that it does. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Great. So so I think that my sense is that having Fannie Lou Hamer testify in that particular case was sort of an unalloyed good for the people involved in it. They were thrilled to have her and in fact the fact that she was that side that she was personally opposed to abortion in some sense I think only added credibility to the argument that they were making that that that reproductive freedom should include the right to to decline to have an abortion but I think what your question gets at is that this reflected a really important source of division within the feminist movement and it wasn't necessarily over I think it's fair to say that there were probably not a lot of African-American feminists who were opposed to abortion. I don't think Fannie Lou Hamer would have probably called herself a feminist but rather that their priorities were more in line with what were the challenges to reproductive autonomy that women of color and poor women faced which during this period were much more about involuntary sterilization and limits on their ability to reproduce and support their children than it was about their ability to have an abortion which is not to say that that African-American feminists didn't care about abortion rights or didn't care about certainly access to contraception a lot of other goals of the reproductive rights movement but what a lot of the lawyers who were involved in in the Andrews case Rhonda Copeland and Nancy Stearns and others affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York were part of they were actually all part of a a sort of interracial reproductive rights organization called the campaign against but it was against sterilization abuse the acronym was CAROSSA and there's a really interesting study of that organization and that was published a few years ago by Jennifer Nelson and they were sort of working to overcome these divisions between African-American and Latina feminists and just generally advocates for low income women and then mostly white women but not just white women but other professional women whose primary concern was about their ability to voluntarily be sterilized or voluntarily terminate their pregnancies and so one of the places where this came to a head was over federal funding for family planning which was something that feminists were theoretically in favor of but was being used in some instances in very coercive ways to convince low income women for example to be sterilized and in order to continue to receive welfare benefits and things like this so there's a lot of controversy over the Department of Health Education and Welfare's guidelines about sterilization because on the one hand there were feminists who wanted to make sure that women had access to voluntary sterilization and then there were others whose priority was really more to make sure that people weren't being involuntarily sterilized and they eventually I think came to a compromise but it was a very fraught issue that was divisive in that way both along kind of race and class lines Yeah That's the compromise Yes Yes, absolutely And you also have a private composition Definitely and that's so I talk a little bit about that and although not as much as I should in the book and and I think she my sense is that she may have seen I don't have a lot of evidence of that how she saw her role in this particular case I think to a large degree she saw herself as and she was accepted it was very interesting she was accepted as an expert by the judge in this case William Cady who had presided over racial desegregation in this school district for several years at that point and had encountered Fannie Lou Hamer in that context and had sort of developed a sort of relationship with trust with her and I don't think I don't think Mrs. Hamer actually talked about her experience with sterilization during this case but she had gone public with it quite a number of years before and had been one of the sort of prominent voices to expose the fact that these kinds of what they called Mississippi appendectomies were occurring in hospitals throughout the south where women would African American women would come to give birth and leave having been sterilized without their consent and she was one of those women so absolutely that this was a key piece of context yeah yeah yeah so I mean so there's and this is this is I don't know enough about this to really speak authoritatively about it but but this is definitely sort of the background to a lot of this controversy is that the knowledge of all the players concern that there is this kind of eugenicist history to some of to some aspects of the birth control movement and a concern that while certainly there's also been a feminist history of the birth control movement that um this kind of population control strand of birth control not be allowed to dominate the priorities of reproductive rights in this era absolutely yeah absolutely and I mean unfortunately that's true of a lot of a lot of feminist icons from that period I mean people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton who you know was involved in abolition but also you know throughout the suffrage as the suffrage movement went on increasingly made arguments based on racist and nativist ideas about you know the idea that white women should have the vote so that men of color and poor men didn't you know ruin the democracy and corrupt the government and so it is it is a it is a tension at the same time there are also I think and I think maybe it's helpful I guess part of my motivation in trying to shed more light on sort of alternative figures and women of color who participated in these feminist efforts is to kind of showcase just as there were African-American women suffragists who rejected obviously the racist components of women's suffrage of the women's suffrage movement just as there were those sorts of people there have also been you know staunch African-American advocates of and other women of color advocates of birth control and so forth that we can call upon as as I come I know it's not specifically to run around but it doesn't come from the study of politics and religion as well yeah I keep on staring at the board kind of looking at the Jewish background the Christian Protestant background the Antelope Baptist background and the Episcopalian concept so like I feel like there's a huge discussion here about the writings and politics without talking about the underlying tone of where the religion and all these women were really active when these were very active women were religiously but they didn't the discussion here doesn't really come to talk about the foundation that all these women have come from and that's like all the broken stuff out do you feel like I'm suing you to put against women as an example do you think for being ahead of so many people and their language and their courage and to do with that or do you feel like the Episcopalian who like be coming up about everything Episcopalian should obviously take that together whereas other women were fighting to separate those two views do you think those things that affect each other greatly this time or is that just both sides of you that's a great question you're absolutely right that it's not my expertise at all you know it's really hard to say because I think I mean I my sense is that Ginsburg for instance certainly felt herself to be culturally Jewish and I think had it formative experiences as a child to some degree of you know for example not being able to say kiddish for her mother and things like that sort of that that she in some sense that some of her feminism was born out of and this certainly wasn't specific to Jews by any means but just was was born out of out of some of that inequality that she experienced in that particular religious context Pauline Murray is actually a harder case for me because you know I think she's she's a religious person her whole life but it's really not so fairly late in life that it's something that she writes a lot about and kind of expresses a lot about as far as what I've seen and that may be partly because she and I didn't have time to mention this but I think it's one of the most interesting things about her biography she was very conflicted about her sexual identity growing up and particularly in her I guess 20s and 30s so in the 1940s she was at the same time that she's starting to think about you know about Jane Crow and about sex discrimination and race discrimination she's also undergoing hormone treatments and thinking about she feels that she's a man in a woman's body for a period of her life and sort of thinking about this struggle and I don't know to what extent I don't have a lot of she left her voluminous papers which are wonderful and she left all of her medical records and her struggle with her sexual identity she left all that well she's with some of it at least I guess we don't know if he left all of it she left some of that to historians to to read and it it my sense is that that that struggle shaped her legal thought and her social and political thought in some sense very subtly and not in a way that she ever expressed but perhaps as much or more than is my perception than her religious belief but then her but that religion became increasingly and as she was able to I think at some point she reconciled herself to being a woman and maybe perhaps it became easier at some point in her life to have most of her relationships be with women I don't think she ever identified herself as a lesbian but she had a lot of relationships with close relationships with women and what actually prompted her to go into the priesthood at least the way she described it was the death of her very close female friend from cancer in the early 70s and she felt she had a calling to the priesthood at that point in time she felt that she she wanted to be able to minister to her friend as she was dying and to do that for other people and it so happened that there were women attending the seminary for the first time and she was able to yeah yeah Phyllis Schlafly another interesting story I think with respect to religion she you know is Catholic and one of the primary political roles she's playing during this whole period is and particularly in the period that I'm talking about in the 70s is uniting evangelical Protestants and Catholics behind a social agenda in a way that previously would have been sort of unheard of so yeah as far as Rhonda Copeland and Eleanor Holmthorne who are in this picture I don't know anything about their religious backgrounds but it's a fascinating topic and there are some historians who are historians of religion who are looking much more deeply into these questions with respect to feminism in particular yeah yeah so it's a wonderful question and when I'm asked a lot and I feel less equipped to answer it other than honest sort of anecdotal level because that's the level at which because it's not the because the contemporary period isn't the focus of my research it's more based on sort of my own personal experience working for various organizations of various points the sense that I get is that and and I've I guess I've I guess I've seen this a little bit from both the sort of civil rights side and the feminist side but probably mostly from the feminist side that there's a real that there is a real recognition in a lot of feminist organizations that or a sort of a high value placed on including a lot of perspectives and particularly perspectives of women of color and low income women in in the work of feminist organizations you know I think with varying degrees of success I'm sure and and there's certainly I mean since this period I think there's a lot of very self-conscious coalition work that goes on and certainly you know plenty of feminists of color and organizations that are you know sort of generally feminist in scope who are working on who are working on these issues so I I mean in some sense I guess I see the contemporary context as one that that grows sort of fairly organically and logically from this period that I work on which is convenient for me to think of it that way of I don't know if that's true or not but that you know even some of the personnel is you know a lot of the people like Polly Murray were of an older generation and Ruth Bader Ginsburg of a slightly younger but still older generation many of the the young women that I you know research about this project are still around or around so very recently Rhonda Copeland is a wonderful example for instance of someone who spent her life working on you know issues that involve the intersection of race and poverty and feminism so so I think I think these legacies are alive and well and you know in varying degrees and different organizations and and causes and the agendas have moved to I mean to some degree the agendas are similar but I think there's been a shift a very appropriate shift particularly perhaps in places like New York and California toward the rights of immigrants and thinking about these issues more globally and not just as kind of domestic issues and again Rhonda Copeland actually is a great example of someone who really has expanded into the realm of international human rights in a way that's very integrated with with domestic feminism anyone else so thank you so much for that absolutely wonderful question these are the best questions I've ever gotten this has been fantastic thank you so much