A Timeline of
Women's Legal History in the United States
and at Georgetown University
This webpage contains a history of significant events for women in the United States regarding their experience with the law: using it, making it, practicing it as a profession, profiting or suffering from it. It ranges from 1619 to the present. The version placed on this site in March, 1998, is specialized to show key events in the history of the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Those events appear in bold. Some will be relevant to non-Georgetown students, and some won't -- caveat lector! (For the younger students using this page, that's "reader beware!"). For readers with no interest in Georgetown's history, a non-Georgetown page which contains additional non-Georgetown women's accomplishments, organizations, and other information is available here.
The page is new and still evolving. Anyone with corrections or suggestions should write to the webmistress, Professor Cunnea (who is not a Georgetown professor). This timeline is copyrighted. Anyone intending to publish more than 100 words needs to get permission, and students quoting from it should provide appropriate attribution. Webmistresses or webmasters from non-commercial sites may link to it freely without prior permission. Commercial sites must request permission!
Thanks are due to the Fellowship Program for making this project possible and enjoyable, especially the directors, Judy Lyons-Wolf and Sue Ross; the historian at the Georgetown Law Library, Laura Bedard; the historian at the main Georgetown Library, Jon Reynolds; Professor Wendy Williams of Georgetown Law, who loaned me the text of her 1994 lecture on women at Georgetown; and the other good people who provided confirmation or leads but might not want their names on the web!
Planned additions: bibliography of sources, links to other timelines affecting women; links to biography sites; links to relevant cases. Someday. Not now. But Real Soon Now!
The Centuries: 17th 18th 19th 20th
1619 A proposal to give women an equal portion in colonial lands is
rejected by the Virginia House of Burgesses.
1638 Margaret Brent, the first woman lawyer in America, arrives in
the Colony of Maryland. She was involved in over 100 court cases in Maryland
and Virginia, and was a major landowner as well. Governor Calvert chooses
her as the executor of his Will. As such, and separately on her own behalf
as a major landowner, in 1648 she formally demands a "vote and voyce" in
the Maryland Assembly -- two votes, in fact. The new Governor, Thomas Green,
denies her request.
1655 Elizabeth Key, a slave, sues for her freedom in Virginia based
on the the argument that her station in life should be determined by her
father, a free white, rather than her mother, a slave. Her attorney, William
Greensted, wins the case and marries her. Virginia reacts in 1662 by legislating
that children's status is determined by the mother's condition, slave or
free.
1692 In Salem, Massachusetts, fourteen women and six men are executed during the witch panic. Several others, including children, die in prison while awaiting trial on witchcraft charges. The panic spreads until a female relative of a colonial governor is accused, at which point the elite of the colonies begin to reconsider the wisdom of the prosecutions.
1745 In Pennsylvania, frontierswoman and poet Susanna Wright becomes
a prothonotary of the colony, enhancing her stature as a legal counselor
to her mostly illiterate neighbors, for whom she prepares wills, deeds,
indentures and other contracts. She also serves as an arbitrator in property
disputes.
1764 American patriot pamphleteer James Otis compares the submission
of the modern citizenry to the colonial agreements made by previous generations
to the legal submission of women to men, and argues that both classes ought
have the right to make their own compacts: "Are not women born as free as
men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by
nature?"
1765 Jenny Slew, a mixed-race woman about 46 years old, sues as a spinster
in Massachusetts after being kidnapped and enslaved in 1762. Through counsel,
she argues that because her mother was white, she is not subject to enslavement.
She loses at trial and wins on appeal, despite her opponent's claim that
her past marriages to slave men make her a femme covert with no
right to sue in her own name at all, whether slave or free. Ironically, she
may have escaped the civil oblivion common to married women at that time
due to a 1706 anti-miscegenation statue forbidding interracial marriages.
Future president John Adams observes one of the proceedings and notes it
in his diary.
1775 Prior to publishing his famed pamphlet "Common Sense," Thomas
Paine proposes women's rights in an article for Pennsylvania Magazine.
1776 Abigail Adams, wife of future U.S. President John Adams, writes
him an impassioned note: "[I]n the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will
be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and
be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such
unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be
tyrants if they could. If perticular care and attention is not paid to the
Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves
bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." After a
mocking response in which John calls her "saucy" and claims "[w]e know better
than to repeal our Masculine systems," Abigail answers, "I can not say that
I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace
and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining
an absolute power over Wives."
1781 Mum Bett, a slave 37 years old, wins her freedom based on the
argument that the 1780 Massachusetts constitution declares "all men are born
free and equal." Although she does not represent herself in court, she provides
her counsel with the legal theory, the first time a state constitution is
used to challenge slavery. After her success, she changes her name to Elizabeth
Freeman. Except for her co-petitioner, a man known as Brom, other Massachusetts
slaves are not freed until 1783.
1787 Women, initially permitted to vote in some areas during the colonial
period and early statehood, are systematically disenfranchised in every state
but one through a series of legislative acts beginning in 1777. New Jersey
completes the ban when woman suffrage is revoked there in 1807.
1789 Georgetown University is founded.
1797 Lucy Terry Prince of Vermont, born in Africa, enslaved in the U.S., and freed via purchase by her husband, appears in a property dispute before the U.S. Supreme Court regarding some farmland. The future governor of Vermont, Isaac Tichnor, is her attorney, but Prince presents the oral argument herself. She wins, and Justice Samuel Chase compliments her skill. She is best known to modern historians as a poet rather than as the first woman and possibly the first African-American to argue before the Supreme Court.
1831 Maria W. Miller Stewart, an African-American, is the first woman
to become a professional orator, a career she is compelled to give up after
a single year-long tour due to public disapproval of women speaking in public.
Her topics are abolition, the education and history of women, and civil rights
for African-Americans. Foreshadowing Sojourner Truth, one of Stewart's speeches
asks, "What if I am a woman?"
1839 Mississippi passes the first Married Woman's Property Act, followed
by New York in 1848. Many similar acts are passed in the next two decades,
providing women in some states with a measure of security in their own property.
The Mississippi Act is inspired by a state Supreme Court ruling in
1837, which held that Betsy Allen, a Chickasaw, could protect her property
from her white husband's creditors because Chickasaw tradition granted married
women independent property rights.
1848 Politicized by their work in the abolition movement, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organize the first women's rights convention
in Seneca Falls, New York, publishing a Declaration of Sentiments which echoes
the Declaration of Independence.
1848 The Supreme Court renders the first of several decisions in the
case of Myra Clark Gaines and her attempts to inherit her father's property
despite a suspicion of illegitimate birth. This is the first of four times
the case will be heard by the Supreme Court during the 56 years it was litigated
-- it came up again in 1851, 1861, and 1867. In at least one of these arguments,
Gaines herself gives the oral argument against Daniel Webster, and wins.
1851 Abolitionist, feminist, and former slave Sojourner Truth delivers
her famous "And Ain't I A Woman" speech at a women's rights convention in
Akron, Ohio. Now revered as a classic of American oratory, her address exposes
the hypocrisy of the 'woman on a pedestal' argument used by conservatives
to deny women civil rights.
1868 Myra Bradwell establishes the Chicago Legal News, the
foremost legal publishing house and legal newspaper in "the West," as everything
west of the eastern seaboard was then called. As early as the second issue,
she begins a column on "Law Relating to Women," calling for suffrage and
reporting on women attorneys even before such women sought formal admission
to the bar.
1869 The Chicago Legal News notes in February that one Mary
E. Magoon has her own law office in the town of North English, Iowa. Although
Magoon is not a member of that state's formal bar, such admission was often
not needed for practice at the county level. There are no records of how
many women practiced under these circumstances.
1869 Belle A. Mansfield becomes the first attorney to join the licensed
bar in the United States after she successfully passes the state examinations
in Iowa after informal study. Myra Bradwell applies to the Illinois Bar three
months later, but is rejected on grounds of her sex.
1869 Lemma Barkaloo becomes the first woman law student in the nation.
She does not complete her degree at the Law Department of Washington University
in St. Louis, but chooses to take the Missouri bar after one year of study.
She passes, and begins practicing in 1870, just months before her death at
approximately age 22 of typhoid fever.
1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found the National
Woman Suffrage Association. Lucy Stone forms the American Woman Suffrage
Association.
1869 The Wyoming Territory grants suffrage to women, followed in 1870
by the Utah Territory. Colorado, in 1893, and Idaho, in 1896, were the next
jurisdictions to grant women the vote. No other states would do so until
a flurry of five Western states enacted woman suffrage between 1910 -- 1912.
1870 The Law Department of Georgetown University begins classes
in the fall.
1870 Ada Kepley, the first woman to earn a formal law degree in the
U.S., graduates with an LL.B. from Union College of Law in Chicago, now known
as Northwestern University.
1870 Esther McQuigg Morris becomes the first woman judge in the country
when she is appointed justice of the peace in a mining town in Wyoming. Her
predecessor there resigned his position to protest woman suffrage in Wyoming,
which Morris had helped secure.
1871 Belva Ann Lockwood matriculates at the new National University
Law School after being rejected by the law schools at Georgetown University,
Howard University, and Columbian College. The latter school becomes George
Washington University in 1904 by an Act of Congress, and absorbs National
fifty years later. George Washington University now honors the alumna its
earliest incarnation rejected, putting Lockwood's statue on prominent display
in the law library since at least the 1970's to the present.
1872 Victoria Claflin Woodhull is the first woman to declare for the
United States Presidency. She founds the Equal Rights Party, with a platform
based on principles of socialism and sexual and racial equality drafted in
part by Belva Lockwood. In addition to being female, Woodhull is only 34
at the time, and would not be the Constitutionally-required 35 until September
of 1873. Due to the age issue, she and her running mate, Frederick Douglass,
are denied placement on the ballot.
1872 Arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment permits it, Susan B. Anthony
attempts to vote in the presidential election in Rochester, New York. She
is arrested, convicted, and fined. Sojourner Truth attempts to vote in Grand
Rapids, Michigan, but is refused a ballot and sent away from the polling
place. Victoria Woodhull had attempted to vote in a lesser election in 1871,
also without success.
1872 Charlotte Ray becomes the first woman admitted to the Bar in the District of Columbia, as well as the first African-American woman to be a member of the formal bar anywhere in the U.S. She opens a solo practice in Washington specializing in real estate law, but according to Kate Kane Rossi, another early woman attorney, "although a lawyer of decided ability, on account of prejudice [Ray] was not able to obtain sufficient legal business and had to give up . . . active practice." Ray remains involved in the suffrage cause and returns to her first career, teaching, in New York in 1879.
1873 In Bradwell v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that states
may statutorily deny women the right to practice law. In 1872, while the
Bradwell case is pending, Illinois passes a bill drafted by Alta M. Hulett
which provides that no person can be excluded from any occupation, profession,
or employment because of sex. Hulett, only 19, becomes Illinois' first woman
lawyer. Bradwell, still waiting on the U.S. Supreme Court decision, does
not re-apply and is deeply disappointed when the Court's decision comes down
upholding the discriminatory interpretation of Illinois' previous law. Bradwell
is finally licensed in 1890, when the state supreme court, on its own motion,
reconsiders her 1869 application and grants the license nunc pro tunc,
backdating its effect to the original date. The U.S. Supreme Court,
acting on the motion of hte the U.S. Attorney General, follows suit in 1892.
Bradwell, already mortally ill with cancer at the time of these gestures,
dies in 1894.
1874 Journalist and suffragist Lillie Devereux Blake publishes
Fettered For Life, a novel dramatizing the legal disadvantages of
American women. She lobbies Congress and state legislatures for woman suffrage,
education, and property rights.
1875 In Minor v. Happersett, the U.S. Supreme Court rules definitively
that the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges and immunities clause does not
have the effect of extending suffrage to women.
1878 Known as the "Anthony Amendment," the Women's Suffrage Amendment
is introduced in Congress, beginning four decades of intense federal lobbying
and conflict.
1879 The U.S. Supreme Court is compelled to admit Belva Ann Lockwood
to its bar, after rejecting her 1876 application on the grounds of "custom."
Lockwood, who held the requisite lower court license from the District of
Columbia, DC., obtained Congressional legislation early in 1879 establishing
that women who practice law must have access to even the highest court.
1879 In Strauder v. West Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that
the Fourteenth Amendment forbids a state to bar men from jury pools based
on race or color, but "[i]t may confine the selection to males, to freeholders,
to citizens, to persons within certain ages, or to persons having educational
qualifications. We do not believe the Fourteenth Amendment was ever intended
to prohibit this." In 1961, the Court still relies on this case to continue
denying women the right to serve on juries.
1880 Georgetown University admits two female students to the
School of Medicine. They go on to graduate from the Women's Medical College
of Philadelphia. Jeannette Sumner and Annie Rice returned to Washington after
completing their medical education and established the first dispensary to
serve women and children in poverty.
1884 Belva Ann Lockwood leads a revival of the dormant Equal Rights
Party as part of her candidacy for U.S. President. With running mate Marietta
Snow, editor of The Women's Herald of Industry, Lockwood wins over
4,000 votes in six states. Indiana unsuccessfully tries to switch its votes
from Grover Cleveland to Lockwood, but is barred by a technicality. The party
flags again after Lockwood's 1888 run.
1886 The Equity Club is founded at the University of Michigan by Lettie
Burlingame for women law students and law alumnae, later expanding to include
women attorneys from other schools. It is the first professional organization
for women lawyers, and circulates its newsletters to members nationwide.
Burlingame, a suffragist, goes into private practice and "so successful was
she that she won every case entrusted to her" prior to her death from "la
grippe" in 1890.
1892 Feminist economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman publishes the novella
The Yellow Wall-Paper, a horrifying depiction of how the medical
and legal systems worked together to institutionalize or otherwise isolate
ambitious women simply by spousal fiat. Such women were often treated for
"mental exhaustion" by being deprived of any "unwomanly" intellectual stimulation
whatsoever, including basic writing materials or the right to hear news or
speak to friends.
1893 Belva Lockwood, grudgingly admitted to the Supreme Court bar in
1879, is denied the right to join the state bar of Virginia. The U.S. Supreme
Court, relying on the 1873 Bradwell decision, reaffirms that state bars may
discriminate on the basis of sex.
1893 The Queen Isabella Association is formed by women to promote women's
accomplishments at the World's Fair in Chicago. They select their name to
reflect that Europeans would not have settled America without Isabella's
sponsorship of Columbus. As part of the Fair, its legal committee organizes
the first nationwide meeting of women lawyers.
1897 Lutie A. Lytle, an African-American attorney, becomes the first
woman law professor in the nation when she joins the faculty of the Central
Tennessee College of Law.
1898 Women found a law school to accommodate female students rejected from established schools due to their gender. Ellen Spencer Mussy and Emma Gillett found the Washington College of Law in the District of Columbia, now the law school of the American University.
1904 Georgetown University creates its first program to routinely
accept female students: the all-female School of Nursing.
1908 The Portia Law School in Boston is created for women to attend
classes in the evening. It does so well that a day program is added in 1922.
The program continues to flourish even after other area law schools begin
admitting women, and becomes the New England School of Law in 1969.
1911 American mountain climber Annie Smith Peck ascends Mount Coropuna
in Peru at the age of 61, and unfurls a banner reading "Votes for Women"
at the summit.
1914 Margaret Sanger is indicted on obscenity charges for sending birth
control information through the U.S. mails. She flees the country, but returns
in 1915. The charges are dropped, and in 1916 she founds the first U.S. birth
control clinic in Brooklyn, New York.
1916 Jeanette Pickering Rankin of Montana is elected the first woman
member of the United States House of Representatives.
1919 Barbara Armstrong becomes the first woman appointed to a tenure-track
position at an accredited law school when she joins the staff of the University
of California at Berkeley.
1920 The Nineteenth Amendment is passed, guaranteeing women the right
to vote in federal elections. It reads, "The right of citizens of the United
States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by
any State on account of sex."
1922 Florence Ellinwood Allen of Ohio becomes the first woman elected to a state supreme court.
1923 The Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is introduced.
Drafted by Alice Paul, the ERA is initially an affirmative statement: "Men
and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every
place subject to its jurisdiction." The version Congress passes in 1972 was
a 1943 revision: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or
abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." It falls
three states short of ratification in 1982, and is reintroduced in subsequent
Congresses without passage.
1924 Federal suffrage is extended to Native Americans of both sexes
by an act of Congress. For the first time, all women in the United States
except for the residents of the District of Columbia are guaranteed the right
to vote in federal elections. Women in Puerto Rico win suffrage in 1928.
1925 Two wives of former governors became the first women governors.
Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming serves a single two-year term. Miriam A. Ferguson
of Texas serves twice, 1925-27 and 1933-35.
1928 Genevieve Rose Cline of Ohio becomes the first woman to be a federal
judge when she is appointed to the U.S. Customs Court, where she goes on
to serve for 25 years.
1932 Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas is appointed to the U.S. Senate
in 1932, and in 1933 becomes the first woman elected to that office.
1933 Frances Perkins becomes the first female Cabinet member in U.S.
history, selected by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be Secretary of Labor.
1934 Florence Ellinwood Allen, formerly of the Ohio Supreme Court,
is appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be the first woman on
the federal appellate bench. She is chosen to sit on the Sixth Circuit Court
of Appeals.
1945 The United Nations Charter is signed, and provides that "the peoples
of the United Nations . . . reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in
the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and
women . . . ."
1946 In U.S. v. Ballard, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that "[t]he
systematic and intentional exclusion of women, like the exclusion of a racial
group, or an economic or social class, deprives the jury system of the broad
base it was designed by Congress to have in our democratic society . . .
. The injury is not limited to the defendant -- there is injury to the jury
system, to the law as an institution, to the community at large, and to the
democratic ideal reflected in the processes of our courts." However,
the Court limits this holding to gender bias in the selection of federal
jurors from whatever pool of jurors are qualified by state law; a state's
right to keep women out of the pool entirely is not disturbed.
1946 The United Nations establishes the Commission on the Status of
Women to protect women's rights and monitor their status world-wide.
1948 Eleanor Roosevelt heads the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights and obtains passage of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights,
which provides that everyone is entitled to the Declaration's rights and
freedoms without "distinction of any kind, such as race [and] . . . sex.
. . ." The Declaration also explicitly provides for the equality of women
and men in marriage: "Men and women of full age . . . are entitled to equal
rights as to marriage, during marriage, and at its dissolution."
1949 Margaret Chase Smith becomes the first woman elected to the U.S.
Senate without previously being appointed to the office.
1949 Burnita Shelton Matthews becomes the first woman on the federal trial bench when President Harry S. Truman appoints her a district court judge.
1950's Georgetown opens all graduate and undergraduate programs
except for the Georgetown College to female students. Some of the graduate
schools had begun to admit women in the 1940's, following World War
II.
1951 Georgetown University Law Center enrolls its first eight
female students. An African-American woman whose name has not been recovered
is admitted in 1951 but does not attend. The first women to graduate are
Ruth Marshall Paven, a transfer student from Harvard, in June of 1953 and
Renee Grosshandler Baum, a member of the original eight, in October, 1953.
Another of the first eight women, Helen Elsie Steinbinder, graduates in 1954
and, in 1957, becomes the first woman named to the law faculty.
1953 Playwright and journalist Clare Booth Luce becomes the first woman
to be a U.S. Ambassador to a major posting, Italy.
1955 The arrest of Rosa Parks fuels a new wave of civil rights activism
when she refuses to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man in
Montgomery, Alabama. Echoing the origin of the first wave of feminism in
the abolition movement of the Nineteenth Century, the modern civil rights
movement for racial equality spurs the second wave of feminism to seek broader
gender equality.
1956 Helen Steinbinder, one of the first women admitted to
Georgetown University Law Center, and Mabel Dole Haden, an African-American
attorney, receive the first LL.M. degrees granted by the Law Center to women.
The following year, Steinbinder begins her teaching career on the law
faculty.
1960 A new student organization forms at the Georgetown University
Law Center "to assist wives of new students in settling into the community,
to enable the students' wives to better assist their husbands in their progress
through law school and to prepare the wives for the role they will ultimately
occupy in the community as lawyers' wives." The group was variously known
as The Law Students' Wives Society, the Student Wives' Club and, most commonly
as time went on, Law Wives.
1961 In Hoyt v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that state laws
which effectively exclude women from jury pools are not invidious discrimination,
but rather, are an "inoffensive" attempt to accommodate the "special
responsibilities" of women, and that women tried before the resulting all-male
juries have no valid claims under the equal protection clause.
1963 The Equal Pay Act passes, requiring equal wages for women and
men doing equal work. It is the first federal law prohibiting sex discrimination.
1963 Betty Friedan publishes "The Feminine Mystique," a keystone of
the modern women's rights movement.
1964 The Federal Civil Rights Act passes, including Title VII, which
guarantees equal opportunity in employment. Title VII is the statutory basis
not only for equal opportunity and sex discrimination cases, but, as a subset
of the latter, sexual harassment cases as well. The Civil Rights Act creates
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce workplace equality.
1965 In the U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, married
couples are assured nationwide access to contraception.
1967 In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down state
anti-miscegenation statutes, guaranteeing the liberty to form traditional
marriages without regard to race.
1969 Women students are admitted to the Georgetown College,
completing the co-education of all aspects of Georgetown University.
1970 A group of women law students begins meeting on women's
issues at the Georgetown University Law Center. In the fall of 1971, they
formally become the Women's Rights Collective. In 1990, the group is re-named
the Women's Legal Alliance.
1970 Georgetown Law's first Women and the Law class is taught
by Barbara Allen Babcock, following up on the nation's first courses at NYU
in the fall of 1969 and at Yale in the spring of 1970. George Washington
University's National Law Center initiates its Women and the Law class in
the fall of 1970, simultaneous with Georgetown, and taught by Gladys Kessler
and Susan Deller Ross. In 1971, Eleanor Holmes Norton teaches the course
at NYU Law School, and Ann E. Freedman joins Babcock in teaching the course
at Georgetown. In 1972, Judy Lyons Wolf and Nancy Stanley teach it at George
Washington University, and in 1973, Marna Tucker and Brooksley Born do so
at Georgetown.
1971 The Women's Legal Defense Fund is founded to advance women's
rights, initially litigating through a network of volunteer lawyers. With
a grant from the Junior League of Washington to fund paid staff, Judith L.
Lichtman becomes the first executive director in 1974.
1972 The Women's Rights Project of the Center for Law and Social
Policy is established under the direction of Marcia D. Greenberger. Its mission
is to provide legal representation on women's issues in the courts, in Congress,
and through public education.
1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird assures nationwide access to contraception
regardless of marital status, fifty-six years after the first birth control
clinic is opened.
1972 Title IX of the Education Amendments Act passes, guaranteeing
equal access to academic and athletic resources regardless of gender.
1972 Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, a candidate for president in the
Democratic primary, becomes the first woman and the first African-American
to run for a place on the presidential ticket of a major party.
1973 Roe v. Wade establishes a nationwide right to abortion, with
restrictions permissible at late stages of pregnancy.
1974 The Georgetown University Law Center's Law Wives student organization
changes its name to Law Spouses.
1974 Sex-Based Discrimination, coauthored by Kenneth M. Davidson,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Herma Hill Kaye, is published as the first law school
casebook addressing the topic.
1974 The first shelter in the U.S. for battered women opens in St.
Paul, Minnesota. By the mid-1990's, there are over 1,000 such shelters
nationwide, but with very limited bedspace and funding. Facilities located
in large cities report that they may have to turn away as many as 70% of
the women who seek temporary respite from violence in their own homes.
1974 Ella T. Grasso of Connecticut becomes the first woman to win a
governorship without being the spouse of an earlier governor.
1975 In Taylor v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court reverses its 1961 position about the Sixth Amendment rights of criminal defendants, and now holds that exclusion of women from juries is impermissible. Women are a "distinctive group" and "sufficiently numerous and distinct from men" that jury pools without them are a violation of a defendant's right to be tried before a true cross-section of the community. "If it was ever the case that women were unqualified to sit on juries or were so situated that none of them should be required to perform jury service, that time has long since passed."
1975 Sex Discrimination and the Law, co-authored by Barbara
Allen Babcock, Ann E. Freedman, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Susan Deller Ross,
is published, providing a second casebook on the subject. The book evolved
from materials the authors used for the first Women and the Law classes at
Georgetown, George Washington University, and Yale.
1976 Julianna Zekan becomes the first female Student Bar
Association President at the Georgetown University Law Center.
1978 The Emergency Domestic Relations Project begins as part
of the Women's Legal Defense Fund. The Project, through manager Meshall Thomas,
helps indigent victims of domestic violence gain legal protection from their
batterers. The Project provides counseling about the court system, negotiation
services, volunteer attorney referrals and training, legislative advocacy
and community education.
1978 Wendy Webster Williams authors a comprehensive 1978 Supplement
to Sex Discrimination and the Law textbook to augment and update the
earlier work.
1978 The Pregnancy Discrimination Act becomes federal law, recognizing
that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is discrimination on the basis
of sex. The PDA guarantees pregnant women who are capable of working the
right to do so, identical to employees with other, but similar, medical
conditions. The Act also mandates that employers provide the same benefits
to women at any stage of pregnancy, delivery, or recovery from delivery when
they are medically unable to work as to all other employees with temporarily
disabling conditions. It also forbids workplace discrimination against women
based on the mere possibility of pregnancy.
1979 The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women is adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, becoming effective in 1981. By 1998, 161 nations have joined CEDAW; the United States is not among them. CEDAW and similar instruments of international law become the focus of International and Comparative Law on the Rights of Women classes begun in 1991 at the Georgetown University Law Center by Naomi Cahn, Anne Goldstein, and Susan Deller Ross.
1980 After lobbying by women students for a clinic focused
on women's rights, the Georgetown University Law Center begins its Employment
Discrimination Clinic. Initially headed by Wendy Williams and Catherine Cronin,
and then in the spring semester by Wendy Williams and Laura Rayburn, the
Clinic's initial caseload is comprised of federal agency employment
discrimination hearings. In 1982, it is renamed the Sex Discrimination Clinic,
and is taught by Laura Rayburn.
1981 In Rostker v. Goldberg, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that single-sex
registration for the military draft is constitutional. In the dissent, Justice
Thurgood Marshall notes that the decision relies upon "ancient canards about
the proper role of women" and "categorically excludes women from a fundamental
civil obligation."
1981 Sandra Day O'Connor, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, becomes
the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court.
1981 The Women's Rights Project of the Center for Law and Social
Policy becomes the National Women's Law Center, with Marcia D. Greenberger
and Nancy Duff Campbell as co-presidents.
1982 Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan establishes that, under
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, public schools may
not discriminate on the basis of sex without "exceedingly persuasive
justification."
1982 The Georgetown University School of Nursing, the first
University school to welcome women, now becomes a graduate program, offering
a Master of Science in Nurse-Midwifery. By 1998, the graduate program at
the nursing school offers five graduate specialties.
1983 The Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program is
founded at Georgetown University Law Center. The Fellowship begins its
partnership with the Sex Discrimination Clinic under the leadership of Susan
Deller Ross, director of both programs. The Clinic's focus shifts from agency
hearings to federal court litigation on women workers' employment discrimination
suits, equal access to credit, and pregnancy discrimination, and begins to
include research on public policy issues such as the Equal Rights
Amendment.
1984 Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of New York is chosen as the
vice-presidential candidate on the Democratic slate by presidential candidate
Walter M. Mondale. She is the first woman in U.S. history to be on the
presidential ticket of a major party.
1984 A new student club, Women in Law as a Second Career, forms
at Georgetown.
1985 The Rita Charmatz Davidson Fellowship is established at
the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program to honor the first woman
appointed to Maryland's Court of Appeals, funding work on the rights of women
in poverty.
1986 The U.S. Supreme Court holds in Meritor Savings Bank vs. Vinson
that sexual harassment creating a hostile or abusive work environment, even
without economic loss for the person being harassed, is in violation of Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sarah E. Burns, assistant director
of the Georgetown Sex Discrimination Clinic, participates in an amicus curiae
brief in this, the Court's first sexual harassment case.
1988 Judy Lyons Wolf begins work as director of the Women's
Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program. Naomi Cahn becomes assistant director
of the Georgetown Sex Discrimination Clinic.
1989 The Georgetown Sex Discrimination Clinic shifts its focus
from federal sex discrimination litigation to local court litigation on domestic
violence cases, helping battered spouses obtain civil protection orders,
and filing contempt motions when orders are violated.
1989 Judith Areen becomes Dean of the Georgetown University Law Center, the first female Dean in its history and one of only a handful of women law school deans in the nation.
1990 The Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship provides its
50th year of attorney time to the women's public interest
community.
1991 In UAW v. Johnson Controls, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that
"fetal protection policies" such as mandatory sterilization for women or
complete exclusion from certain jobs are illegal gender-based employment
discrimination and forbidden under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The Georgetown Sex Discrimination Clinic submits an amici brief on
behalf of women's groups supporting this result.
1991 The Emergency Domestic Relations Project becomes part
of the Georgetown Sex Discrimination Clinic.
1992 In the aftermath of the contentious Clarence Thomas -- Anita Hill Supreme Court confirmation hearings of 1991, 1992 becomes known as the political "Year of the Woman," with women elected to federal, state, and local offices in unprecedented numbers.
1993 A woman attorney moves into the White House -- as First Lady,
when Hillary Rodham Clinton moves to Washington at President Bill Clinton's
inauguration.
1993 Janet Reno of Florida is appointed by President Bill Clinton to
be the first woman U.S. Attorney General.
1993 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, nominated by President Bill Clinton, becomes
the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court.
1993 The Family & Medical Leave Act becomes law, based
on the research and policy initiatives prepared by the Women's Law and Public
Policy Fellowship class of 1985-86. President Bill Clinton selects
the FMLA to be the first legislation signed in his presidency. President
George Bush had twice vetoed similar bills.
1993 Georgetown opens a day care center for the children of
staff and students at the Law Center's new Sarah and Bernard Gewirz Student
Center, 23 years after the women law students first requested this much-needed
amenity.
1993 The Harriet R. Burg Fellowship is established at the Women's
Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program. Burg, a 1980 graduate of Antioch
Law School and counsel to the District of Columbia's City Council's committee
on education, died of breast cancer in April of 1983. She had been a physical
therapist in her first career, and had done her law school internship at
the Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund. The fellowship in her honor
is designated to address legal issues facing women with disabilities.
1993 The Sex Discrimination Clinic files an amicus brief in
U.S. v. Dixon, the first U.S. Supreme Court case to consider civil protection
orders against domestic violence. Both private enforcement of such orders
and public criminal prosecution of the underlying behavior are upheld.
1993 The Fellowship begins the Leadership and Advocacy for
Women in Africa program. Twenty African women attorneys and judges study
and work in Washington for sixteen months. Each obtains an LL.M. degree focused
on women's rights from Georgetown University Law Center and provides six
months of work to public interest organizations devoted to advocacy for women.
The graduates return to advocate for women in their native countries and
network with one another throughout the continent. The first four graduates
from the initial pilot program return to Ghana and Uganda at the end of 1994,
and the final four graduates return to Tanzania and Uganda at the end of
1997.
1993 Deborah Epstein begins as Assistant Director of the Sex
Discrimination Clinic.
1994 In J.E.B. v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court holds that even
peremptory challenges are impermissible if their effect is to discriminate
on the basis of gender when seating a jury panel. The Court at last affirms
that the equal protection rights of the potential jurors to serve, rather
than the Sixth Amendment rights of the defendant to a fair trial, are a
sufficient justification for ending invidious discrimination against jurors
due to gender: "When persons are excluded from participation in our democratic
processes solely because of race or gender, this promise of equality [under
the law] dims, and the integrity of our judicial system is jeopardized."
1994 Passage of the federal Violence Against Women Act creates penalties for interstate stalking and other gender-based crime.
1995 The Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship provides
its 100th year of attorney time to the women's public interest
community.
1995 The American Bar Association, after 117 years, inaugurates its
first woman president, Roberta Cooper Ramo. Martha Barnett is the chair
of the ABA House of Delegates.
1996 U.S. women sweep the Olympics, competing and winning in more sports
than ever before. Their success is widely attributed to the maturation of
the promise of 1972's Title IX.
1996 In the "VMI case," U.S. v. Virginia, the U.S.
Supreme Court rules that the Virginia Military Institute, a state-supported
military academy previously limited to men, must admit women in order to
cure its violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
or cease to operate from tax funds. Tightening the "exceedingly persuasive"
standard of review, the Court holds that separate is not equal as regards
the creation of a military program for women at another school, and that
categorization by sex "may not be used . . . to create or perpetuate the
legal, social, and economic inferiority of women." The Court explicitly holds
that no government unit may "den[y] to women, simply because they are women,
full citizenship stature -- equal opportunity to aspire, achieve, participate
in and contribute to society based on their individual talents and capacities."
1996 The Emergency Domestic Relations Project helps initiate
the D.C. Superior Court's Domestic Violence Intake Center. The Project begins
a new focus on assisting petitioners to file for civil protection order cases
and conducting safety planning.
1997 The Emergency Domestic Relations Project hires its second
Domestic Violence Intake Counselor, Melba Calderon.
1998 In Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, the U.S. Supreme Court
unanimously decides that same-sex harassment in the workplace falls under
the protection of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and holds the sexual
orientation of the harasser irrelevant.
1998 Georgetown University appoints Carolyn B. Robinowitz,
M.D., Dean of the School of Medicine, the first woman medical school dean
in the University's history. With Elaine L. Larson, R.N., Ph.D., as Dean
of the School of Nursing since 1992, and Judith Areen, J.D., continuing as
Dean of the Law Center, Georgetown University now has women deans of three
graduate programs.
1998 The Emergency Domestic Relations Project manager Meshall
Thomas enters her twentieth year of service to victims of domestic violence
in the District of Columbia. More than 50,000 women have benefitted from
her assistance.
1998 The Women's Legal Defense Fund becomes the National
Partnership for Women & Families, reflecting a new priority on consumer
education, quality health care, and workplace issues affecting women. Judith
L. Lichtman, who joined the Fund in 1974 as executive director and was named
president in 1981, continues as president of the National Partnership.
1998 The Fellowship Program and the Sex
Discrimination Clinic continue their partnership as the Center for Legal
Advocacy for Women's Rights at Georgetown University Law Center, directed
by Susan Deller Ross. Shortly afterwards, the Center grows to three partners
as the Clinic becomes two clinics: one on Domestic Violence directed by Deborah
Epstein, and the other on International Women's Human Rights directed by
Ross.
1998 The Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program graduates its 15th class, for a total of 133 advocates for women's rights to date. There have been 113 domestic fellows, and twenty international, providing almost 125 attorney-years of service to the women's legal advocacy community. In the fall of 1998, nine domestic Fellows and two Fellows from Africa will build on this record.
visitors since March 8, 1998.
Copyright info: (c) 1998 LS d/b/a Professor Cunnea. All rights reserved. Remove NOSPAM from the email form to reach the professor. For permissions, contact here via email, or, if no response in 48 hours, contact the Women's Law & Public Policy Program at Georgetown University in Washington, DC via phone. To cite this work (as students must, to avoid academic disciplinary action -- remember, your teachers can use the web just as easily as you can!), contact Professor Cunnea for appropriate citation information. An alternative, if acceptable to your instructor, is to use the format "Cunnea, Professor. [pseudonym of L.S., Esq.]" with the web address, the date, and whatever other information your school requires. Professor Cunnea is the "nom du net" of an alumna of the Women's Law & Public Policy Fellowship Program.