Wendy W. Williams

March 20, 2006; December 19, 2008; December 15, 2010

Recommended Transcript of Interview with Wendy W. Williams (Mar. 20, 2006; Dec. 19, Citation 2008; Dec. 15, 2010), https://abawtp.law.stanford.edu/exhibits/show/wendy-w-williams.

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Terms of Use This oral history is part of the American Bar Association Women Trailblazers in the Law Project, a project initiated by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession and sponsored by the ABA Senior Lawyers Division. This is a collaborative research project between the American Bar Association and the American Bar Foundation. Reprinted with permission from the American Bar Association. All rights reserved.

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ABA Senior Lawyers Division

Women Trailblazers in the Law

ORAL HISTORY

of

WENDY WEBSTER WILLIAMS

Interviewer: Jennifer Lyman

Dates of Interviews:

March 20, 2006 December 19, 2008 December 15, 2010 Women Trailblazers Project

Oral History of Wendy Webster Williams Interviewer -- Jennifer Lyman

Interview 1: March 20, 2006 ...... 1

Interview 2: December 19, 2008 ..... 38

Interview 3: December 15, 2010 .... 91 Tape #1.

JL: Today is March 20, 2006, and I am Jennifer Lyman. I am interviewing Professor Wendy Webster Williams for the Women Trailblazers in the Law project, and this is my maiden voyage as an interviewer, so we will see what happens. Now it's all formal. Well, the one thing they do advise is starting at the beginning, so if that doesn't bother you that's where I would choose to start - and I can't wait. WWW: Does that mean the very beginning?

JL: Well, the beginning as you know it.

WWW: The beginning as I recall it.

JL: Yes.

WWW: Or have been told about it. Like when, the day I was born , , ,

JL: Well, sure.

WWW: Are we going that far back? JL: Whatever, whatever ... [Laughing.] WWW: Okay, okay, we will just do the basics. JL: Whatever sets the stage.

WWW: Well, let's see. I was born in the San Francisco bay area on September 5, 1944, and my first memories were of being in a boys' camp, because my father ran a boys' camp up in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

JL: Did you live in San Francisco?

WWW: We actually lived in the east Bay, for a year, and then my father took up camping.

JL: Where in the East Bay?

WWW: Concord.

JL: Which must have been a tiny town.

Page 3 of 119 WWW: We filled up the whole place! [Laughing.] No, actually, since I was the oldest that wasn't the case. We moved from there before the next-oldest was school age.

JL: What's the gap, gender breakdown, among the siblings?

WWW: I have three brothers and three sisters.

JL: Wow, did they luck out!

WWW: So, my next two siblings were brothers and they were born while my father was still running the camp at Bald Rock. Then, after living in a town called Greenville for a some months, we moved to Quincy, not much bigger than Greenville, but bigger enough to have several bars and several service stations. It's the county seat of Plumas County. My father continued his camp near Quincy, in Meadow Valley, so in the summers I was with boys. I was always with boys, and my two next siblings were boys, so I'm a tomboy, big time. JL: And did your parents . . . how did they treat you as a girl in that ... ? WWW: Honestly, when I was really young, I don't remember that they ever asked me to wear a dress (maybe for Sunday school, but I don't remember). My mother always said I should look clean and neat, and didn't get much beyond that. I guess she had her hands full with my siblings, so I kind of got to chart my own course a little bit, which was wonderful. But, in our household, my father sat at the head of the table. When I got old enough, I had to iron my brothers' clothes, and so, in that sense, it was pretty traditional. And my father old a lot of jokes about women drivers and stuff. All the standard '50s stuff, you know. So, anyway, I was only in that one room school for a little while, and then I was JL: When you moved to the big town.

WWW: I went to Quincy Elementary School, which was much bigger, and more siblings arrived. JL: Did you get any sense of what your mother's feelings about that were?

WWW: I just remember her as being tireless, always taking care of everybody, and as I grew older, I thought she never payed enough attention to taking care ofherself. She was classic in that sense. She - I don't know quite how she did it - but she made each of us feel special and that was quite an Page 5 of 119 was logging, but the trees were running out, so one by one the mills closed. The town actually started with a gold rush in that area.

JL: At the same time as the other California gold rush or later?

WWW: In that same time period, but the gold gave out pretty quickly

JL: Before the trees.

WWW: Although, when I was growing up there, sometimes people would go gold panning in the Feather River and come up with a trace of gold. Anyway, after the gold rush, people stayed on and the trees went much later. So now I don't know what they do up there to stay alive. I have a brother who still lives there. He lives a good life.

JL: What does he do?

WWW: He's an engineer, a civil engineer, so he builds bridges and stuff. JL: Shades of Wallace Stegner.I

WWW: Right. I love it.

JL: So what were your relationships like with the siblings.

WWW: I loved my brothers, although growing up I was closest to the brother born next after me, Jim, and the next born after him, my second brother. But my second brother, Tim, claims that Jim and I used gang up on him. I personally don't recall that, but I take his word for it. After Tim, a sister was born, another sister and another sister. And then, when I was in college, my last sibling, my youngest brother, was born. But they all were more like another generation. So we never had any money, but it was a great life. We were outdoors all the time and hiking around, swimming in the creeks. My father at one point built us a house.

JL: How old were you then?

WWW: I must have been in fifth or sixth grade, sixth grade maybe.

1 Wally Stegner was 20th Century American writer, known for writing about the West, whose Pulitzer prize winning novel Angle of Repose (1972) encompassed characters who were geologists or civil engineers.

Page 7 of 119 WWW: He ran a print shop. He would do printing for people. My mother worked with him.

JL: Tell me more about the siblings. Did you end up spending most of your time with your siblings or did you have more of a friend group outside the family.

WWW: When we moved to Quincy, I was near other kids who were my own age, but where we lived before, the place he was building the house, there were very few families around and nobody my own age - well, with one exception, a long walk away, but that was it. And this other girl and I actually, you know, we'd exercise the horses for the local dude ranch in the winter and that was great, because we got to ride the horses. They never gave us any saddles, only bridles. So, once I fell off and broke my tail bone, but other than that it was great. JL: How old were you then?

WWW: It seems like I was probably in seventh grade. The tailbone hurt for years but it doesn't hurt any more. JL: That's great. Did they want you to get right back on and ride?

WWW: I did get right back on and ride, because I was too far from home, and I had to get the horse back. The horse just - something moved in the bushes and she shied and I just couldn't help ... JL: You just kept going in the same direction.

WWW: Yeah. I remember bears. You know once I was out riding and there was a bear family, a mother and two cubs, ambling down the old logging road we were riding on. The horses were not happy! They didn't want to turn their backs on this mother bear, but she batted her cubs into the bushes and as she bore down on us the horses finally turned and just tore back down the logging road. The bears would also come down to the camp and they'd try and get food. They would come after the garbage cans. The bears were great. That was one of my favorite things, the bears. One time in the middle of the night, my father heard noise and went to the mess hall, where he found that a bear had torn a hole in the wall and was sitting eating peaches stored there and spitting out the pits.

Page 9 of 119 can't knit anymore." So the doctor cut off her little finger and she went back to her knitting. That was the kind of people there were there. It was a great place to grow up. If I had grown up in a city, I think it would have been harder to have less material wealth, but as it was, everybody was in the same boat, and were just outdoors, we didn't need a lot. Yeah, it was great, it was just great.

JL: So there weren't invidious comparisons at school or that kind of thing?

WWW: No, no, because the only people in town who had any money were the doc.tor's daughters and the dentists' children. There were two lawyers in town, one of them made money, the other one didn't. JL: Right.

WWW: It was that kind of place.

JL: And what was school like?

WWW: I liked school. Not the way Ruth Ginsburg liked school. I liked the part when you play games outside, and all that, as well as the learning part. I was very physical in the sense that I loved tether ball and I liked ... JL: Were you good at those things?

WWW: I was good at those things, yeah. I was around boys, it was self-defense, you know. I loved riding my bike.

JL: Well, I could have been around all the boys in the world, and I still wouldn't have been coordinated.

WWW: I don't know how coordinated I was. Once I got the bright idea of riding my bike down a hill with no hands and no feet and broke my arm. But life was fun, it was really fun. And I think that both being the oldest and being in a setting like that made me feel like, I guess, independent.

JL: I was going to ask you about that in terms of playing outside and so on. It was a different era.

WWW: We were pretty unsupervised by today's standards. We roamed miles from home sometimes. JL: And nobody knew where you were?

Page 11 of 119 JL: Was it the subject of discussion around the dinner table or anything like that?

WWW: No. My father generally held forth, but other than that it was "please pass the whatever." I don't know where that came from, I really don't, but I remember it so distinctively, and I really believe that I was taking that message even perhaps more seriously than she meant it. I don't know.

JL: How about your sisters, did they get clippings, too?

WWW: I have no idea. They were almost a generation after me. When I was an older high schooler, they were toddlers. Maybe I was also part of their feedback mechanism by then, too. One of my sisters, Betsy, when she grew up, set up her own printing business. She bought a little house, took the wall out, put in a printing press, closed it up again with my father's help, and that's how she started her printing business, which is now a middle-sized printing business in Sacramento. And one of my sisters, Barbara, is a program officer for the California Endowment, which is this huge foundation that gives grants to work on health issues. JL: Is that what the stem cell thing was modeled after?

WWW: Could have been. I have no idea. It's a great institution in the sense that it gives money for a lot ... JL: And is this separate from Kaiser Family?

WWW: It's not Kaiser. It was a fund created when Blue Cross Blue Shield switched from being a non-profit to a profit making insurance company. And then another sister, Susan, is going to school now to get her degree in psychology. She didn't finish college, but she is now, and she is going back for a masters degree.

JL: What does she want to do with it?

WWW: I think she wants to do something like rape counseling. It took her a long time to figure out what she wanted to do. But in the meantime, she ran a chain restaurant, then her own restaurant; then she went to work for a Borders bookstore, and they liked her so much they made her manager of the bookstore. She had the best Borders in the California Valley and got awards for it; then she went back to school. So they're all wonderful, my

Page 13 of 119 WWW: Yeah, I'm 5-10, too. Probably smaller than that now. But I was 5 feet 10 at my peak. So being big was, I thought, a good thing in the sense that some of the things that scared smaller people didn't scare me. Probably a false sense of impunity there. JL: Uh-huh.

WWW: But there was one guy who tried. He gave m~ a ride on his motorcycle, and then he tried to force himself on me, but he was a little smaller than I was. It didn't work out for him. So, I though, yeah, I can handle these things. JL: That would be an empowerment.

WWW: That's a gift, a gift.

JL: How old were you then?

WWW: Oh, I must have been a junior or senior in high school.

JL: So you were still home?

WWW:· Yeah. So it didn't bother me much because I handled it and I thought this was handleable.

JL: Right, right.

WWW: Which meant that it took me a while to understand the vulnerability, physically, that many people experience, I think especially women. And so that was an interesting sort of blank spot for me for a while. JL: Can you see when that started to change?

WWW: When I started hav~ng clients. JL: Uh-huh.

WWW: One of my clients when I first became a lawyer worked for - I can't remember what it was, the Forest Service or something like that. The guys just didn't want her there. She was the only women. And so they harassed her a lot, and she kept trying to get them to accept her. So they'd tell dirty jokes and she'd laugh and she'd try to fit in. And then one day, they got her in a position where she ended up taking her clothes off.

Page 15 of 119 JL: I was a freshman at Berkeley in '68-'69.

WWW: Well that's wonderful. I loved Berkeley. I-really loved it. One thing I loved about it was peculiar, which was in the beginning I loved it because nobody knew me. I didn't have to always meet expectations about who I should be. For example, one time I was driving along in the old truck in my little home town and I did something wrong, probably it was speeding a little. And an officer pulls me over, and, as they did back then in -our rural community, he said, "What's your name?" And I said, "Wendy Webster." And he said, "Is your dad Paul Webster?" And I said, "Yeah," and he said, "Listen, if I see you speeding again, I'm going to talk to your dad." It was so different than Berkeley. But high school was interesting. I was over-involved in activities in the sense that I just did everything, joined all the clubs. Which is a little looney.

JL: Why did that happen, do you think?

WWW: I have no idea. It just - did you ever see that cement company in the San Francisco Bay area that had those big cement trucks with the motto on the side of the truck - "See A Need and Fill It."

JL: [Laughing]

WWW: I was sort oflike that, you know. It was sort oflike that.

JL: Was there any rhyme or reason to the activity. Could you chart a pattern?

WWW: No. I was in 4-H.

JL: Uh-huh. I was going to ask you about 4-H.

WWW: Cooking. I made aprons. I made good aprons.

JL: Uh-huh. Did you have Home Ee. WWW: We all had home ec. The boys had Shop and ... JL: The boys had Shop and the girls had Home Ee.

WWW: Absolutely.

JL: Wood shop, metal shop?

WWW: Wood shop and metal shop.

Page 17 of 119 remember about the change in music, and how you knew about it and what you thought about it. WWW: I loved it. I remember Elvis. And ... JL: "You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog."

WWW: Loved it! You know, I was a real teenager in that sense. That was our music and I really loved it. We'd have these school dances where we'd all go and I didn't ... JL: Sock hop?

WWW: The sock hop. We had sock hops and stuff like that. And you know, I didn't get to dance as often as the girls who were the right size. But every once in a while . . . and a lot of times it didn't matter. We were out there doing whatever you do - line dances and other group dances. But I liked that. And I loved Elvis. JL: What did your parents think of the music.

WWW: Horrible! My father was very censorious about the music. He thought it was really disgraceful.

JL: And the band thing? Did he react to the band thing at all?

WWW: Hmmmm. I don't know that he ever saw what we did. JL: [Laughter.]

WWW: And P.E. [Physical Education]. I remember P.E. so well because the whole idea was to get out of P.E. That's what girls did back then. We tried to get out of it at least two days a month.

JL: [Laughter] I got my period eight times a month!

WWW: Right, exactly! We were not supposed to play when we had our periods because it was considered bad for us. Actually the best thing we could have done was get out there and play, of course.

JL: Of course!

WWW: So there was that, there was that ridiculous thing. And we had to play half-court basketball. They didn't want us to exert ourselves too much. Might ruin our reproductive organs or something. Page 19 of 119 WWW: Absolutely. Oh, that was something interesting I did. I met this other guy who was also in a co-op and going to UC Berkeley. His name was Barry Williams. And Barry was 6 feet 6. JL: That's tall.

WWW: He was 6-6. I found that very exciting. No need to slump. So we started spending time together. And then I met his mother. His mother's name was Claudia Williams. And she had been a labor organizer in her youth, and a communist. Threw that over, you know, when the bloom came off in Russia and the ideal was not realized. But, you know, she had an FBI file on her and everything. (So did my father-in-law, Dave Williams.) I just thought Claudia Williams was great. She was artistic and smart and assertive.

JL: Did she have a career at that point?

WWW: And she was big and tall. Oh yeah, she always worked. She always worked. And I thought she was just a terrific person. So I guess I ' actually married Barry for his mother. Which is a little embarrassing! But I thought she was just fabulous. I met Harry Bridges, the head of the Longshoreman's Union, at her house, and James Baldwin. And I was learning from her about how to think about the world in new ways. And then Barry decided to go in the Peace Corps right after he graduated, which was the summer of my sophomore year. But then he decided he missed me, so he called me up and asked me if I'd marry him. And I said, "Sure." What was I thinking!

JL: You were a sophomore.

WWW: I was a sophomore in college.

JL: What were you, 19?

WWW: My mother was upset; she thought I was going to quit college. But I thought, "Why would I quit college just because I'm getting married.''

JL: To some guy who's like far away, right?

WWW: Well, he was supposed to go to Iraq. Or was it Iran? He was learning Farsi and everything. But instead he came back from Peace Corps training and we got married. And we both went on with school. He

Page 21 of 119 real Podunk place, and I didn't really expect to flourish quite the way I did. So I switched from graduate school to law school at Boalt Hall [U.C. Berkeley's Law School]. Some very important things happened to me there. One thing that happened was that I was in the first class that was ten percent women. That was a milestone. Everybody thought women were invading! JL: What year was that?

WWW: Let's see. That must have been 1967, I started law school. And the first year was truly bizarre because - from my way oflooking at it - because I didn't love learning law. I really didn't love it. I was back in boys' camp, but the boys were sort of .... JL: Dworkey.

WWW: It seemed like a lot of them had parents -well, fathers -who were lawyers. And I was intimidated, really intimidated. And I hated courses like Corporations. I just, you know, had a bad attitude. I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer.

JL: Well, you know, I'm sorry but my recollection from both the colleges I attended at that time that the law schools were a repository of the most uncool guys. I mean the absolutely most terminally uncool guys.

WWW: But see, I was married by then, so I didn't care that much about the guys. Okay. I was rushing home to make dinner. JL: Where was home at that point? WWW: Home at that point was Berkeley.

JL: And so he had to commute back and forth across the bay?

WWW: Yes. By then he had finished law school and was working in San Francisco.

Page 23 of 119 JL: Were you aware of feeling like I'd rather be doing that or was it just something you accepted.

WWW: It was what I did. I didn't think anything of it. I do remember, when I got married to Barry, I was really uncomfortable about the name change. This was before anybody was talking about keeping her own name, so I became Wendy Williams and felt unnerved by it, but that's the way it was, and I did like my mother-in-law Claudia Williams a lot, so it was okay. And even after the divorce, I kept "Williams" because that was the name on my diplomas from college and law school.

Law school in 67-68 was an exciting place. Students were really standing up more and challenging faculty more, not just accepting what we were told. But honestly, I didn't think I knew what I was doing the· first year; so that was a little scary.

JL: Does anybody? Some people put on a show--especially boys.

WWW: Yeah, all the guys seemed to know what they were doing, right. And when you are a woman in a male setting, you're likely to imagine that whatever they have is magic, because they've always had it and you're just there, kind of a stranger in a strange land. JL: What was the relationship among the girls?

WWW: Well, the first year - I don't remember much there. Except there was another girl in one of my first year classes, it was our first year small section and it was Civil Procedure. Marietta Poerio, who I got to know somewhat, and I got to know some of the guys in there pretty well, too. So I had a nice time with the small section students, and we had a class party and things like that. The class party was at the house of a faculty member named Preble Stolz. Somebody brought marijuana brownies -- I won't say who did that or who partook -- but there were no brownies left at the end of the evening and everyone had a splendid time. Those were the days, oh yeah. And then in my second year, because of all the trouble we were causing, the faculty agreed to put students on faculty committees - all the committees except the secret ones, like the tenure committee, the ones they didn't dare put us on. So I signed up to be put on a committee, and they put me on the admissions committee, and I was very conscious that - I saw it as my job to get more women in there. I don't know why I

Page 25 of 119 women law students together. There was a men's lounge at the law school, which was quite large, and a women's lounge, which of course was quite small.

JL: And had places to lie down.

WWW: Of course - the ubiquitous dark rooms with cots, because when we women had our periods we obviously needed a place to lie down (which made the pain worse, but never mind). Oh gosh, I had forgotten those little dark rooms. They were everywhere; they were in all the buildings.

JL: They were always the little anteroom to the bathroom..

WWW: To the women's bathrooms, absolutely. Oh, that's so funny. Anyway, there were too many of us, so we took over the men's lounge to meet. Yes, we did. No men allowed. And Herma talked to us about what was really women's right to expect more from our institutions and to count on succeeding there and being able to go ahead and do what we were trained to do in school. It was inspiring. It changed my life. So we all agreed that we would begin working on these issues. We founded the Boalt Hall Women's Association and went to work. We did! There was this firm, a Los Angeles firm, that came in the fall of my third year to interview. They had posted a notice on the employment bulletin board basically saying "No woman need apply."

JL: Do you remember which firm it was?

WWW: Oh, it was some little firm in Los Angeles. I had never heard of them before and have never heard of them since. But I should remember, because I did something pretty funny. I rounded up my friend Marietta Poerio, who was by then on the Law Review as was I, and we went and signed up for an interview with this firm. The new· Boalt Hall Women's Association got quite interested in this, too. Well, when the representative from the law firm came to interview at Boalt, they refused to see us. So we went to the Associate Dean, Dean Hill, and he was sympathetic. He told the representative that if he wanted to interview anybody at Boalt he would have to convince the women students that he should be able to do so. So he invited the poor guy up to the cafeteria where we were waiting. At the peak of the confrontation, there were 30 or 40 students there - most of the women students and some very interesting male students, as well, and Dean Hill. And we raised holy hell. And the

Page 27 of 119 about how secretaries didn't like to work for other women. And so I thanked him very much and left, and he hired a nice guy who was below me in the class. His name was Frank Garfield. And Frank told me later that Zirpoli really did think that his secretary wouldn't want to work with me because I was a woman. That really was what his problem was. He didn't think a woman secretary would take orders from another woman. JL: And the secretary, as we all know, ... WWW: Ruled. Right, right. Because their bosses needed them so much. I actually think it wouldn't have bothered her. I think it would have been fine. I got along fine with Justice Peters' secretaries.

JL: It was a projection.

WWW: It was a projection. But that was the story at the time. Judge Zirpoli later played a very important role in my early life as a women's rights lawyer.

JL: How is that? WWW: Well, after I clerked for Justice Peters ... JL: We'll go back to that.

WWW: After I clerked, I became a poverty lawyer, through the Reginald Heber Smith fellowship program they had back then.

JL: A Reggie.

WWW: I was a Reggie. And I got assigned to San Mateo Legal Aid.. I thought they would assign me somewhere else in the country, but it was San Mateo Legal Aid, which was very convenient. And I had a case that started at San Mateo Legal Aid called - well, I guess it wasn't called Geduldig v. Aiello back then. It started out as Armendariz v. Hanson.2 I had had a co-clerk named Peter Weiner when I clerked for Justice Peters, and Peter also became a Reggie. He was working down Highway 101 from San Mateo in - what's the name of the garlic capital of the world?

2 For a more detailed description of the case, which was decided by the Supreme Court as Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974), see Fred Strebeigh, Equal: Women Reshape American Law (2009), pp. 81-139. Page 29 of 119 interested in women's rights and actually knew something about it by then. Also, the EEOC intervened in the case and sent out one of its lawyers, Nancy Stanley, from DC to argue the EEOC's position. One of the judges on the three-judge court had been head of the department that enforced the statute we were attacking. That was Spencer Williams, a Reagan appointee. He had worked for Reagan when he was governor of California, so I knew that our challenge was a losing proposition with him, but the other two judges were Alfonzo Zirpoli and a Ninth Circuit judge named Ben Duniway. Duniway's grandmother, Abigail, was a pioneer women's rights advocate in Oregon. There's even a book written about her. So he looked good. JL: Yeah?

WWW: And something had happened to Judge Zirpoli since my thwarted attempt to get a clerkship with him. His daughter was in law school at Hastings and not only that, she was pregnant! So we won the case before the three­ judge court. Zirpoli wrote the opinion joined by Duniway, and Williams dissented.

JL: Which just goes to show you it's all personal experience.

WWW: Oh boy, isn't it. I really believe that personal experience is crucial which is why there have to be people with a broad set oflife experience on our courts.

JL: Hel-lo!

WWW: It's so obvious. JL: Have you written that article?

WWW: I have made that point so many times in my life. It's so fundamental. Things that people would never imagine if they didn't have someone with actual experience to bring it home to them. It's just essential, and it's why the courts have to be quite broad in terms of who gets to be a judge. Well, so Judge Zirpoli absolutely did the right thing and so did Judge Duniway, but we were on our way to the Supreme Court - not what we wanted to have happen.

Page 31 of 119 WWW: Well, Barry had.this fantastic mother, so nothing surprised him really. And she was really interested in the new women's movement, too. So it was not so hard to begin talking with Barry about changing things, but what was hard was still being married to anybody. So at some point, I left. I guess it was after I finished law school. He didn't really want it to end. But we stayed friends. Later on, he married a woman with four or five children. She was a secretary in the law firm where he worked, and I thought "What a good guy," you know. Later on, I went to his wedding reception. He saw me and came across the room and gave me a big hug - and I suddenly noticed that all around this silence had fallen. So I decided I shouldn't stay too long. Barry was good to those children. He died about a year ago of- I don't know what, heart disease or something. He must have been sixty. When my father died in 1990 he came all the way up to Auburn, in the foothills, where my parents had been living, for the memorial event which we held - at my father's suggestion before he died - at the local firehouse. Barry came - and by then I was married to Richard Diamond and had children .. My son Luke must have been nine or ten then. Barry and I were standing and talking and Luke came up to us with a tray full of food .. I said, "Lukie, I want you to meet my first husband, Barry Williams." Luke looked up all 6 feet 6 inches of Barry Williams and just dropped the plate on the floor with a crash. Later he said, "Mom, you should have told me." I had neglected to tell him that I had been married before. It just never came up. So it was pretty funny. But Barry Wil~iams was a good guy and his mother Claudia was wonderful. I stayed in touch with her until she died. She was terrific. Barry and I once house-sat for two good friends of hers. I had never met a lesbian couple before, never. This was when gay people were still very closeted. And here we were housesitting for a lesbian couple.

JL: You didn't evep. talk about it. You knew some gay guys, but you didn't know any gay women.

WWW: None. Well, Claudia got us a house-sitting job with these two women. And I loved being in their house up on the Mission District hill in San Francisco, and I loved it that my mother-in-law was perfectly comfortable with them. It was an eye-opening experience for me, or maybe you could say, a heart-opening experience. Claudia also had to her house one night James Baldwin.

JL: Oh my gosh.

Page 33 of 119 WWW: It was the court. Chief Justice Roger Traynor, and the whole nine yards, the whole crew, and it was considered the best Supreme Court in the United States, a great state high court. JL: There were casebooks that put the California court's cases right up there with the U.S. Supreme Court.

WWW: It was a great court. JL: At least in my era.

WWW: Yes, well, that's right. It didn't last that long, because, of course now, it's not that way, but at the time it was a thrill to work there. I personally, though, really wanted to work for a trial level court, which was the reason I also applied to Zirpoli. I wanted to see how it was done, I wanted to understand the actual thing, to be a better lawyer. And I thought that being a clerk for the Supreme Court would be much more like law review - and, of course, it :w.M much more like law review, where you wrote a lot. But I made some really good friends among the clerks. We spent a lot of time together, all of the clerks. In the fall, when I was still totally intimidated and didn't know any better, a case came up to the court that involved a bar that had been fined or sanctioned in some way because it hired women as bartenders. There was a state law that said women couldn't be bartenders, and that was, yes, to protect us from the evils of alcohol and men and prostitution and all that. The bar was in the Sail' er Inn, somewhere in Southern California on the water. And the papers that were filed with the Court were really thin. It was a skimpy little presentation. And it didn't have much in it that would cause the justices to want to take the case. The way the court allocated cases was that the petitions for review would come in and they would be doled out proportionally to all the judges, whose clerks would go through their judge's batch and write up a recommendation memo. The judge would read it, approve it, ask for changes to it, do whatever need to be done, and then it would circulate to the rest of the court. And almost always the ones in which denial of review was recommended were in fact denied. So the Sail'er Inn petition for review went to a different judge than mine and the recommendation was not to hear the case. And when I saw the recommendation come around, I was beside myself, because by that time, you know, after Herma Hill Kay had opened the door, we - my female classmates and I - were thinking all the time about women in law. Ww

Page 35 of 119 Boalt Hall Women's Association. And then came oral argument day. I sat in the courtroom for the arguments. After the argument I was once again sitting in my office waiting to hear the fate of Sail'er Inn. My phone finally rings: "Ray Peters here." "Yes, Judge." And he says in his growly voice: "Women's Lib is going to love me!" It was unanimous. The opinion ofthe California Supreme Court declared sex a suspect classification. It also said the bartender law violated the state constitution and was contrary to Title VII. And so ... JL: The rest is history.

WWW: The rest is history. How are we doing?

JL: Well, we could break. This is a logical moment.

WWW: Before I forget, just a couple of other things associated with this, that are kind of funny. The context of what was going on was really ... JL: That would have been 1970.

WWW: This was the spring of '71. So the case actually came out in May of'71.3 And, you know, it was news in the legal world. There was a group of women at Yale law school which had also ... JL: There was actually a group of women at Yale Law School?

WWW: Yeah, a handful. They weren't a big group, but they were definitely a group~ And they also formed an organization like we did at Boalt Hall. It was the women students who talked their law schools into approving the very first women and law and sex discrimination classes. NYU was the first, in the fall of 1969; Barbara Brown, An~ Freedman and some others - they had gotten really interested in the idea of having a woman and law course at Yale and basically created their own class and brought in lawyers with expertise to teach what they knew. Barbara Babcock taught the class at Georgetown in the fall of 1970 while she was still at the Public Defender Service, and Susan Ross, who was a young EEOC lawyer, taught the course at George Washington that same semester. Barbara Babcock taught Yale's second women and the law class in the spring of 1971. Ruth Ginsburg's students talked her into teaching the course at Rutgers, which

3 Sail'er Inn v. Kirby, 5 Cal 3d 1, 485 P.2d 529 (1971).

Page 37 of 119 Page 39 of 119 WWW: It was. It was. It's gotten more conservative since then. But, nonetheless, that court has recently made another astonishing leap forward, just as they did with the Sairer Inn case. I'm thinking of The Marriage Cases, holding that the statutory distinction between heterosexual and homosexual partners violated equal protection. 4 I was so proud that one of the two cases they relied on to reach that conclusion was Sail'er Inn. They actually held that sexual orientation is a suspect classification, as they had held sex is a suspect classification in Sail'er Inn. The other case they relied on was the Perez case 5 which said that the Constitution required that African Americans be allowed to marry whites and vice-versa. The use of Sail'er Inn meant so much to me personally, because I have one of these families which couldn't have looked the same way 50 years ago. I have a sister and her spouse, my sister-in-law, now.6

JL: I have a brother and a brother-in-law.

WWW: Yes! And I have a little nephew, who Barb and Renee adopted, who is so special. He was abandoned in the hospital after he was born, so Barb and Renee have had him since he was a baby. He is brown and beautiful. It was so thrilling to see the line of cases that came together to produce this. JL: The continuity.

WWW: The continuity as well as the change. Who would have thunk it.

4 In re Marriage Cases, 43 Cal.4th 757, 183 P.3d 384, 76 Cal.Rptr.683 (Cal S.Ct, 2008) (The Court held the statutes violated the California Constitution: "The statutes in question properly must be understood as classifying or discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, a characteristic that we conclude represents - like gender, race, and religion - a constitutionally suspect basis upon which to impose differential treatment .... "),

5 Perez v. Sharp, 32 Cal.2d 711, 198 P.2d 17 (1948) (State law banning interracial marriages is inconsistent with the fundamental constitutional right to marry.) Perez anticipated by almost two years the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) (Virginia law banning interracial marriages unconstitutional.)

6 Barbara and Renee Webster-Hawkins were first married on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2004. For the story of the California gay marriage litigation, including the Valentine's Day weddings in San Francisco, see Patricia A. Cain & Jean C. Love, Six Cases in Search of a Decision: The Story of In re Marriage Cases, in Women and the Law Stories (Elizabeth Schneider & Stephanie Wildman, eds. 2011) 337-378. Page 41 of 119 analyze the case as a sex discrimination case~ but I think the California Supreme Court took the better route. JL: Yeah.

WWW: They said, and I think this is the right approach, the classification in it is better analyzed as a gay-straight line and that line is suspect in its own right.

JL: So it's a step forward.

WWW: Exactly. It's not just repeating. It's recognizing that each class of people who have had to struggle with prejudice and second-class status have their own set of ways they are disadvantaged and an impetus for the discrimination which is different. A little different. So, anyway, that's my thrill of the year. JL: Isn't that the beauty of the common-law?

WWW: Indeed. JL: When it works well .... WWW: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And that was a little update on where Nancy Davis, who was a cofounder of ERA [Equal Rights Advocates] with me is today. JL: You jus~ alluded to it at the end of our ... WWW: Yes.

JL: And I remember ERA because it was an externship opportunity when I was at Stanford.

WWW: Yes, it was.

JL: And my best friend from law school did that while I did Public Advocates.

WWW: Well, here's how it goes. Public Advocates was, I believe, the first public interest law firm in the San Francisco Bay Area and it really impressed young lawyers and law students. It gave Mary, Nancy and me a model to build ERA on. Mary was a year behind me at law school. Nancy was two years behind me at law school. JL: Both at Boalt. Page 43 of 119 JL: Barbara Babcock. She was married to a guy named Addy Bowman.

WWW: Anyway, so Barbara has just started, first woman professor out there. She had been working on a case book with the group that put on the Yale conference in 1971. What I had learned since I talked to you last -- either I didn't know it or didn't remember it - is that that conference at Yale on teaching women in the law was funded by a guy name Eli Evans. He was with the Carnegie Foundation whose focus is education, and the conference and the book were about teaching this new subject, women and law. He was genuinely excited about the project.

JL: At Yale?

WWW: At Yale. So Mary, Nancy and I and Barbara Babcock were there together at that conference. I don't know ifwe had met her before that conference (I don't think so), but we certainly felt her presence at the conference. When Nancy gr_aduated from law school the next year, I think she then spent the summer working for Barbara Babcock as a research assistant, working on Barbara's part of the casebook. In any event, it turned out that Barbara Babcock and Eli Evans had been classmates at Yale Law in the early 1960s and they were real buddies. So when the time came to look for funding for Equal Rights Advocates, Barbara contacted Eli to see if we could get funding and that's how the concept of a teaching law firm with Barbara taking the lead at the Stanford end with the training seminar came to be and Carnegie funded it. There was an interim period though while we were working on getting the funding. Nancy was out of law school and we were impatient to get going. So we hung out our shingle as Davis, Dunlap and Williams for a little while in that interim period. We moved into the upstairs in the two-story building where Public Advocates had its office. We were upstairs/downstairs with Public Advocates for a number of years. JL: Was that in the Mission District?

WWW: It was on Turk Street. After I left, ERA moved to the Mission.7 But at that point we were in this building on Turk Street about two blocks from the federal building where the federal courts were and the state building which housed the California Supreme Court. Turk Street became a bit

7 In 2011, Equal Rights Advocates moved from the Mission District to 180 Howard Street in San Francisco. See \V\V\'l .equnhigh.ts.org, the ERA website.

Page 45 of 119 furlough male prisoners during _the week so they could work, which allowed them to continue to support their families, and hold them in jail on the weekend. JL: What was the reason?

WWW: I don't know, maybe . . . They never really gave one. It could have been that they just never thought of it because women prisoners were fewer in number than men, combined with the assumption that women prisoners weren't breadwinners. JL: One experience in the prison system is that women are smaller in number. There is always a hassle because they can't be stored with the male population.

WWW: Yes. Yes. JL: They end up just being this administrative thorn in the side and the jailers just want them to go away and not really have to deal with them.

WWW: Exactly. I think it either didn't occur to them or they said it's too much of a hassle. One or the other or a combination of the two -- but in any event I then learned that in fact Marin County and San Francisco County had the same thing. So I filed suits against them too. I had a hearing on a motion for preliminary injunction in one of those prison cases. I finished my argument and everything was over and we did what we always do at such a moment -- we marched off to the women's bathroom. I'm in a stall actually and I hear this voice say, "Hi, my name is Sonia Soehnel and I go to the University of San Francisco Law School and our dean said if I can find somebody to teach women in the law at our school, he might allow it. Would you want to do it?" JL: Laughter.

WWW: I said, "Sure, but wait until I come out the stall." Nancy, Mary and I put together a cours·e partly using the materials we'd gotten at the Yale women and law teaching conference, the reading list and stuff, updated. We taught the course at the University of San Francisco for several years. A little later, we added Golden Gate Law School and we also taught it at Santa Clara. We called ourselves "the traveling road show." Once ERA kicked in, we had to give it up because we had to devote ourselves to Stanford students and our new arrangement.

Page 47 of 119 distinguishing between men and women. There was too much to choose from almost. There was no problem getting clients. The problem was, as I said, how pick and choose and focus. My orientation was the Reggie orientation which is selection of maximum impact, biggest bang for the buck cases. Mary Dunlap was quite the opposite. She spent the year before Nancy got out of school working in her father's law firm which was a longstanding general practice in Napa. She came in with a more practical sort of how-you-help-individual-people-one-at-a-time orientation.

JL: Sort of a small town lawyer?

WWW: Yes, small town lawyers. Medium town lawyers actually. JL: Medium.

WWW: Yes. So in Mary we actually had somebody who knew something about the practicalities of a law practice, we had me with my Reggie class action training, and then we had Nancy who had a third useful orientation. She liked to work on proposals. She was good at figuring out budgets and that type of thing. We actually got lucky in that way. We had a simple plan for our office structure and it was that everybody in the office would be paid exactly the same and given that it was public interest that wasn't a whole lot of money. I think $12,000. So Nancy, Mary, I and our staff all got $12,000 a year. We had some wonderful people doing the typing and stuff. JL: Typing was serious business then.

WWW: Then it was really, yeah;· it wasn't like today with computers. JL: Where you could just delete mistakes.

WWW: There were no do-overs. Right, exactly.

JL: Did the staff all go to law school and give you up?

WWW: Let's see. One of them surely did. Yes. She did go to law school. She definitely did. One of them was a guy. I don't know what he ended up doing, actually.

JL: One staff person at a time?

Page 49 of 119 JL: Was there any money in the divorce? We didn't talk about the divorce in the last interview. I mean you said you'd just split and that was it.

WWW: Yeah, Barry's a nice guy. I had nothing against him whatsoever. It just wasn't where my head was then. We had all these, on the West Coast we called them encounter groups.

JL: T-groups.

WWW: Yes, T-groups. What were they called on the East Coast? They had a different name?

JL: T-groups.

WWW: Well, anyway, all the women I knew had their T-group. In those groups, we'd explored all the old assumptions about women's minds and bodies and proper roles and we redefined ourselves. JL: Consciousness raising.

WWW: Consciousness raising, indeed. It was quite wonderful but the project was each one of us was reassessing our entire lives in light of basically feminist principles. So a lot of husbands went by the wayside. There was a lot of readjusting, rethinking, and I certainly did that. My husband, Barry Williams, did workers compensation law and he was later on the workers compensation board for a while. He died maybe a year or so ago. Maybe two years ago. He was a good guy and I loved his mother.

JL: I remember you said you never gave up his mother.

WWW: I never gave her up. When Barry and I divorced, we just split up our material possessions and went our separate ways, two lawyers who would each take care of our own selves. JL: Right.

WWW: Which is why Nancy gave me a loan so I could eat, buy gas for my car and pay my rent. When you're young like that, you don't really worry about it. So and then we started getting that $12,000 a year and that seemed like big time money. We didn't have to go looking for cases - they just seemed to keep coming through the door. We gave talks to anybody who called us up and said they needed a women's rights lawyer to speak. We were always on the go. We were teaching classes.

Page 51 of 119 JL: If you were putting up pictures of people, I don't see Barbara Babcock and Ruth Ginsburg as in the same photo. It doesn't happen.

WWW: They are temperamental and stylistic opposites. Herma and Ruth are very much more similar. But you know what? They get along okay. In fact, while Barbara was in the Justice Department, she supported Ruth Ginsburg's appointment to the DC Circuit. JL: I'm sure they're wonderful.

WWW: You're so right. We (Mary, Nancy and I) were so lucky these two feminist treasures of the Bay Area, Barbara Babcock and Herma Kay, were helping us and urging us on. For years, Herma was on the Equal Rights Advocates board and, of course, Barbara was an integral part of ERA's Stanford program. So, yeah. It all worked out amazingly well. Actually Nancy Davis had been Herma's research assistant when she was at Boalt and worked on her casebook and then worked with Barbara on the other book.

JL: Yeah. Yeah.

WWW: The other thing that was happening in the 1970s -- and this is a lovely part of doing Ruth Ginsburg's biography which I'm just totally enjoying -­ was how at each step it looked like we were all pretty much in communication. We were all watching Law Week for the newest developments. They would find their way into somebody's brief and the brief would then be shared, or several of us from different parts of the country would join together to do an amicus brief. JL: Without email. ...

WWW: Without email... It was a miracle. Also ,there were institutional connections. For example, Ruth Ginsburg not only headed the Women's Rights Project of the ACLU, she served on the board of the Cleveland Women's Law Fund, and for a while, was on the NOW LDEF Board. I was on the, let's see, when I got into teaching I was on the board of NOW Legal Defense Fund and chaired the ACLU Women's Rights Project advisory board. I also served oi:i the Women's Legal Defense Fund litigation committee. We were all interlocked in many ways and I could see it clearly in Ruth Ginsburg's Library of Congress papers. She was writing to and receiving letters from women's rights lawyers, including

Page 53 of 119 WWW: Yes. Well, we would have meetings once a week about the cases and they'd be assigned to particular cases and we'd all be working together. But we ran a substantive seminar which we did at Stanford and Barbara was the lead person on that.

JL: Were there more people in the seminar than were externing at ERA?

WWW: No, it was integrated. I think the externships came later. What we were doing in the early years wasn't considered an externship so much as it was an integrated clinical course.

JL: I see. I see.

WWW: Yes. Like a clinical course with ....

JL: Right, with field work.

WWW: With field work, yes. It was so much fun.

JL: How many students at a time?

WWW: I don't remember. I know, maybe eight or 10, something like that.

JL: So, very, very much like a clinic.

WWW: Yes, very much. We'd teach the developing substantive law and also do simulation exercises with the students. A number of our students have gone into teaching themselves. I keep running into people who are teaching now.

JL: Any names ring a bell?

WWW: Well, Kate Bartlett, who was several years behind me at Boalt, worked with us in the summer and went onto to be the dean at Duke Law. Then I was out in California a year or so ago at U.C. Davis Law School. I'd been invited out to talk about Ruth Ginsburg at one of their faculty lunches. This guy came up to me and I said, "You look familiar." He said "You changed my life." I said, "What?" He'd been one of our women and law students when we were doing our traveling road show, and here he was, teaching at Davis. I hadn't seen him since he was a student. Those things happen. There's another student, a Stanford student, who went on to clerk at the Supreme Court for Justice Brennan while Ruth Ginsburg was litigating before the Court. Important gender cases were coming to

Page 55 of 119 WWW: It was easy. Mostly the cases were terrible but there were one or two little hints of something better to come when I was working on the case in the fall of 1970 and spring of '71. Reed v. Reed hadn't even been decided.

JL: Yes.

WWW: In fact, speaking of Sail'er Inn, that's how I probably met Ruth Ginsburg. Sail'er Inn had just been decided as Ruth was writing the brief in Reed v. Reed, and it gave her a case to cite for the proposition that sex is a suspect classification. The Reed brief was the first time that argument was made to the United States Supreme Court.

JL: Yes. Yes. My first year moot court case was the Oklahoma drinking beer and driving case.

WWW: Yes. Craig v. Boren.I5

JL: That was the problem for my first year.

WWW: That's hilarious. That case, Craig v. Boren -- this is why going back through the Ginsburg files- in the Library of Congress files is so valuable. I'd always viewed that case as kind of ari outlier. The lawyer in the case was Fred Gilbert from Oklahoma and the case was not an ACLU case. But I learned from the files that Ruth Ginsburg's fingerprints are all over that case. She was there for the oral argument and sat at counsel table with the lawyer. She contributed to his jurisdictional statement, helped with his brief and submitted an amicus brief. And she had an oral argument in a case of her own immediately following his. 16

JL: Wow.

WWW: In her files I found her contributing to many cases in ways that I never dreamed of. She would draft things for other lawyers or write letters advising them.

15 429 US 190 (1976). Curtis Craig challenged an Oklahoma law which allowed women to purchase near-beer at 18, but required men to wait until they were 21. The Court struck down the statute, and Justice Brennan used Craig as the occasion to strengthen the standard of review in sex discrimination cases.

16 Her case was Califano v. Goldfarb, 403 U.S. 199 (1977), in which she won a challenge to a Social Security Act provision which provided survivors benefits for widows on their husbands' social security account, but not for a widower on his wage-earning wife's account unless he was her dependent. Page 57 of 119 WWW: Yeah, right! That was a big case. We filed a good complaint against Saks Fifth Avenue on behalf of the women. We had to do lot of discovery - interrogatories, depositions, etc., and we really got the goods on how badly the women were treated. Then I left ERA for Washington and the lawyer who replaced me, Joanne Chandler, who had worked at Public Advocates, took over. She was a very good lawyer. It was time for a summary judgment motion. Most of our work had been done or at least the outreach work had been done and now it was time to press the case in court.

JL: The fact-gathering we never talked about in law school.

WWW: Right, right. We had gathered the facts. We had a pretty good case, And what finally happened was they settled. It was so outrageous. If you wanted to work at Saks Fifth Avenue you had to live with your parents or have a husband who supported you. I still can't bring myself to shop at Saks.

Page 59 of 119 recommendations for change. Even before the Commission completed its work in 1973, states began to set up commissions on the status of women all over the country, patterned and encouraged by the feds. Then the state commissions began having annual conferences in Washington DC hosted by the Women's Bureau. Information on women's legal status in the various states was collected and shared at the annual meetings. The mass movement that was underway by 1970 was really jump-started when, in 1966, frustrated by the slow government progress, a group of women with ties to the federal and state commissions founded NOW. By 1970 or early '71 NOW had a legal branch modeled on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the·NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, NOW­ LDEF. Also, by the spring of '71, the ACLU had committed itself to women's rights and Ruth Ginsburg was working on Reed, which was decided in the November of 71. The ACLU's Women's Right Project started up in early 72 and Ruth agreed to run it. JL: The women's rights network in this country became strong, very strong. How much did you know to look at, think about other countries?

WWW: I was taken with Sweden, myself, for good reason. In the area of work and family issues, Sweden was way ahead of us.

JL: The gold standard.

WWW: The gold standard. Given what I was working on, international developments in reproductive health, women and pregnancy were on my radar screen. Certainly Ruth Ginsburg had her eye on international developments and from the first included cites to them in her briefs. But I think it's fair to say that at this point, the women's legal movement in the United States was a national movement, looking inward. We weren't international, yet. In fact, I think the internationalization came maybe not even until the nineties ...

JL: Beijing?

WWW: It was Beijing. 19 I was there. It was Beijing. And just as we had started teaching Women and the Law also known as sex discrimination and the law, which morphed into Gender and the Law and then Feminist Legal

19 The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, September 1995, Beijing, China. Page 61 of 119 was sex discrimination. Moritz had represented himself in the tax court and lost.

JL: Classic.

WWW: So the Ginsburgs took his appeal to the 10th Circuit, in Denver. I believe that was Ruth's first oral argument at that level. And the brief --oh my God, the brief was a gem. In it, she made the argument that sex should be treated as a suspect classification. While she was working on that brief in the Spring of 1971, the Supreme Court granted review in Reed v. Reed, which the ACLU had picked up from the local Idaho lawyer. As soon as she finished the Moritz brief, she sent it to the litigation director of the ACLU saying he might find it useful in Reed and suggesting that perhaps he might want a woman as co-counsel. He invited her to join him to work on the Reed brief, and the rest is history. She adapted and expanded her Moritz argument about the level of review appropriate in sex discrimination cases for the Reed brief. Later she called the Moritz brief the "Grandmother brief' and the Reed brief "the Mother brief." JL: And the Reed brief went straight to the Supreme Court.

WWW: Yes, and it was the first time the Supreme Court ever struck down a statute on the ground that it unconstitutionally discriminated against women. Ironically, even though Moritz was argued to the 10th Circuit a week or so before Reed was argued to the Supreme Court, the decision came down just about a year after Reed was decided. One of the judges on the appellate panel had gotten sick and died. As it turned out, the Ginsburgs won the case for Moritz20 -- and the decision cited Reed as the precedent for its holding.

JL: So that's a great story.

WWW: Yes, and here's my favorite part of it. The solicitor general files a petition to the Supreme Court asking it to review Moritz. His argument to the Court is basically that it can't let the Moritz case stand because the literally hundreds of federal laws contained sex-based provisions and they were all called into question by the Tenth Circuit's holding -- and what does he do? He attaches as an exhibit to his petition a print-out of all of those sex-based laws. It was so useful that Ruth suspected that maybe

20 Moritz v. Commissioner oflnternal Revenue, 469 F.2d 466 (10th Cir. 1972). Page 63 of 119 JL: Uh-huh.

WWW: Here's the decision. Barry Williams and I were divorced by that time. I was just finishing up clerking for Justice Peters on the California Supreme Court so it must have been sometime in August of 1971. The Federal Building housing the federal courts was right across the street from the State Building where the California Supreme Court was. There was a-cafeteria in the State Building, but anyone who actually wanted a good cheap lunch would go over to the Federal Building cafeteria. Much better! So one day my co-clerk Peter Weiner and I went over to the Federal Building for lunch where we were sat down to eat with one of the federal clerks who had gone to law school at Yale with Peter, John Ladd. While we were eating, who shows up but one of the incoming clerks for a federal judge who had also gone to Yale Law school, but had stayed behind for an extra year to get a masters in something, maybe history. That was Richard Diamond. By the end of Richard's clerkship year we were spending a lot of time together. Then off he goes to clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court. After that, he took a trip around the world. He'd accepted a job at a San Francisco law firm for when he returned (actually the firm where John Ladd was then working), but then he chickened out and went to work for Steptoe and Johnson in Washington DC, where his brother lived. Richard had grown up in Manhattan and was as much an East Coaster as I was a West Coaster. But we had stayed in touch. I guess we finally decided we ought to try to be in the same city and see what happened. So he applied for a job teaching at Stanford and didn't get it. I applied for a teaching job on this coast and this wonderful thing happened. I got a job here at Georgetown University Law Center. The reason I got the job, I later found out, was because Georgetown's women students had founded a women's collective, as they called it, and began pressing the school administration to hire more women on the faculty and, specifically, a woman with my expertise in women and law. They had been getting along by importing adjuncts to teach women and the law. Barbara Babcock was their first, in the fall of 1970, while she was still with the DC Public Defender Service, and I think Ann Freedman, who had just graduated from Yale and was working on the Babcock casebook, taught it next. Or maybe they taught it together. I must have gotten the offer in late '75 or early '76, and began teaching in the fall of '76.

Page 65 of 119 kept each other afloat for several years while Georgetown was still a wilderness for women. Judy and Pat are just remarkable people. Today Pat King's on the board of Harvard and Judy is the past dean of the law school. They've done extraordinary work along the way. Judy wrote the first feminist case book on family law. Pat King has made her mark in health law. But back then we were just scared and struggling to find our way in an alien environment.

JL: What did you tell them about what you really wanted to know but afraid to ask?

WWW: I don't remember what my reply was. I just remember how welcoming it felt that they asked the question. I probably asked if this was a place I can do what I wanted to do which was write and teach about women's rights. Because Herma Kay and Ruth Ginsburg had both advised me I'd have to do what's expected until after I got tenure. That's what they told me. But I knew that that was just not me. JL: Wasn't worth it.

WWW: That's not me. But by the time I came up for tenure Georgetown had evolved just far enough that I could get away with it. But who knew? I just knew that's who I was. So anyway, they made me feel like I could do this.

JL: Do you remember who else came in?

WWW: Poor Judy Areen. It was really bad when I first started Georgetown. When Judy Areen came up for tenure the head of the tenure committee chased her around his desk. And then there was a picture of her, a nude figure, with her head superimposed ... JL: With her head on top.

WWW: Posted on a wall at the law school. These were things that happened to her because she was drop-dead gorgeous and in a job a woman wasn't supposed to have.

JL: Yeah. Was she married to Richard Cooper at the time?

WWW: I don't think she was.

JL: He was my first boss.

Page 67 of 119 Catholic. And there I am, interviewing for a job in the aftermath of Roe v .. Wade. JL: Reproductive rights?

WWW: Well, baby killer was more her view ofit. She also told me she'd heard that all feminists were lesbians. But interestingly there was a way in which she later seemed proud of us, Judy, Pat and me. She never changed her view on abortion, but she made .her peace with us. But at the time, it was a pretty unpleasant experience for me. So I thought whooooo! I don't know about this. My third memory was of my last interview· which took place not in a faculty office but in the faculty lounge. It involved a guy who I think began the clinical programs at Georgetown. He had set up a clinic in 1971, the Institute for Public Representation, which he nicknamed "Inspire." Ever since he left, it has been known as IPR.

JL: So this guy, was it Greenhalgh?

WWW: No, it wasn't Greenhalgh. He started the clinic before Greenhalgh, I think, but Greenhalgh was already at Georgetown. I can't remember his name. 24

JL: I can't remember. But I remember interviewing with Charlie Halpern. I applied to IPR. I think I got an offer.

WWW: Yes, oh my God, I forgot Charlie Halpern.

JL: A brief stint among his many.

WWW: I thought he was really interesting that guy. Maybe he couldn't stay in one place to save his life, but he was an interesting guy. But this other guy founded Inspire. He was a founding father. So we're sitting around talking and all of a sudden a short little guy comes in. He climbs up on an end table, literally. Silence falls, and he stands on this little table and says, "I just have three questions." Now, I don't remember what the three questions were but one of them had to do with clinical teaching. And I passed that one because ....

24 The forgotten founder of IPR was Victor Kramer. With Charles Halpern, he co-founded the Center for Law and Social Policy and became the first director of the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University in the early 1970s. For his obituary, go to: www.washingtonpost.com/wp­ dyn/content/article/2007/01/12/AR2007011202109.html.

Page 69 of 119 WWW: How was I thinking about it? I certainly didn't think I would be here so many years later - how long has it been? I lost count after 30. But no, I didn't do it as forever. I figured after a couple of years we'd go back to California. And who knows? It may not be forever. I may end up back in California.

JL: I keep saying that, too.

WWW: Maybe in retirement. It's still in my emotional home. I go home every year for Christmas - haven't ever missed one. When I had my December babies, both of them had had their first plane ride before they were a month old.

JL: How did your leaving go with Mary and Nancy?

WWW: They were very good friends. That was really hard. That was the hard part. ERA was such a great experience. But I kind of felt it was make or break time for Richard and me. If I'd stayed, who knows. It could have been a very interesting life that way, too. Who knows?

JL: So were you living with Richard or were you living in ....

WWW: I am a very independent person. I do not give my independence up easily. So, I kept my own place for several years. But then I finally broke an arm. My right arm. I was having so much trouble. Richard said, "Come stay with me until you get better." If it was my left. arm I would have stood my ground. But it was my right arm. I couldn't even operate a can opener, which is how I ate. Richard had an electric can opener. So I just moved in and never moved out. That was that.

JL: Where did he live?

WWW: He had a little house on Capitol Hill. And I was staying at a place on Capitol Hill, as well. JL: What was he doing at the time?

WWW: He was working for Steptoe & Johnson. He stayed there, became a partner, then switched to teaching at the law school. That was in '84 or '85, something like that. It worked out well. We were on the same schedule so we could coordinate vacations. JL: Oh yeah.

Page 71 of 119 comfortable ... to get really comfortable. Judy Areen had also had problems because she has a very quiet voice. JL: And she's beautiful.

WWW: And she's beautiful.

JL: They hate you when you're beautiful.

WWW: I know. They take you apart because you're not in the right role. And she's also quite reserved. She would get angry and hurt. All these things we worked with and we got better at it all. Of course, Pat had a double whammy - she was the wrong sex and the wrong race for these white guys. She's an African-American woman and that's as hard as being a beautiful white woman.

JL: Yeah, or worse.

WWW: Yes, worse. We really helped each other through those early years so we have a bond that goes way back. We also had our children in the same general time period beginning in 1980. That was a tricky business - a new experience for the law school. We were concerned about the consequences but emboldened because by then we had legal protection from discrimination based on pregnancy. Still, we gave birth during breaks in the school year - Pat & Judy had summer break babies, I had winter break babies. But a terrible thing happened. Judy's first child was killed in August - I think it was 1997 because he was 17. He was about to enter his senior year in high school. He was driving home from his summer job and stopped at a stoplight at Nevada Avenue and -- I think it was Military. This dump truck with defective brakes comes roaring down the hill, swerves to miss another car, and flips over onto Ben's car, squashing it flat. That intersection is near our house. There's a planter with flowers in it to mark the spot.

JL: That was her first child? I couldn't go by that place either.

WWW: Every time I go by there I think of Ben. He was born four or five months before my Luke. I remember Judy gave me Ben's coming-home outfit to bring Luke home from the hospital in. But Luke was so long it didn't fit him. Anyway.

JL: Did Judy have the first child?

Page 73 of 119 WWW: Yeah, right. I recall one faculty meeting where we were accused of getting together before a faculty meeting and deciding to vote as a block, because we happened to agree with each other on something in the meeting. We hadn't. Yes, they did get a little threatened if you seemed to be seeing eye-to-eye or spending time together. JL: When you had kids what happened to your thinking?

WWW: Let's see. Luke was born in December, 1980. I think I got tenure just before that. Or maybe just after.

JL: Was he an accident? We're both making faces. LAUGHTER

WWW: He was an accident but a good accident. Do I have to tell this part? Yes, I do. This is truth, right? What happened was, I was 35 and I had fibroids and this male doctor said to me you're not going to be able to have kids but that doesn't matter because you're too old to have kids anyway. This was, I think, in January of 1980. I was just completely frosted by that comment. I was so frosted, and I went home and called Richard -- Richard was at the San Francisco on a business trip -- and said we're going to have a child. But I didn't realize how quickly it would work. So by the end of January Luke was apparently on the way. I had morning sickness. After the last class of the semester Richard and I ran over to Virginia because in that state you could get the license and get married the same day -- and we got married before a justice of the peace in Alexandria. Luke was born in December, three months after I turned 36. Now that was interesting because students can count. Obviously, I got pregnant and then I got married!

JL: I proposed not getting married at all but my husband now wouldn't go for it.

WWW: · Yeah. The only reason I did is because it was still true that single men were legally disadvantaged as parents. I felt it was important that the father have equal legal status with the mother. So anyway, Luke turned out to be a very exciting child. He had (and has) ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder). He had such trouble paying attention which meant lots of difficulties with teachers. He would break bones all the time. JL: His own or other people's?

WWW: His own! He was always taking risks. He was a wild child.

Page 75 of 119 phone at work and she is yelling at me. She yells, "Do you know where he is?" And I said "No, where is he?" She said, "I'm looking out my window and he's up in a tree." What had happened is he had forgotten to take his medicine, so he was just full of energy. He was up in the tree because he· was acting out the way he shouldn't, but always did when unmedicated. It was P.E. and the gym teacher, instead of having him run laps, which would have been the proper way to handle his overabundance of energy, told him to go sit down on the bench until he calmed down. JL: Okay.

WWW: Right. So of course he climbed the tree. JL: He had insulted him.

WWW: No, he just literally couldn't sit still. It was always like that. Of course, he had wonderful moments, too. When he was in second or third grade there was this graduate student doing a study on kids and gender and we got a call from her. I didn't even know she was doing this. She said, "In this study I am doing at the school, I tested all these kids and your son was the only one who didn't show any signs of gender bias. Can I come to your house and talk to you about why that might be so?" So, you know he's great, but he was just very wiggly-jiggly, always had something going on. JL: Did he stay at GDS?

WWW: They kept him. There were people there who loved him and took care of him. Kept him there against all the odds. When he broke both his arms though, it was like the principal just couldn't believe it. How was Luke going to do his schoolwork? He threw up his hands, and said "Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to talk to each of the teachers, and ask them what the minimum is they in good conscience are willing to require from him in order to allow him to graduate. And we're going to graduate him out of here." I mean he couldn't write. Even when his wrists weren't broken, it was hard enough for him to sit and write, and this was just the last straw. So bright, such a bright kid. He got incredible standardized test scores but his grades were so-so because he forgot to do homework or ifhe did remember, lost it before he could turn it in, and he sometimes remembered to study for tests and sometimes didn't. He was like a Cadillac with no wheels. I could tell you stories all day. Hilarious. But

Page 77 of 119 JL: Hi.

WWW: This is my spouse, Richard Diamond.

JL: Do you want me to stop?

WWW: No. Do you want me to stop?

Richard: Ah, no.

WWW: Okay, okay, alright. END OF INTERRUPTION

WWW: So, that was it. When Luke was still a baby - he must have been about six months old -- I went to a Women In Law conference, and Richard came along to take of him. [To Richard]: People teased you about that didn't they? Your colleagues at work teased you because you went to take care of Luke while I was doing this.

Richard: [Richard claims that when WWW found out she was going to have a boy, she told her research assistant and when a friend of Wendy's called to see how she was, the research assistant answered the phone and told the friend, "Bad news. It's a boy."]

WWW: I don't believe that story. That story has gotten told and retold. I don't think it's a true story. You know, both times I was pregnant I got tested to make sure there weren't birth defects, which also reveals whether the fetus is a boy or a girl, so I knew early on that I was having boys. Richard: I'm remembering the story about Luke fracturing his skull.

WWW: Oh, I left out the fractured skull story. An organization called CHADD, a national advocacy group for people with ADHD, had their very first national conference in Washington. Richard and I wanted to go, because Luke had been diagnosed with ADHD. For some reason our normal child care arrangement fell through that day, so I took Luke with me to work and I got my research assistants to take care of him while Richard and I went to the afternoon workshops at the CHADD conference. JL: How old was he at that point?

Richard: 10.

WWW: Yeah, and he was a wild child. So my two research assistants had taken care of him. I get back to the Law School from the CHADD conference ... Page 79 of 119 At some point he discovered that if he held his breath, alarms would go off and nurses would come running. When I heard that, I knew he was going to be fine.

JL: What!!! Did you ever reconstruct what happened to him?

WWW: He couldn't remember because he was in La La Land. JL: Yeah.

WWW: But, I think they were playing airplane with him and the RA was on her back and zooming him up in the air on her feet. And somehow he zoomed too far and fell on his head.

JL: Oh my God.

WWW: Or against furniture or something. I don't know. So, life with Luke was always exciting, it was always like that. JL: That's the kind of thing where Child Protective Services looks at it and goes, yeah.

WWW: Yeah. That was scary.

Richard: I don't know why you are doing this interview.

WWW: It's Women Trailblazers in the Law.

Richard: Thank you. I thought you might be from Child Protective Services. JL: [Laughter.]

WWW: [Laughter.] Poor Luke!

JL: No, I'm a defense lawyer. Richard: Forget our Luke stories. It just goes on and on and on .... WWW: But this is sort of back to how it changed ... . JL: Changed what you taught? Or the way .. .

WWW: I remember teaching Women in the Law when I was pregnant and one class session was on abortion law.. And it was an interesting feeling, you know. I said it out loud. !said, "I'm pregnant and here we are talking about this. This is really interesting, you know." But I felt then what I

Page 81 of 119 Richard: That's not exactly true. We gave him the choice between the dog and a brother.

JL: And he opted for the brother?

Richard: He took the brother -- until the brother arrived.

WWW: He had second thoughts. But actually, they have been really important to each other and are to this day in a special way. So, Ethan's just graduating from Georgetown undergrad. He's a great kid. He was so much easier. So, in that sense, ... Richard: You might want to add to this story.

JL: Go ahead.

Richard: [To JL]: Did she tell you about the Bork hearings? 26

JL: No. What happened?

Richard: First of all, I was driving carpool that afternoon and we were in the car and listening to the radio. And suddenly there's Wendy's voice on the radio, testifying against the Bork nomination. So Luke does this report to his class on Bork. When was this?

WWW: Well, it was whenever Bork was up for Supreme Court. JL: Supreme Court, right.

Richard: The paper consisted of colored pages and it starts out, Bork is a bad man.

WWW: I had forgotten that.

Richard: I remember the wonderful Women's marches. Wendy took the kids.

WWW: That was fun. I also remember taking my kids to the Gay Pride march.

JL: Really, exciting.

WWW: When they were about you know 4 and 10, and thinking, I wonder how this looks to them. You know, one of the interesting things is for young people today what the civil rights movement and women's movement

26 Robert Bork had been nominated by President Reagan for a seat on the Supreme Court and Senate Judiciary Committee hearings were held in September, 1987. A majority of the committee recommended against Bork's nomination and the Senate ultimately voted not to confirm him. Page 83 of 119 JL: Interesting that you were so involved in the pregnancy issue and thinking that you weren't going to do it yourself.

WWW: Right. Well, it was, yes, but mind you, by the time the Family and Medical Leave Act passed in 1993, I had children. But the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was before I had any children. It was probably just because the Aiello case happened to come to me as a young lawyer. In its coming to me I learned a lot about all of these things. It might have even have opened me up to the idea of being a mother in a funny way. Because I'd been thinking so long about the workplace-family nexus issues and I'd served on a committee for the Bush Center at Yale that was looking at the workplace-family nexus issues.27 So I was just so lucky. I was born at the right time. Go figure. I mean, I was just a kid from No Place, California. I just happened to be there at the moment when things were opening up and allowing me to really do some good work- and not think I had to give it up because I had children. I think I did make a contribution. Not alone, of course, but as part of a movement with other people. We as a group really made a difference. That feels good. Girls and women have so much latitude now that we didn't have back then. My daughter-in-law is in some ways a girly girl but also a marathon runner.

JL: Wow.

WWW: When I was a girl we weren't even suppos~d to run around the park; it might affect our reproductive organs.

JL: We didn't play full court basketball.

WWW: Half-court basketball. I still laugh about that. You'd go running along, you'd have the ball and, screeeeech, you'd have to stop right at that middle line. I was tall. You were tall. We could have been ....

JL: Yeah, but I was uncoordinated.

WWW: Oh, well, I'm riot that coordinated either. But who knows how coordinated we would have been if we'd been allowed. But we spent all our time in high school gym waiting for the two days we could opt out because it was our menstrual period.

27 The Bush Center is now the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy, named after Edward Zigler, who was running the Bush Center when WWW worked on the study. Page 85 of 119 Crocker." And I said, "Oh, I completely agree with you." He looked alarmed and said, "Oh, oh, I didn't mean it that way." [Laughter]. I think he was just regretting letting go. He didn't really think she shouldn't do it. I of course viewed it as a matter of feminist principle. LAUGHTER. It was hilarious. It's been really great having the boys. Much easier! JL: Well, I guess it's human nature. You love one after ... WWW: You love whoever arrives.

JL: Yes.

WWW: It was not a contest. And that was the other good thing, too. I worried, would I be too into my work. But they always came first even though I was a full time wage earner.

JL: You're biologically programmed.

WWW: And a good thing it is that we are!

JL: Because otherwise nobody would go through it. Are you kidding?

WWW: Messy little diapers! And now when I smell a baby those pheromones still kick in. You feel like this little somebody needs to be taken care of here. It's so cool.

JL: I've always said the reason why two year olds are so cute is because otherwise you'd drown them.

WWW: That's exactly right. Exactly. Oh my God, it's so true.

JL: And your own are different from other people's. I mean they smell right to you.

WWW: Yes, they do. And until they become teenagers and start shoving real hard, we smell right to them. And then all of a sudden, it's "Stay away from me."

JL: But I'm sure that's biological programming, too.

WWW: Oh, yes. ·

JL: It's not like they stay around forever. WWW: I was telling somebody who has four teenagers ....

Page 87 of 119 needs a flashier title. It's really something that hasn't been done yet which is a book you could use for law teaching purposes. They've done books like this on women's history as history. But the law and women's history needs done. I have a co-author on that, Richard Chused, and I have great stuff. A couple of summers ago, I was in London and I went to the British library. Great stuff. The chapters I'm working on are the law and women's reproduction and sexuality. Just fantastic and really interesting and I have some great stuff, I just have write it down. So I figure if I'm 64 now I should be able to finish all this by the time I'm 70. And I did retire so I can do this. Yeah, Barbara was an inspiration. Definitely.

JL: Tell me a little bit about the Ruth Ginsburg biography. Not to steal from publisher. WWW: Well, you know .... I have a coauthor named Mary Hartnett. Mary Hartnett was my student at Georgetown way back when, and then she became head of a program . . . Oh, that's the other thing that I did. I'm so fortunate to be able to do. Remember when we were talking about ... You were asking an international law question. And I got off on something else. I have two other things to say about international women's rights. I wasn't an international women's rights expert except that I had this Swedish model for work and family on my mind when I was working on the pregnancy issue. But that changed. I'd been one of the co-founders of a program at Georgetown called the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program, which took graduates of American law schools committed to women's rights. We ran seminar for them and placed them with organizations in the Washington area where they would work on women's issues of various kinds. We started that about 25 years ago. And then, 10 years in, we added our program on African women's rights, called LAW A - Leadership and Advocacy for Women in Africa Fellowship Program. We got some money for it and it became part of WLPPF program. And that was so fantastic for me. It was a window on a world that was totally unfamiliar. I learned so much from them. So, you know, part of my heart is really in Africa now. We initially had law fellows from Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana. Then that funding ran out, but we got some from to bring women lawyers from Southern Africa. We had South Africans, some Swazilanders, some from Zimbabwe and Botswana. I could talk about it all day. And then Sierra Leone. And this

Page 89 of 119 WWW: And I took my aged mother, too. She had a wonderful time. JL: My mother went to Beijing. I didn't go, but my mother ... WWW: [Laughter] Yeah. So you know international is indeed now a very important part of my perspective. It's Africa-centric international, but of course, in order to teach international human rights, I have to understand the European structure and the structure of women's human rights in the Americas. So that's been a wonderful experience for me. But back to Ruth Ginsburg. When she finished her clerkship, one of her law professors persuaded her to come back to Columbia for two years to work on something they called the International Procedure Project. And her assignment was to write about civil procedure in Sweden. So, she learns Swedish and off she goes to Sweden. She arrives just as women's equality becomes a big issue in Sweden, after this woman, Eva Moberg, wrote a commentary in a Swedish newspaper which really rang true to Ruth, about women's double burden. Moberg said women had to do all the house work and they had to work outside the home for pay, and it wasn't fair. She argued that men should carry their fair share at home. The result was the Swedish government made policies designed to address the double burden of women. So Ruth Ginsburg, the internationalist, also got a good dose of feminism which, seven or eight years later, bore fruit when she took on women's equality in the United-States. In her first brief to the Supreme Court, she cites the precursor to the International Women's Rights Convention. What's it called? JL: The Convention?

WWW: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 31 And that's in her brief in Reed. There's also a reference to Sweden's efforts on women's equality.

JL: So it's all about the network.

WWW: Right. So she's been an internationalist all along. And she's always been the world traveler, not as a child, because her family could not have

31 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Dec. 10, 1948): "Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex,. language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status." Page 91 of 119 Women Trailblazers Project Wendy Williams Oral History Interview #3 Interviewer - Jennifer Lyman December 15, 2010

JL: Okay, this is Jenny Lyman interviewing Wendy Williams for the purpose of completing an oral history initiated in 2006. It is now December 15, 2010. So we're covering a little history right here.

WWW: I think we're making history because we're probably the last people to get our transcript in.

JL: Oh, I bet not. I think there is somebody later.

WWW: There has got to be somebody later.

JL: Okay. We had begun to talk about your kids when we last spoke.

WWW: Yes, my kids. Yes, and I had explained how Luke broke both his wrists when he was a senior in high school. There is actually a sequel to that and the sequel is so he broke both of his wrists and he was a senior and two things came out of that. One was that the school decided it was hopeless to expect anything more of him and to just pass him on to the next stop. JL: What time of year was this?

WWW: It must have been November or December - or maybe January. JL: Early.

WWW: Early. And the second thing was in order that he could at least unzip his pants and go to the bathroom by himself we persuaded the doctor to check the wrists and have the wrist that was least damaged be in a kind of splint rather than a cast so he could zip and unzip his pants. JL: Opposing thumb kind of thing.

WWW: Opposing thumbs, exactly. Well, so, Luke being Luke JL: How about elastic waistbands.

Page 93 of 119 there. He came home and said, "There is this girl there and I think she's interested in me." We learned later she had gone home and said to her parents "There are these two crazy guys in my class." (Luke commuted to school with an even crazier guy and I think she thought they were kind of fun). So within a month or two Luke and Penelope were a pair and they got married in April, 2006, go figure. Ruth Ginsburg did the ceremony, it was a hoot. She had gone to his baby shower back in 1980, so I guess this was just a follow-up. When she declared Luke and Penelope married "under the authority vested in me by the United States Constitution, all the lawyers at the just swooned. It was a huge wedding. His wife is five years older than he is and very, very energetic and capable. Before she went to culinary school she had been an event planner for Ritz Carleton so she put the whole wedding together. It was her masterpiece. She loves dogs so I have two grand-dogs now. That's the very exciting part of my life, my grand-dogs. And Luke went on to cook. He was first at a little place in Bethesda called Persimmon which w.as quite wonderful. JL: Yeah, I've read reviews of it.

WWW: It's good, it's very good. And then he moved on up from there to Palena, in D.C. He was at Palena until he had done all the stations and learned everything he could and then he moved on up to CityZen in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We can't afford to go there but I hear it's very good. [Laughing.] No, actually we went there for our 30th anniversary which is a few months before Luke's birthday and so it was great, it was really amazing to watch him. They have an open kitchen, so the customers can watch the cooks in action. I was totally impressed.

JL: Oh wow.

WWW: Now, he's done all the hard stations like fish and meat there but the one thing he hadn't done at any of his restaurants was he hadn't done desserts because he was trained as a cook not a pastry chef. So he talked the head chef into letting him learn pastries, which is what he's doing now. And when he's done doing pastries there is no place to go except set up his own restaurant or change directions, so he's decided to go back to college. He's trying to talk Maryland into taking him back and letting him complete his

Page 95 of 119 you don't get anything for a long time. So there was one period when they claimed they almost starved to death. The vice principal of Ethan's school came over and got us to sign a waiver of liability!

JL: I'll bet, I'll bet.

WWW: The guys stayed in The Cube until the vice principle came back to tell them that they had to come out for the final year-end assembly at the school, so they came out. They stunk, oh, did they stink. And somebody brought them roses, there was a little presentation in front of the garage and they posed for pictures, and then off they went to school smelly with their roses. In The Cube they had a little webcam tracking their every move (except for when they went into the corner where the litter box was) --they were on the web and over at Sidwell, which, as you know, is another private school in this area, somebody at Sidwell heard about the guys in The Cube and started watching it and ... JL: This was being broadcast?

WWW: This was·being streamed so people all over Washington were watching them but Sidwell had to tell the students that they couldn't watch because school was coming to a halt while the kids all watched the webcam.

JL: What school was he at?

WWW: He was at Georgetown Day School. JL: One- up Sidwell.

WWW: Right, exactly, exactly.

JL: And so did they have to write a paper?

WWW: They had to do a presentation on their projects. And so all these students stood up in front of all their families and explained how they did these environmental projects or went to South America and helped little children or went to a hospital and comforted patients, etc. But my son, Ethan, was in a black box and stunk. That was it. So anyway he is just a funny, funny kid. He's very funny. In spite of how sweet-goofy he is, he did get into college, he went to Georgetown, he actually graduated with decent grades and his major was computer science. And while he was there he was in the standup comedy club and also played drums in a band.

Page 97 of 119 WWW: At some point when he was a teenager, I realized it was just a matter of keeping him alive, that was my job.

JL: How did you do going to school and

WWW: · Because there is this wonderful woman named Ladorsa Nelson who basically was a housekeeper with a tremendously good sense of humor and infinite calm and patience and when I wasn't there she was there and vice versa.

JL: How did you find her?

WWW: Weli, because we hired a woman who turned out to be her aunt-in-law when Luke was really little, and when Shirley, her aunt-in-law, was having health difficulties and couldn't really do the housework anymore, Ladorsa would come and help out with that and she was so terrific. She was very young then. She had a boy about Luke's age and a girl a little younger. And her husband turned up with roses on her birthday. I mean it was just lovely and she has taken care of my boys ever since. We just got very lucky. And when we moved here to Northwest Washington from the Hill she kept commuting here. She still comes.

JL: How old were they, the boys, when you moved from the Hill?

WWW: Ethan was probably three or four which means that Luke was six years older than that. They are six years and six days apart. With Luke at some points I could not have a social life basically and it was just scary but we got through it and he's great now. He's doing really well.

JL: Were you scared for him, for you, talk about that.

WWW: Both. Yes, I was very afraid for him. He was so impulsive I was afraid he would accidently kill himself or somebody else. For example, when he was 18 or 19 we went on vacation and he was staying in the house and he and a couple of friends starting drinking and they jumped off our roof and one of them, this young woman, broke both her ankles. That kind of thing was always happening. Luke himself was always breaking bones and stuff like that. The way he broke his wrists when he was a senior was, he was trying to impress a girl, and leaped off a table thinking he would grab a pole a few feet away and swing himself around it, but he missed. And now we know that ADHD involves a certain slowed development in the

Page 99 of 119 JL: Especially when he was a teenager ... WWW: When he was a teenager. So it was just very difficult. And it wasn't a productive time of my life in terms of work but it was definitely productive in terms of, you know, learning about how to be calm and take care of this wild child. So it was good. And so I sort of dropped out, I didn't get to go to conferences and stuff. And at one point I was head of an AALS committee and I had to withdraw when he was going through a particularly bad time.

JL: We should say that's the Association of American Law Schools.

WWW: I had to quit, right. I felt terrible about it but I just couldn't keep going on that, I had to withdraw from it when he was at his most exciting. So it was quite an experience, very rewarding in some ways, incredibly hard in others.

JL: How did it affect your view of all these sort of women's movement things that you had been doing?

WWW: I remained a total feminist and still am, that's the truth. But

JL: Unapologetic I think.

WWW: I'm unapologetic, right! I am unapologetic, yes, unreconstructed . . Sometimes I even let my hair in my armpits grow just in honor of [Laughing].

JL: And no· manicures.

WWW: And no manicures, damn it. I haven't worn a skirt since I was 50 which is now 16 years ago. When I turned 50 I said this is the end, no more skirts, no more pantyhose, no more high heels, that was it. So, you know, in a way I'm just as nutty as ever. I have really loved teaching but I've retired so I can work full-time on the Ginsburg book. And that's been working very well. I also did a semester at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and something very wonderful happened there, which is that there were several people there working on biographies while I was working on the biography of Ruth Ginsburg. One, Mary Ellen Curtin, is doing a biography of Barbara Jordan; one of them, Robyn Muncy, is doing a biography of a woman whose name I keep forgetting, Josephine Roche,

Page 101 of 119 WWW: Yes, the ACLU Women's Rights Project. So Dorothy Kenyon got to see this happening before she died. Well, one of the people in the Red Line group Philippa Strum, is now doing her biography.

JL: Spell the last name just for the record.

WWW: STRUM. And it's Philip plus an extra panda. And we call her Flip. And she is my role model. She's 71 -- I think her birthday is today in fact, I'll have to call her. And she is just -- she's amazing. JL: Is this all women, these biographers?

WWW: No, there are two guys in the Redline Group. One of the guys lives on the other coast but he drops in whenever he's in town. He's wonderful. Salim Yaqub. He teaches history at U.C. Santa Barbara. And the one who lives here is Matt. Matt's father is a famous historian, Robert Dallek; this is Matt Dallek, his son. And he's just a joy. He makes the salads for our monthly meetings. He makes great salads. He's our salad person. And so we're a group of five typically and then when the others are in town, they come. One of the out-of-towners is Patricia Sullivan who just wrote a book on the early NAACP. 36 She finished her book.

JL: So it doesn't have to be a biography strictly.

WWW: Not strictly. But that's kind of like a biography - a biography of an organization.

JL: But I can see why you would be motivated to pick another biography as your next project.

WWW: Right. So it's just been a wonderful suppqrt group and I think we'll all be together until all of us get our books done. One of us, Marie Therese Connolly (we call her MT) is not doing a biography but she's writing a book on elder abuse.37 And she's the only other lawyer in the group like I am. And it's such a depressing subject that the way she is choosing to do it is, she's focusing on several different kinds of people in this country who have committed their lives working on this issue. And they are a very

36 Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (2009).

37 In December 2010, MT Connolly received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award" to support her work, including the book, on elder abuse. Page 103 of 119 JL: So is there a group theme in your life here? There sort of seems as though there might be. You know -- the consciousness raising groups, the group that formed the Equal Rights Advocates .... WWW: I have one more group in my life, one more spectacular group in my life, that I don't think I've talked about yet. When I came to this coast from the left coast it was pretty disconcerting because I had always lived in California. But there were some other feminist lawyers on this coast and two of them together had bought this run-down old house out on Long Island near Sag Harbor. So in honor of my making this huge transition they invited me up to their cabin up there for a weekend and every year since that time -- every year since 1976 -- we've gathered. We call it the Wendy Weekend and it is sacred.

JL: A whole weekend of your own.

WWW: Of our own. Well, I guess poor Richard would have to take care of Luke and Ethan 3B all by himself when I would go to Wendy weekend. But it's been a stunning experience. And the reason it's so stunning is we're all lawyers and mostly women's rights lawyers and it's just been amazing to continue to meet with Nancy Stearns, Rhonda Copelan and the rest as we change, grow old. One of us died recently: Rhonda Copelan died of ovarian cancer which she fought like crazy. She was ·really amazing. But she had been one of the early, pre-Roe abortion litigators along with Nancy Stearns, and then after that there was an abortion case called Harris vs. McRae, which is a case about poor women and their ability to get abortions under Medicaid. 39 Well, Rhonda argued that case before the Supreme Court. It practically broke her heart. Nancy Stearns taught one of the earliest women in law courses in the country and she was with the Center for Constitutional Rights as was Rhonda Copelan in the 1970s. The two of them did their work through CCR initially. Later, Rhonda

38 WWW: One exception: When Ethan was 6 or 7 months old, I took him with me to Wendy Weekend. He was the star of the show until he ate some egg, which he was apparently allergic to, because he broke out in hives all over his little body and we had to rush him to a hospital. After a shot of something or other, he slept for several hours while his rash receded, and when he woke up was none the worse for wear.

39 Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 297 (1980) (The Court held, 5-4, that the Hyde Amendment, which excluded abortions from the conditions for which funding was available under Medicaid Act, did not violate either the Fifth Amendment or the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.) Page 105 of 119 Mama and sometimes at the Metropolitan Room. She also sang several times at Barnes and Noble in midtown. She's got some CDs out. Rhonda was there at her most recent show, this past April. She was in a wheelchair by then. She died on May 8. The Weekenders along with a much larger group, a network of women lawyers, feminists, shows up for all Nancy's shows and it's just a hoot, like a family reunion.

JL: So you really have more than one meeting a year.

WWW: Yes, but we still go to Long Island for Wendy Weekend in the summer. And this little shack is now better, it's better. Nancy has done lots of work on it. Nancy and Rhonda, being people so totally different that it's almost scary, had trouble co-owning a house, so

JL: They weren't partners in life or they were?

WWW: They were work partners, they were not romantic partners. Nancy went for men and Rhonda went for women. So Rhonda built another little house nearby and we've have these two houses and our group has met every year and in the last ten or so years, maybe 15 -- it's been going on for 30-something years now, I think this was our 33rd --we've journaled, so we have in writing a kind of time lapse photography of the lives of each these women, their work, their loves, their losses. Rhonda was the second ofus to die. First was Mary Dunlap, my partner from Equal Rights Advocates, who would come out from San Francisco most years for the Weekend. She died of cancer, too, in January of 2003, pancreatic cancer.40 Another extraordinary, larger-than-life, person. Rhonda was my age when she died (we were born the same month, September) but Mary was only 54.

JL: Oh my goodness, so you've been journaling ever since for just the last 15 years?

WWW: For the last 15 or 16 years, yeah, it occurred to us that that we weren't going to be meeting forever. So that's been just a great part of my life, too.

JL: Did you know Nancy and Rhonda before you went for your first Wendy Weekend?

40 See Commentary: A Tribute to the Life of Mary C. Dunlap, 19 Berkeley Women's L. J. 1 (2004). (WWW's tribute to Mary is at p. 12.) Page 107 of 119 Rhonda and Nancy and I were always there and Mary Dunlap and Nancy Davis from ERA, other friends, and Ruth Ginsburg was there a lot and Barbara Babcock was there and it was just it was a huge success in terms of educating large numbers of law students, lawyers, judges, law professors, legal people about the issues and also inspiring activism on behalf of women's rights.

JL: So it wasn't just the elite litigators.

WWW: Oh no. It was open. And there were several hundred people there after a while and it was just wonderful. And they would bring in all these lawyers and law professors to talk about subjects within their expertise. JL: What was the group that made this happen?

WWW: Well, it started in the New York area and I've never been able to quite get this right but I think NYU had the first one where it was just invitational and before that Columbia had gotten together with NYU and had a conference just for the law schools in the New York area but then it went national. I think it was at Chicago Law School its second year and UC Berkeley its third, although it may have been the other way around. JL: So it wasn't like a 501(c)(3) or some kind ... WWW: It probably was at some point, it probably became a 501(c)(3). I don't know that for a fact but it probably did. And there are people who know the answer but I don't know the answer yet and I've been trying to find out. I think I was even on the board for a while, but my memory of all that is dim.

JL: I just wondered because one of the sorts of threads in feminism was we're going to organize ourselves differently, you know we're going to structure ourselves differently.

WWW: Yeah, right. Well, in the beginning, it was like that, it was all horizontal but horizontal some people decided was not that efficient I guess so there was a little less· horizontalness as time went on.

JL: A little verticality.

WWW: · Got some verticality in there but the conferences themselves were extraordinary because they dealt with all the areas of the law which had

Page 109 of 119 WWW: Well, I still put a lot of mental and emotional energy into Luke but he was in good hands and as I gained confidence that he was in good hands I was able to do more things. But I tended to do things that I could do more locally. And then one day, it. must have been in the spring of 2004, Mary Hartnett said to me "You know, I have a zany idea." JL: Where was she at this point?

WWW: She was running our Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program JL: At Georgetown.

WWW: At Georgetown. Oh, that's another great joy of my life -- the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship Program. But put that aside for a moment. Mary said, "Why don't you and I do a biography of Ruth Ginsburg," and I said "Oh no, I don't have time·. Teaching takes up too much time. It's a huge project, blah, blah, blah." But then, coming up was a big event at the Library of Congress41 which involved a new webpage on women and a conference. They had a keynote panel which included Ruth Ginsburg and Sandra O'Connor and I was asked to be the moderator. And I said to Mary, "Let me see how this goes, I'm going to do a little biographical introduction of the Justices and see how I feel about this. And then afterwards I'll give it some more thought and if I'm willing to commit my life to this -- because that is what it will take -- we'll do it." So the Library of Congress panel went well and I enjoyed it and I thought about it and I thought somebody needs to do Ruth Ginsburg right. JL: What was your approach to her, to Ruth?

WWW: So I say, "Mary, let's see what she thinks." So we hem and haw and finally we write her a little note and we say we're thinking of doing a biography of you.

JL: Got to stop you. Is the note on e-mail, by letter?

WWW: I think we actually put it on vellum. I think we did it on Georgetown letterhead. And so JL: Handwritten or typed?

41 Resourceful Women Symposium, Library of Congress, June 19-20, 2003, see http://www.loc.gov/rr/women/awprogram.html. Page 111 of 119 Herma asked Ruth if she would like to join her in writing a casebook on sex discrimination, which they did together. And Barbara Babcock, of course, was working with Ann Freedman and others on another casebook, that was part of what the conference was about. And so I surely met Ruth there but don't remember. 42 The next time might have been I was working on the Geduldig v. Aiello case. 43 Aiello was coming up through the courts and Ruth had had a case called Struck v. Secretary of Defense, like Aiello a case involving discrimination based on pregnancy under the Equal Protection Clause. (Actually, I just went to interview Susan Struck in Tombstone, Arizona the week before last.)

JL: Oh, my Gosh.

WWW: The Court had granted review in Ruth Ginsburg's Struck case JL: In the Supreme Court.

WWW: In the Supreme Court, but the Navy had granted relief to Susan Struck soon after the Court decided to hear it and that mooted the case. 44 Jane Picker of the Women's Law Fund of Cleveland had the next pregnancy case the Court took, but in her case the Court dodged the Equal Protection question and held that the mandatory imposition of maternity leave on teachers months before their due date and for months after the baby was . born, even though many were perfectly capable of working, violated due process. I traveled all the way from California to Washington DC to hear Jane Picker's oral argument in that case, LaFleur,45 and when I got back home I learned that the Court had decided to review Geduldig v. Aiello on the same day that LaFleur was argued. Ruth Ginsburg not only had her own pregnancy case but was also on the Women's Law Fund Board and she was keeping an eye on me and my pregnancy case out in California. She was also the on the ABA Journal Editorial Board. Somewhere along the line she got Jane on Board and then she got me on there for a while, so

42 The Ginsburg-Kay and Babcock et al casebooks are discussed in the Dec. 19, 2008 interview, supra.

43 Geduldig v. Aiello is discussed in the Dec. 19, 2008 interview.

44 Struck v. Secretary of Defense, 460 F.2d 1372 (9th Cir. Nov. 1971), remanded for determination of mootness, 409 U.S. 1071 (December 1972).

45 Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, 414 U.S. 632 (Jan. 1974). Page 113 of 119 was working for the Carnegie Foundation, Eli had funded that 1971 Yale conference on teaching women and law, funded the work on Barbara's casebook, and also funded Equal Rights Advocates, which was designed as a litigation clinic with Stanford Law School, and Barbara, by then the first woman on the Stanford Law faculty, was the faculty advisor and co-taught with us a seminar for the students. After years at Carnegie, Eli switched to another foundation, the Revson Foundation. Well, in the early1980s he was out roaming around JL: Giving money away.

WWW: Giving Revson money away for women's rights training -- so he calls up his feminist law school friend Eleanor Norton. He calls up Eleanor and he wants to fund an organization that will do fellowships and training for young lawyers who want to do women's equality work. Eleanor and I were both teaching at Georgetown Law by this time, and he also talked to the two 501(c)(3) national women's law groups in Washington, the National Women's Law Center and what is now the Partnership for Women and Families, but used to be Women's Legal Defense Fund. He said he was prepared to fund this thing, and would we do it. Well, of course. So the Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship program began as a U.S. program in 1983, housed at Georgetown. Its board of directors included Eleanor Norton, Judy Lichtman of the Partnership for Women and Families, Marcia Greenberger of the National Women's Law Center and me. Our first director of the Program was Susan Ross, who Georgetown had just hired to do its women's rights clinic. We brought recent graduates. from law schools from around the country interested in and qualified to do women's rights law and worked with them. Each was assigned to a Washington DC "placement," where she (or an occasional he) would work on some aspect of women's rights. The fellows would meet together weekly or biweekly for a seminar at the law school where they reported on their own work and heard experts speak. For field trips, we took them to lunch annually with Justice Ginsburg at the Supreme Court and, when Eleanor Norton became the DC representative in Congress, lunch with Eleanor at the Capitol. Still do! If you go and look at the super structure today oflawyers and law professors doing women's rights work, a large percentage of them have come through our WLPPF program. And they do great things. And after about ten years of that we got some funding to bring women lawyers from Africa for graduate training in

Page 115 of 119 WWW: Yes. Later we had plenty of alums over there who could

JL: Do the vetting for you.

WWW: Do the vetting for us and it saved us money. And we've had lawyers from Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Kenya recently, and what is the name of that little bitty country that is sort of a little island in South Africa?

JL: Oh, Botswana ..

WWW: We've had fellows from Botswana and also Tanzania. But I'm thinking of a small kingdom whose king with many wives. JL: Lesotho.

WWW: Not Lesotho but like that. JL: That's not how you say that. You pronounce some other way.

WWW: Leso-toe, but it's got a "th" when you spell it.

JL: I know it does, I know it does. I knew someone who was a Peace Corps volunteer there and he was always very insistent on the pronunciation.

WWW: Swaziland, that's what I'm thinking of. Anyhow, I just thoroughly enjoyed that program. We had a big reunion for the 20th anniversary. Ruth Ginsburg and Eleanor Norton spoke and we honored Eli Evans, our benefactor, who was retiring that year. It was terrific. We also raised some money and took current and former LAW As with us to Beijing for the International Women's Conference in 1995.

JL: So we've been going for a while and I don't want wear you out.

WWW: I actually have to go in about six minutes.

JL: 0 kay. Can you talk just briefly about some of the revisionism in feminism and where you came .out in that?

WWW: Well, that might take the whole six minutes! That's a subject of great interest to me. We humans always have to be doing or saying something new which is probably why we're taking over the world and ruining it. But so there are styles and everybody is working towards the newest best way to be. Academics are certainly like that, because they're supposed to

Page 117 of 119 published an article called A Love Letter to Ruth Ginsburg 47 and started talking about how the threads of critique of subordination of women was there, all along. Well, duh, as my sons would say. That is when I knew that what goes around comes around. My own experience of reading and pondering these various feminisms as they have come along has been that every piece of it has enriched and challenged and deepened my own thinking. For many_years I taught courses on women in law and also taught feminist legal theory as part of a first year class called Legal Justice and I've just gotten a big kick out of it. And then I've gotten really interested in going back in history and seeing where it came from and how it has developed and so ... JL: So there is the biography of Ruth Ginsburg.

WWW: Yes! And one last thing on my own efforts. I also coauthored a casebook which was a revision and extension of the original Barbara Babcock casebook. I did the history section and also the modern constitutional rights section. And it was just so much fun to do and the experience has been invaluable in working through Ruth Ginsburg's contribution. You know, I'm a very happy camper right now. I'm doing exactly what I most want to do.

JL: Well, that's a lovely place to end. Thank you.

47 Catherine A. MacKinnon, A Love Letter to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 31 Women's Rights Law Reporter 177 (2010). Page 119 of 119