Two Women, Two Histories
A feminist, an antifeminist, and their exercise of power
by Serena Mayeri
As the second world war drew to a close, two women thought about applying to Harvard Law School.
The first was an African-American native of North Carolina, the granddaughter of a slave and the great-granddaughter of a slave-owner, who had moved North for college, survived the lean years of the Depression, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and sought unsuccessfully to do graduate work in sociology at the all-white University of North Carolina. When instead she finished Howard Law School at the top of her class, she sought the fellowship traditionally awarded to Howard’s best student: a year at Harvard to complete a master’s of law degree. But, wrote the admissions committee, “Your picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that you are not of the sex entitled to be admitted to Harvard Law School.” The woman did not take this rejection sitting down. She was accustomed to standing her ground, after leading some of the first sit-ins for desegregation in the early 1940s and refusing to sit in the back of the bus years before Rosa Parks famously inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott. After an unsuccessful letter-writing campaign that included supportive intervention from FDR himself, the woman obtained her master’s from Boalt Hall, University of California at Berkeley, and eventually became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Yale Law School.
Illustration of Pauli Murray by Scott Laumann
She went on to play a pivotal role in the history of modern feminism: as a founding member of the National Organization for Women, an American Civil Liberties Union strategist who paved the way for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successful litigation campaign for women’s rights before the Supreme Court, a curricular innovator in the study of gender and race as a professor of law and politics at Brandeis, and eventually one of the first female Episcopal priests.
Illustration of Phyllis Schlafly by Scott Laumann
The second woman who thought about applying to law school was a Midwesterner of Scottish descent, educated in Catholic schools paid for by her mother’s hard-earned wages. After politely defying her teachers by declining a full scholarship to a local Catholic college, this woman spent the war acing a full course load in political science at her state’s best university by day, and working eight-hour shifts testing firearms in a munitions factory by night. Upon her graduation, Columbia, Radcliffe, and Wellesley all offered her financial aid for graduate study; she chose correctly, and so impressed her Radcliffe professors that one offered to sponsor her application to law school. The steep cost of a legal education led her to decline, and she was off to Washington to seek a job in the federal government.
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