THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Judith Lichtman
“I know from experience – if we can imagine it, we can make it happen.“
Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, July 2019
MJC: Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about before you got involved in the women’s movement.
JL: I grew up in New York City. I was born in Brooklyn, grew up on the southern tip of Queens in a tiny little town called Far Rockaway, a wonderful way to grow up, in the 1940s and 1950s. I was born in 1940. Anybody wonder how old I am? I’m 83 years old.
[I had] two extraordinary parents – my sister and I were brought up to believe that you were put on this earth to make it a better place. My parents’ politics were very liberal. My mother died at 106 and her politics were very liberal.
We were proud of our Jewish heritage. We were not very religious people, but we believed in the basic tenets of Judaism: to make this world a better place.
So, my parents, as good liberals of the 1940s and 1950s, believed wholeheartedly that their two daughters needed to be economically independent. They thought education was our pathway to that economic independence. They didn’t have a lot of money; they were working class people. My parents didn’t graduate from high school. They got GEDs when I was in law school, and my sister by then was working on her PhD.
My parents dropped out of high school (my dad was the oldest of six, my mother the youngest of six) because their families needed their economic support. It was the depression. There was not a lot of room for going to school. They were creatures of their time. Had they been born in a different time, I have no doubt they would have been superior candidates for higher education.
I grew up in a very safe, nurturing, large family.
MJC: Tell me about your education and preparation for that economic independence.
JL: I started out going to Hofstra College on Long Island and commuting. The summer of my sophomore year, I went to the University of Wisconsin for summer school and fell in love with Madison and basically never went home again. I did go back to Hofstra for the first semester of my junior year, because they didn’t have enough dorm rooms at Wisconsin. I transferred to the University of Wisconsin in January 1961 and finished my undergraduate degree there.
I am very much a product of being mentored. I had a wonderful undergraduate teacher named Shirley Abrahamson who retired from the Wisconsin Supreme Court a few years ago after many decades. She was a very important member of that court, much attacked by the right wing and conservatives. When I was at Wisconsin, she was a brand-new lawyer herself, teaching an undergraduate course in constitutional law.
The University of Wisconsin had a lot of funny rules, one of which was that you didn’t have to take the LSAT if you had at least a minimum average of B from the Madison campus. With a B average you were automatically admitted to the law school. There were only two of us women in the law school out of a class of one hundred and fifty.
I asked Shirley to write a reference for me so that I could apply for a PhD in American political theory. Applying to graduate school in American Political Theory was non-traditional in 1961 and 1962. Shirley, knowing me a little bit as my teacher in con law [knew] that it wasn’t an activist enough degree for me. She thought I needed to think about a law degree. I was a civil rights activist on the campus, and she thought an academic degree was not the right one for me. I have often given her all the credit but none of the blame for my choice. I graduated in June of that year with my undergraduate degree.
MJC: So, then you go through law school, and you’re involved in civil rights in Wisconsin.
JL: Yes, I went to law school because I wanted to be a civil rights activist. I was very interested and absorbed in issues of race discrimination in America and very concerned about school segregation. While I was in law school, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, and took effect. The year I graduated from law school in 1965 it became a law that was beginning to be implemented. I really thought it was an employment law.
One of Wisconsin’s other crazy rules was that it was a “diploma state.” You could get admitted to the Wisconsin bar without taking a Bar exam, but I was a New Yorker not intending to make my life in Wisconsin. I did get admitted to the Wisconsin bar and I’m still a proud and inactive member of the Wisconsin bar, but I went home and took the New York bar exam.
It took me a while to figure out how to get a job in Washington. I came in March of 1966 to work for the then U S Department of Health, Education and Welfare– first in what we would now call the Office of Civil Rights, and then pretty quickly in the general counsel’s office. My job was to tell Southern school superintendents what they had to do to comply with this new law, specifically Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law said if you get any federal money, you can’t discriminate based on race. Title VI was particularly being tested in elementary and secondary education and enforced in the context of school desegregation.
MJC: What was the experience of trying to implement a new law like?
JL: It was scary in some ways. The federal government had a couple of interesting policies for those of us lawyers going down and meeting with Southern school superintendents. One was we didn’t use a government car because people thought that was too dangerous; you rented a local car with a local license plate.
No national hotel chains were integrated in the areas where we worked, so we stayed in black neighborhoods, in hotels and motels that would allow both blacks and whites to stay there. There were very few integrated accommodations. Title II of that same civil rights act, the Public Accommodations title, also passed in 1964, was just beginning to be implemented. As one example, some southern cities and towns were closing swimming pools rather than integrating them. That was the context of these trips to the south.
MJC: Did you have any trouble as a woman getting hired by the government to do this work?
JL: No, there wasn’t a gender issue. There were very few women lawyers and at that moment the government was eager to hire lawyers who were willing to do civil rights work. So that wasn’t an issue.
MJC: That’s a very intense period of American history – we were getting new laws to try to eliminate segregation.
JL: Yes, “tried” to eliminate it is the right way to say it, because we still live with more than the vestiges. The reality is we continue to have very segregated schools in America. And now we have in our political dialogue Kamala Harris and Joe Biden talking about school busing – it’s just shocking. I thought I was the only person in America who still talked about school busing.
MJC: So, you moved to Washington. You weren’t married at that time.
JL: I wasn’t married. I met Elliott Lichtman who was an appellate lawyer arguing in courts of appeals all over the country for a federal agency called the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB. I met him through a blind date. He had already been a volunteer lawyer in Mississippi for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
I met him in July of 1966. He had been in Mississippi for a month, and he was determined to leave the NLRB and go back to Mississippi full time as soon as the Lawyers’ Committee had a slot available in their Jackson office. This guy was very committed to civil rights, doing something about the injustices of race discrimination, and he was determined to return to Mississippi.
He went back to Mississippi full-time in February of 1967 and we had this commuting relationship until the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. It was an anti-Vietnam War March. He came up to join me as a legal observer trying to make sure that people who were arrested weren’t clobbered to death. We spent the entire weekend getting people out of jail. At the end of the weekend, I said I can’t do this long distance anymore and he said OK, I think we should get married.
We married two months later at the end of December 1967. We bought a tiny little house in a wonderful, brand new black neighborhood in Jackson. It was a little house that was built for us for $13,999. We got married, packed up the car and moved to Mississippi for a year, where I taught at Jackson State College, which is now Jackson State University, a historic black college. I was their first white hire. It was a very gutsy, courageous thing for the black president of a state institution to hire me in the first place. Elliott continued working for the Lawyers’ Committee. He was in Mississippi for two years, and I was there for one full year.
MJC: When did you return to Washington?
JL: At the end of 1968 we returned to Washington. Elliott joined Joe Rauh Jr.’s private law firm as an associate. Joe Rauh Jr. was “Mr. civil rights” and “Mr. labor law” in D.C. Elliott had the unique confluence of expertise in labor law and civil rights. We always intended to return to D.C. permanently. We never intended to move to Mississippi full time. We came back a little earlier than either of us had planned, maybe a year or two ahead of our schedule, but jobs like Elliott’s that paid him for civil rights and labor law work didn’t happen very often.
I took one civil rights job after another. My first job after returning was working for the Urban Coalition. I then went to the US Commission on Civil Rights and at each place I worked on school desegregation issues. I left the Commission in the summer of 1974, intending to take the summer off and just relax. I had worked since I was 14 years old. Elliott and I had a little girl who was two years old at that time and I thought this was going to be fun. I was going to take the summer off.
Gladys Kessler, a wonderful woman who was one of the founders of the then Women’s Legal Defense Fund (WLDF) now: The National Partnership for Women & Families contacted me. Later Gladys became a federal judge appointed by President Clinton. She said WLDF just received new funds from The Junior League of Washington D.C. Brooksley Born had given a dynamite speech to the Junior League that was entitled “de jure sex discrimination”. It was all the ways that the law required gender bias, not just permit it but require it.
Brooksley got these Junior League ladies all fired up and they gave the Women’s Legal Defense Fund $30,000, a one-time seed money grant. That allowed Gladys to come and make the pitch to me that I should come work on sex discrimination issues. I thought sex discrimination issues were interesting even though I didn’t know anything about them. My passion was fighting race discrimination.
Gladys made a very simple argument that the nexus between race and sex discrimination and poverty is inextricable and unless you were working on gender and race, you were never going to get at the roots and seeds of poverty in this country. She was ahead of her time. Think of all our contemporary discussions about the need for working on issues with intersectionality. She made a lot of sense to me. So, I took this job for $15,000 in salary. I paid an assistant $10,000; I ran the office on $5,000 and I learned a lot about sex discrimination.
I came to the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in July 1974. Roe had been decided barely 18 months before. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was just beginning in 1971 to attack sex discrimination in the courts. Congress was just beginning to pass laws that prohibited sex discrimination. We have the Equal Pay Act of 1963. In that same Civil Rights Act of 1964, as I talked about, there was Title VI which prohibited discrimination based on race in federally funded activities. Title VII included for the first-time a prohibition on discrimination in employment based on sex, following on the Equal Pay Act of the year before. Title IX, prohibiting discrimination in education based on sex passed in 1972, barely two years before I started, and now you see one result of that law: the glory of the women’s soccer and women’s basketball.
And at the same time, women and men were still not being paid equally. We have come very far and by God we have very far to go. At the same time, we celebrate women’s progress, we smack our hand against our heads – how can this be that we are paid less than men?
MJC: So much less.
JL: So much less.
MJC: Not just a little.
JL: I had a lot to learn, but not all that much to learn. Racism and sexism are inextricably intertwined.
MJC: Talk about the women’s rights movement and how that phenomenon influenced you?
JL: The Women’s Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1971 and I came in July of 1974. From ’71 to my being hired, we operated as a local direct service organization with volunteers. We divided ourselves up into counseling committees: one on employment discrimination, one on family law, one on reproductive rights, another on name change, which was a big issue of the time. Women wanted to figure out how to retain their birth given name after marriage or go back to their birth name.
We were a local organization: we weren’t a big national policy organization. We litigated a little bit and if we had been born in some place other than the nation’s capital, as an institution we would have stayed a local direct service organization. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was challenging important sex discrimination cases and winning a fair number of them. Congress was passing laws like the Equal Pay Act, Title VII, Title IX, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act which prohibited discrimination based on sex.
The administration was promulgating new federal regulations that gave force to these brand-new laws and court decisions that threw out the old regulations that allowed discrimination based on sex and forced the administrative agencies to promulgate new regulations. You need implementing regulations to make those laws real and enforceable. I had a fair amount of experience from those previous public policy jobs. I understood the advocacy piece and the lobbying piece from prior experience.
I had a strength. And I had some frailties. I played to my strength. We became a central place in the women’s movement for public policy, reform and advocating for strong implementation of those laws. We were key players in every piece of women’s rights, legal rights, and civil rights legislation and advocacy to implement them.
We weren’t representing very many plaintiffs in court, but every once in a while, we would. We were the first people to bring forward a sexual harassment case in this country. In 1974 Barnes v Costle established the principle that sexual harassment was sex discrimination and a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
With the National Women’s Law Center, then the Women’s Rights Project of the Center for Law and Social Policy, we were operating as the legal arm of the women’s movement.
We jointly convened a coalition to get strong regulations to implement Title IX. We worked with the National Organization for Women (NOW) and many women’s groups to get an executive order promulgated that said: If you get government contracts, you better not discriminate against women, and you were required to have an affirmative action plan in place that requires you to hire women at all levels of your place of employment and retain them.
This executive order applied to a wide range of sectors, from the construction industry to higher education. We were keenly aware of our legal expertise and how we could be the best peers and colleagues as well as represent women.
MJC: Where was the work you did afterwards directed at? The Hill? In terms of getting the laws implemented.
LW: It was getting laws passed on the Hill (in Congress), but there was a wasteland of years when Reagan and Bush Sr. were President. They were both hostile to the expansion and enforcement of civil rights. Sometimes we were counting our victories by what evil we stopped: what bad laws or regulations we stopped from taking away victories we had already won. In the context of reproductive rights, we struggled with both parties. President Carter was not pro-choice.
The first pro-choice president this country has ever had was Bill Clinton in 1993. The entire time from ’74 to ’93 we were fighting bad attempts by administrations, including Jimmy Carter’s administration. Sometimes we won and often we lost. We were on the defensive in the reproductive rights area.
MJC: The Democrats controlled Congress during part of that?
JL: Yes, except from 1980 to ’86 when we lost the Senate. But we had the House, which was very important. It was part of our defense strategy. But it didn’t work for judges and judicial appointments because only the Senate votes on judges. It was like today. Not having a majority in the Senate means judges like Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett are confirmed.
MJC: Would you say your organization was adaptable?
JL: Yes. I always describe us as happily opportunistic. If we were on the defensive on a particular issue, we sought how to make lemonade out of lemons or how to stop evil from happening. If we were in a position to push the envelope, we looked for every single opportunity, and still do (now as the National Partnership for Women and Families) to move the needle by as much as we can. I think of us as not only happily, smartly and strategically opportunistic, but as very entrepreneurial. I don’t think organizations like ours thrive unless you’re both.
MJC: There have been peaks and valleys in terms of the administration. How [has] that affected your work?
JL: I’ll give you an example. The first law that Bill Clinton signed in 1993 when he was barely in office two weeks, was the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Our work on FMLA began in the mid 1980s. Donna Lenhoff, one of my colleagues wrote the FMLA long before we had computers. She said she didn’t even have whiteout. That’s a lie, I gave her whiteout for sure, to use with her typewriter.
Our work, the intellectual capital piece of writing and testifying on behalf of the FMLA, having substantive hearings on behalf of the FMLA, happened in the 1980s. We were positioning it. And not giving [up] hope that we could get Bush Sr. to sign it. We were wrong He vetoed it twice., but we never gave up. We were pie-eyed optimists. We were not masochists, but we thought, “oh we’re going to make a difference and this time we’re going to convince them to do it.” We were wrong twice.
And then both Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis rejected our pleas to include support for the Family and Medical Leave law in their campaigns. They thought they would be accused of being communists.
MJC: For [Walter] Mondale?
JL: And too expensive. They thought they were vulnerable to be accused of supporting a “socialist” plan, although they said “communist,” but again, a label which continues to rear its head even now.
MJC: So, you had to continually come up with alternative strategies?
JL: Yes, I didn’t know Governor Bill Clinton, but I did know the first lady of Arkansas. She was an old friend. I’d known Hillary Clinton since she was a law student. I went to her and asked if Bill Clinton would consider endorsing the passage of FMLA as a candidate. She said, “I don’t know; I think it’s a really good idea. Let me see.”
They did some polling, they had the money for polling, and lo and behold it was very popular. And so, because Congress had passed it twice, but George Bush Sr. had vetoed it twice, it was a great contrast issue in the ’92 campaign. And it was ready. It was positioned to move. As I said, two weeks after the inauguration it was passed by both houses. We had passed it in both houses before, but never by overwhelming margins to override a Bush veto.
Here we were with the President committing to sign it. When President Clinton signed the bill, he wrote W for William. Then he leaned over and handed me the pen. Now President Clinton says that there isn’t anywhere he goes in this country where somebody doesn’t thank him for FMLA. We know from Labor Department statistics that it has been used more than 340 million times. It’s unpaid leave. We continue our advocacy for paid leave.
FMLA says you can’t get fired if you have a family health emergency but it’s not [a] wage replacement. It assumes either public assistance or a family that can help support you. If you don’t have one of those, as a practical matter, you can’t take unpaid family leave, as good as it is. Looking to the future, we want to get a bill creating paid family leave passed by the Congress and to position it to be amongst the first bills that a president will sign.
MJC: I assume originally the bill you supported was to provide paid leave.
JL: It never had paid leave because our congressional supporters said that it would be a non-starter.
MJC: So, in the back of your mind you knew?
JL: Yes, but we didn’t think it would take this long and it’s more than embarrassing that it is taking so long. We’re very active now in state and local governments. We have it in many states and local governments.
MJC: So, talk about your developing role in the organization? You didn’t run it the day you walked in.
JL: I did. I was hired as executive director, but I was also the only person. I did run it, but I quickly hired an assistant for that other $10,000 and when we got enough money from the Ford Foundation, I hired Donna Lenhoff.
It was a joint grant with Women Employed in Chicago– Women Employed from the perspective of a local grass roots organization working on women’s employment discrimination issues and we as a national policy organization that dovetailed with them. We split the money right down the middle and have worked closely since 1976 when I hired Donna.
MJC: That was enforcement too?
JL: Yes, we worked together on enforcing the laws.
MJC: What was Brooksley Born’s role?
JL: Brooksley was a first-year associate and then a partner in a big corporate law firm, Arnold and Porter, volunteering her services to us. Interestingly enough, she became the chair of the board of the National Women’s Law Center Among the true blessings of this work are the friendships and the collegiality and managing the competition between each of these groups. I think it’s a very feminist thing, I don’t believe that men would have been able to pull it off.
MJC: What else would you like to highlight as part of your long-term involvement with the organizations?
JL: There are several things. One is the judicial appointments in friendly administrations of people like Pat Wald, Justice Ginsburg, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan, and Justice Jackson. They are among the committed federal judges in federal courts around this country who have for years made a difference. And many of them are still on the courts. Certainly, the Obama judges who have in so many ways stopped the Trump administration from undermining democracy and the rule of law.
I’m very proud of our role in judicial nominations and in appointments generally. Breaking the glass ceiling both in corporate America – and I look at the women’s sports teams and the implementation of Title IX. That progress could not have happened without Title IX. I graduated from high school in 1958. It would not have occurred to me to play on a team – there was no team. Maybe they’d let us play tennis, but at off times.
And there is the celebration of these glorious, talented women. If you look at women in corporate America and in high level government, higher education positions, very often they have had experience in women’s sports. Very often there’s a nexus between playing sports and women’s leadership. It’s magical.
MJC: It’s certainly been good for men.
JL: Yes, and always was! It was an economic opportunity to go to college in the first place.
MJC: Are there any other ways you want to talk about how the movement has affected your life?
JL: As I’ve suggested, the most important part has been my work colleagues who became my closest friends. The people I rely on, my trusted buddies, the people you would tell anything to and the people who would always have my back [and vice versa]. You can’t overstate “the personal is the political” and vice versa and all of this gets passed on to the next generation.
I don’t know if Marcia Greenberger told you this story, but our respective daughters and their families are close. My grandson, who a few years ago was 9, and her grandson who was also 9 at the time knew each other only slightly. They found themselves in the same day camp and they sort of eyed each other and circled each other for a couple of days and finally my grandson Jack said to Toby, “Do you know Judy Lichtman?” And Toby did. I mean there it is, the third generation. He knew Judy Lichtman.
So certainly, the friendships and victories we’ve all achieved are an important part of our work. I’m painting a picture that’s probably rosier than it is. There were difficult and competitive times, but for the most part, without putting a sugar-coated gloss on it, while social change isn’t linear and there are terrible valleys, it is better today than it was.
It’s not better enough. There is an enormous amount to do, most especially for women of color, older women, LGBTQ+ women. There’s no declaring victory and going home. We have battles that we have to refight. There was a 1965 Supreme Court decision that said married women were entitled to legally buy contraception. Today contraception is a topic of discussion again. The discussion is about whether employers must include the provision of contraception in their health plans. Who would have ever thought that we would have to live with the reality of the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade, a 50-year precedent.
There are no permanent victories. There are realistic gains and every single one of those gains parlay into another gain. Understand that you have to defend those.
MJC: That sounds like your advice for the upcoming generations.
JL: Absolutely and giving forward. I spend an enormous amount of my time when I’m not raising money for the National Partnership, talking to young women who want to think about careers in the movement. My one admonishment to them is: I’m going to be watching and I expect you to give back. Don’t send me a thank you note, I don’t want your damn thank you note. I want you to hear me and spend your life bringing other women along. A) I’m going to know and B) I want you to report back to me.
MJC: And are they doing it?
JL: Yeah they are, for sure they are.
MJC: We’ve covered a lot. Is there anything we haven’t covered or areas that you want to talk about? Are there other areas of activism? You’re still very involved with the Partnership.
JL: I’m on some public interest boards. I’m on the board of the Mississippi Center for Justice. It is the successor of that early Lawyers’ Committee, a group that Elliot worked for back in the ’60s and it is truly a labor of love. They’re working on true women’s issues from reproductive rights and terrible Mississippi state laws, banning abortion coverage and attempting to close the few abortion clinics left in Mississippi, to all the race discrimination issues: from bullying to school desegregation. That’s a board I’m very proud of. I am a founder of Emily’s List and still on the board. I am also on the board of the Leadership Council for Civil and Human Rights, the Moriah Fund and the National Partnership for Women and Families.
MJC: This has been a pleasure to talk to you.
JL: Thank you, Mary Jean. Thank you for having me and for listening.