THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Ann Garfinkle

“Once you see things from a feminist point of view, you can really help people and have the world be better for them and enjoy it.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, February 2025

JW:  Ann, would you tell us when and where you were born?

AG:  I was born in Manhattan, New York. July 11th, 1942.

JW:  Great. Tell us a little briefly about your childhood. What do you think maybe led you to become the person you became?

AG:  Well, my parents were both European immigrants. Nobody had an accent by the time I met them, as it were. I think that certainly propelled me to succeed in America. When I look back on it, while I quite disagreed with my mother, I think because I was around her so much, and she was the Republican leader of the municipality I grew up in. So, I met all sorts of judges and lawyers from the time I was about eight, on.

JW:  Do you have siblings?

AG:  I have a younger sister. She lives out in Arizona, and she’s mostly into raising poodles. She was a book editor before she retired. She’s a writer. She’s a much better writer than I am. I’m the math mind in the family.

JW:  Was there political activity in your childhood?

AG:  The activity didn’t start until I was in about seventh grade, or at least I didn’t notice. My mother decided sometime between seventh grade and ninth grade to go back to work. That certainly shaped me because things were much easier with my mother working in lots of ways. It worked for me. My father was a dress manufacturer. He left the house every morning at 4:30 in the morning to get to Manhattan on time and open up his place of business. And he got home at 6:00 at night. And we had dinner, all of us, every single night.

JW:  When did you get involved in the women’s movement?

AG:  Even though my mother despised feminists, I think I was always a feminist. And there really wasn’t a movement. I came into it through the civil rights movement. I went to college and law school to become what I thought then, was going to be a civil rights lawyer.

JW:  There couldn’t have been too many women in your class then?

AG:  There were three of us, thank you. There were three of us, and we were treated terribly.

JW:  Oh, really?

AG:  Then there were two of us because one of my classmates decided to train horses instead.

JW:  So how were you treated badly?

AG:  Oh, my goodness, come on. The ways you can be treated badly by a professor. One is, Ladies Day. You can’t recite on anything; I’m sure you’ve heard of Ladies Day from other lawyers. And then when you did recite, what you said was nitpicked and then derided. I’ll never forget, my first time being called on, I was in contracts class, and I was a well-dressed young woman. You didn’t look like you do today. And the teacher said, “Ms. Garfinkel, why don’t you pretend you’re the world’s first female athlete,” I think he said. “Or you’re representing her?” And then he proceeded to stare at my breasts when I was standing.

JW:  I see.

AG:  And he didn’t say softball or baseball. He said ball. I mean, ball was the emphasis.

JW:  What year did you graduate?

AG:  I graduated from law school in 1968.

JW:  Wow, that was revolutionary. And did you work on women’s issues at all after that? What happened?

AG:  I was admitted to practice on the day of the first Columbia sit-in in Manhattan. A friend of mine was six months ahead of me in school and so, we then went down to Manhattan Criminal Court and proceeded to be there for the arraignments of a couple of hundred kids. I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” I mean, I’d never been in a courtroom before. The older person said, “Just copy what the person in front of you said.” After a few arraignments, you got to know what you were doing.

JW:  Right. And it worked, I assume.

AG:  Then I represented them all the way through the criminal process. That was my first initiation into being in court every day in the criminal process.

JW:  Were you with a firm or this was just yourself?

AG:  I was with an older woman lawyer. She took my friend Carol under her wing, and she reluctantly took me under her wing. Because having two fledglings at once was too much.

JW:  I see. So, you were on your own.

AG:  I had role models, and I was active in organizations like the ACLU, as a person. So, I wasn’t completely alone that way. And I worked in Nassau County, county court for a summer, clerking for judges. So, I knew my way around.

JW:  Okay. So, did you get involved in women’s issues eventually?

AG:  Yes. The first things we did was abortion rights, because that was the year of the fight. It turned out, and I was very pleased, there were a group of women meeting who were determined to legalize abortion in New York State. I think I got into feminist work through the abortion rights movement.

JW:  Yes, and it worked, didn’t it? I mean, New York legalized abortion before Roe v Wade. What did you do?

AG:  Well, we filed a lawsuit in Manhattan, federal court. I think federal court, because I think we were using constitutional arguments. There were three or four really good arguments why abortion should be legal. What the powers that be who are trying to coordinate this among lawyers did, and I think it was through the ACLU, but it’s so long ago, I can’t tell you for sure, is that we all took different arguments because we hoped that the court would bite on one of them. So, one used equal protection, all the different arguments, for abortion.

JW:  Save lives. How about save lives?

AG:  Let me just say that when I was younger, it was abortion rights. Now, it is save lives. That is, it’s morphed politically and legally.

JW:  Right. Interesting. And so that was early ’70s, I guess. Did you continue to do any work on women’s issues then?

AG:  Well, yes. I did both the serious ones, and I did the fun, silly ones. I was really a First Amendment Rights lawyer, and women’s rights came out in that point. I mean, certainly women’s rights. And I taught Women in the Law at NYU Law School.

JW:  In the ’70s?

AG:  Yes, in the early ’70s.

JW:  Oh, wow.

AG:  Eleanor Holmes Norton and two other very wonderful women developed a course for NYU Law School on Women’s Rights. I picked up after Eleanor moved to Washington to do her piece for America.

JW:  What things did you cover? Do you remember?

AG:  Oh, my goodness. No, I could certainly look it up and tell you.

JW:  That would be great. We can attach it to your page. It would be really fun to see what the topics were in those years.

AG:  But I did also, and I don’t really have any theatrical streak, but for example, a young woman was arrested in New York for being at the beach topless. New York had some very complex laws, which I learned completely. And we went to trial. And by the time I finished with the New York Courts, and not because I wanted to, it was legal to be bottomless, but not topless in New York State. So, for about a year, the law was in that place, and then the legislators changed that. Of course it was terrible.

JW:  Was this on the beach you could be bottomless, or in the city?

AG:  On a beach. In the Rockaways.

JW:  Oh, okay. So that’s interesting. But the women couldn’t go without tops.

AG:  They couldn’t. But the New York law was written so badly that they could be bottomless.

JW:  That’s incredible.

AG:  I tried to have some fun with the law, too. I mean, it wasn’t all serious.

JW:  And you said you did some other fun, silly stuff. What was that?

AG:  Well, that one got some of the big press. I got a strange reputation. I did a lot of criminal work, and the city of New York decided to arrest the writer and the actors of a play. Off-Off, Broadway, in the East Village, and the title of the play was, Che. The author had four characters. One being the Catholic Church, one being the federal government, in very silly costumes. It was very off-Broadway, let’s put it that way. But they busted all of them, and I represented all of them in criminal court in Manhattan. I didn’t do the appeals. I asked the ACLU to do it for me, and they did.

And so, you have four actors on the stage, nude. And one of them is the CIA, and she has a few things on her that look military. One of them represents the Catholic Church, she had on her head a habit, the rest of her was nude, and then one of them was Uncle Sam, and he just had a red, white, and blue belt around his waist and nothing else. And one of them was Che. I don’t remember what his costume was. I think somebody else was on stage, a woman, and just wearing fringes.

So, the case goes to trial, and it was, to say the least, a three-ring circus. But I then decided that the way to teach these three judges what the contemporary community standards were, was to show, I Am Curious (Yellow) in the courtroom as part of my defense.

Well, once the court officers caught on, that meant that the courtroom was packed. And I showed this movie, which had been banned in some places and accepted in other places, and I became well known quickly. But there was such hypocrisy in the law, that people had to just see what you could walk out of the courthouse and go to the movies and see. For eight bucks or five bucks or three bucks, whatever it was.

JW:  Yes. For our audience, some people may not know what that movie was. I do, but others might not.

AG:  I don’t know that I can describe the movie to you, but it had nudity and sexuality in it. And it was I think Swedish, but I’m not sure.

JW:  Very popular at the time, if I recall.

AG:  It was. Absolutely.

JW:  And so, what happened with the case?

AG:  Well, I won part of it on the First Amendment. So, some of the things were dropped. But some of the statutes the actors were charged with were on their face. They said, “being nude in public is against law” kind of thing, or in a theater, whatever. So, I couldn’t win all of it, but I certainly won the poet part of it. It was a very fine poet who wrote this, I think as a lark. That was the time of the beginning of the next wave of political unrest.

JW:  What do you mean by that? The next wave?

AG:  It was the anti-Vietnam War effort. I guess I was in law school when it was building up. My law school was very, very conservative, and when I invited somebody from the ACLU to come speak, they really got annoyed and sat in on the thing to hear what kind of propaganda the ACLU was going to spout. And the man who came to speak to the class was a partner in one of the large Wall Street law firms. So, they just kept their mouth shut. They were going to attack him, and they decided not to.

JW:  What school was that, can you say?

AG:  I went to Brooklyn law School. I went there because it was free and my parents weren’t going to pay. And it was free because I was a New York State resident and I scored high enough on my LSATs.

JW:  It was very conservative, but they took a few women. That was interesting. You must have done quite well on your LSATs. Wow, that’s something. So, were there any women’s issues that were of particular concern to you at the time?

AG:  What? In law school?

JW:  No, once you got out. I think we’re out now.

AG:  I think it’s Gloria Steinem, but maybe someone else. Once it clicks in your head, the anti-woman world that we’re in, and still in, in many ways. Once that clicks, then you see it all over. You have an absolutely different lens on life.

JW:  So, did you work on any women’s issues? I’m curious about that.

AG:  Well, I came at the law from a criminal perspective because I wanted to do constitutional law, and that’s where constitutional matters came up. If I had a case or I saw a situation where it was clearly a feminist issue, it was just clear to me from when I first looked at it.

JW:  Like what? Do you recall any?

AG:  A group of us, there were five of us or so, met with the leadership of NOW, in Manhattan. You understand, this is Manhattan, it’s the height of activity in this area. And we met with them and said, “What do the women of America need from us? We’re feminist lawyers. What do they need from us?” The women said, “We really need you to take divorces because women are getting screwed all over America,” and that would be a different view of divorce.

As you remember, historically, with the women’s movement came an increase in divorces, because women saw that they could say “No, dear.” And part of doing that, led to the not so narrow area of family law, which I did even when I moved here some. And part of it is making sure that in every divorce, the woman gets the time and money to go to college or graduate school so she can be employed, not as a secretary or a street sweeper. You wanted to improve the life of your client, at a going-forward basis.

JW:  I assume there were issues about child custody and so forth.

AG:  There were, but all of us in our small group of feminist women in New York City, we just fought that as a matter of course. We just fought for women as a matter of course. New York didn’t have shared custody at the time. We kind of invented a shared custody because we did acknowledge that children need mommy and daddy. I mean, none of us were pushing that they should only see mommy or they should only see daddy unless the person was incompetent or sick.

JW:  And so, that happened then?

AG:  Right. The court was kind of amused to start with, and I think then the court accepted the point of view. And I think women lawyers, not exclusively, but almost exclusively, pushed the idea of shared custody, and of getting a fair amount of money. I was not involved in it, but my closest friend was. She got New York State to pass financial guidelines for child support. You know, one child equals this, two children equal that, as far as child support goes. The problem that women had, was that they couldn’t get support from their men after they divorced.

JW:  Right. Yes, having been divorced in that time frame, I understand. What other kinds of cases did you have involving feminist issues, as you said?

AG:  Well, if you look at the world of a general practitioner with a fairly heavy criminal law background, and constitutional law background, you took what was out there. You weren’t going to start litigation, but you took what was out there and you put a feminist spin on it. Women who worked outside the home were often called unfit mothers by the court. There were all sorts of horrible things going on, which we see the start-up of now in this country again. And women, I think, for this current administration, women are going to be pushed to being second-class citizens again.

JW:  What do you mean?

AG:  Well, if a woman doesn’t have a right to have an abortion, if there’s a child that she believes she can’t take care of, then has that child, the chances of her going to college and law school are pretty slim. I mean, unless her mother moves in, or her sister moves in and takes over her role, she’s stuck.

JW:  Right. Yes. Well, a lot going on. We have to continue to fight, right? I am interested if you could think of any other kinds of cases that you put a feminist twist on besides divorce. I get the divorce for sure.

AG:  Abortion, divorce. There’s a book written by Flo Kennedy and Diane Schilder about abortion rights law in New York. I knew that you needed to take care of women in prisons. I had a number of clients who were incarcerated who needed extra protection in the prison system, and sometimes from the prison system itself.

JW:  Like what?

AG:  Well, the guards were mostly male, and they had somebody who couldn’t talk back under their purview. In general, you met with the prison officials. When you’re a feminist lawyer, you don’t hate the system. You’re trying to get the system to work for women as well as for men.

JW:  And so, you would talk to the prison officials about abuse?

AG:  Abuse or conditions. For example, some women gave birth in jail, and the issues of their babies was important. Who takes care of the babies and how it’s all working. Initially, the babies were taken from the mothers at the beginning. That wasn’t a case. That was going and talking to prison officials and political people. I mean, you can’t be effective and be out there and screaming. You have to look the part, and be the part of someone who’s advocating for the woman.

JW:  Yes, it’s very interesting you should say that because, of course, that dichotomy of different ways of working towards the same goal exists long before we did stuff, and it continues to exist. It’s very interesting that you found your niche, and it sounds like you helped a lot of women doing that.

AG:  I have no regrets. It was absolutely wonderful.

JW:  That’s great. Any other general issue that you worked on for women that you want to mention?

AG:  No, but I certainly represented a whole lot of women in getting what they needed properly.

JW:  And that was in other domestic situations, and stuff at work?

AG:  Yes, both of them. And I came of age in the era of Title VII. So, there was certainly prejudice against women in the workplace. There was certainly categorization of women’s jobs being different than the categorization of men’s jobs.

JW:  And so did you bring lawsuits? You did advocacy?

AG:  I did advocacy. I love the American judicial system. I think, in fact, it’s probably of the best in the world or the best in the world, but it certainly has its shortcomings. And bringing lawsuits is not such a great way to get things done because the legal system has always been overburdened and things move slowly. So, if you brought a civil case in New York in court, you could be four years out or three years out until you got to anything important. You had pretrial motions and everything. But the timeline was very long, and you wanted better outcomes in a shorter period of time.

JW:  Right. So, you would go right to the head of an organization? I’m making that up. I assume that was the case.

AG:  Yes, that kind of a thing.

JW:  And what would you advocate for? Do you recall any situations?

AG:  The only ones that were really effective was explaining to the head of an organization that the categorization of women’s jobs wasn’t fair.

JW:  And did it work?

AG:  When you can show a fundamental unfairness, I think you can get pretty far. I think people are basically decent. And if you can find the cord in that person that will resonate, I think that makes a big difference.

JW:  And that worked, you think?

AG:  It worked a lot of the time. I think most people, especially most Americans, believe in fundamental fairness under the law. And if you can point out then whether something is fair or not; not in today’s legal world, because we’re dealing with very unusual circumstances. Right now, they’re quite horrible. But I do think that Americans believe in fundamental fairness to men and women, and racially.

JW:  How would you sum up your legal career?

AG:  Varied and fascinating. I was doing a divorce in DC Court. And DC cops, the night before, had arrested about 100 black teenagers for misbehaving. They were all in the same waiting room as I was during a divorce. It was totally apolitical. But because we were surrounded by teenagers, and there are usually grandmothers or mothers down at the courthouse, getting ready for their case to be called. This gentleman and I, who was the other side of the case, sat down and talked for about two and a half hours until the case was called, and it was called in the courtroom, not in the room we were in. And it turned out that he was the Deputy Director of the Hirschorn Museum in DC.

I had done a little bit of art law in New York representing artists. They would mostly be digging for political content. I think one of them was the newspaper that came out of Manhattan, and it was a very local newspaper. My first client got dinged for reproducing. He was the editor of the newspaper. It was kind of a gross cartoon with some sexual content, but it was not meant to be sex, male, female, or intercourse content.

I talked to him about it, and he said, “Have I ever been interested in art law?” And I said, “A little bit,” because I’d done this case, and I’d done a couple of others. And about two weeks later, the phone rings, and it’s Steven Weil, and Steven says, “Ann, I’m sending you Marcella Brenner.” I’m supposed to know who Marcella Brenner is. “I’m sending you Marcella Brenner. I think you two would have a wonderful time with you representing her.” And two weeks later, an older woman comes in with her best friend to size me up. She didn’t believe in women lawyers. At least to start with.

And then I started representing the estate of Morris Louis, and that’s a very big deal in the art world. Morris Louis was a Washingtonian who had, right when he died, a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was represented by a genius of a gallerist named Andre Emmerich. That was taking off on learning all about the world of art law. It was a very nascent area of the law then, now it’s exploded into being a real area of the law. And it shaped the rest of my career, and I still do it.

JW:  Oh, really? Interesting. And so, what are you still doing?

AG:  Well, I’m older, so I’m semi-retired. I don’t go into courtrooms any longer. I had enough of that. I represent artists, and estates of artists, in all their different facets. They need some copyright law, they need some contract law, they need a potpourri of expertise in the arts.

JW:  Are they more women than men? Just curious.

AG:  They are more women than men. Women in the arts have exploded the way women in law have exploded. Each thing I do for them is fascinating because the art overlay makes it so much more interesting.

JW:  Any particular instance of a case you had, or something you did that would be worth talking about?

AG:  Well, I decided to try to figure out with other people how to have an artist’s legacy live on after they’re dead. Because so many artists; of course, most of them being women given the culture they were bumping up against, and the museum world was still very male, and now it’s a woman’s job, but then it was very male, to just figure out how to protect their legacy and make their legacy stay the same or grow. It’s a very interesting thing to work on. Very interesting.

JW:  And are you succeeding? Have you come up with plans?

AG:  I open my client’s eyes to opportunities, and with any luck, they have a good gallerist to start with. And if they don’t, we teach the gallerist what to do.

JW:  Oh, I see. Oh, That’s fabulous.

AG:  Yes. It’s really fun.

JW:  Well, I think we’re coming to a close. I wonder if you have some final comments about working for women all these years?

AG:  Well, it opened my eyes. And once that click happens in your brain so you see things from a feminist point of view, you can really help people and have their world be better for them. And enjoy it.

JW:  Do you have any other closing comment?

AG:  I would say to young women that they need to do well in law school, but also to have some feminist history, some women’s history. And I think that’s very important. Because the young women today don’t understand. They are now being rudely awakened, which is wonderful. Because of the abortion fight. They’re getting it in their face. Because they’re young, they can have babies, and they understand what the world is about.

JW:  Right. And that they better get active.

AG:  That’s right. Now, and not put it off.

JW:  Well, thanks so much.

AG:  You’re welcome. Thank you.