THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Nancy Stanley

“The Women’s Movement Gave Me Purpose.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, January 2023

NS:  My full name is Nancy Elizabeth Stanley, and I was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on August 18, 1943.

JW:  Tell us a little about your childhood and what you think were the influences that led you to what you ultimately did.

NS:  For the first eight years of my life, I lived in a Czech community in Cicero, Illinois. And then my folks bought a little piece of property in Lemont, Illinois, where they built a fabulous house and where my sister and I grew up. The Czech heritage has never figured predominantly in my life, but both my parents had complete Czech ancestry, so I do connect with it in my own mind.

The major influenceon my career, was my mom, who always was the primary breadwinner in our family. She was a registered nurse and when I was growing up, she got a master’s degree in public health. I wonder what she’d be thinking about the public health situation today. And, you know, it just never occurred to me, literally, it never occurred to me that I would not work. I always assumed that I would work. And it was really that subtle influence rather than any discussions about women’s rights that influenced my career and that persuaded me to go to law school. That idea came out of nowhere. I just had that idea, took the LSAT (the law boards) and decided to do it.

JW:  And there weren’t that many women that were applying then. It was around what year?

NS:  Well, I started law school in ‘67, and my class had about 10% women. It was definitely a hostile environment for women, largely because of the way law was taught in those days. The Socratic method, in front of hundreds of other students so that you could be humiliated and embarrassed easily.

JW:  Yes. So, tell us what law school was like then.

NS:  I should first tell you how I actually got the idea about law school. After I graduated from college, my friend Sue Ross, who I think you probably have already interviewed, came here to DC. I got a job working on the Hill for a member of Congress, and I was aware that there was a young woman about my own age who came into the office at night and ran off letters on the RoboType machine. It was a very primitive device, looking back at it, but it enabled her to crank out hundreds of letters to constituents.

Anyway, I was told that she was going to law school during the day, and really, that’s what gave me the idea. Nobody encouraged me to go to law school, but as I say, I took the LSAT, and my scores were good enough to justify my actually applying. I ended up going to GW, George Washington Law School. My last year I spent working for Edgar and Jean Cahn, who were civil rights activists of the era, and I finished my law school education at night. GW in those days, had a night school, and I graduated in 1971.

JW:  And what did you do for Edgar Cahn?

NS:  Well, it was mostly what did I do for Edgar and Jean together. They, at the time, were developing a curriculum for Vista volunteers who were getting master’s degrees in law. I wrote the curriculum over a three-day weekend during a major snowstorm in DC. The Cahn’s aways operated on an emergency basis, and they managed to hold everything together by using people like me who were looking for meaningful work. I was actually still a law student when I first connected with them.

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

NS:  Susan and I were friends, and we were talking about women’s rights. She was very committed to that cause, even that early. And I, in working for the Cahns, saw that they were doing an FCC media project on behalf of African Americans. Their idea was to file petitions to deny license renewal with the Federal Communications Commission on the grounds that renewal should be denied because the stations involved were not airing programming relevant to Black people, nor did they have adequate numbers of Black people on their staffs. . I saw what the Cahns were doing and it occurred to me that the same approach could be applied in challenging network television license renewal on behalf of women.

I wrote a law review article spelling out this strategy, and then, behind the scenes, I encouraged the National Organization for Women to implement the theory by filing petitions to deny the renewal of two stations, one the NBC affiliatene here in DC and one the ABC affiliate in New York City.  These petitions, see below, ultimately matured into lawsuits before the federal courts of appeals.

Women’s rights activity was bubbling up on many levels during this period, and I was involved. During my last year of law school, fellow female students and I persuaded the dean to authorize a course in Women in the Law, my good friend Gladys Kessler and Susan Ross co-taught the course initially; I taught it several years later.

Also during this period, a group of us started the WLDF, the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, which today is called the National Partnership for Women and Families. I cannot remember what year; I was either still in law school or a recent graduate. We modeled the project on the ACLU. Its purpose was to support lawyers who were handling womens’ rights cases by filing amicus curiae briefs on behalf of their clients. The Fund’s membership consisted of both lawyers and law students. Its selection committee, created to select appropriate cases for our intervention, held its first meetings in the ladies room at the George Washington Law School. This must have been in 1971 or ‘72.

It was also during this period that Bella Abzug emerged as a feminist leader. And here I have a story to tell. In 1970 Bella had just been elected to Congress. She was scheduled to take office in January of 1971. Although she was not especially known at that time as a feminist, I got the bright idea of visiting her before she assumed office to try to persuade her to hire me in her new D.C. office as a legislative assistant for women’s rights. To execute this, I tramped up to New York City, during what I remember as a major snowstorm, and went to her house in the Village for an interview.

During which, Bella  said to me, “Well, you know, I’m not really into women’s rights. I’m a Women Strike for Peace person.” But she added, “You should talk to Mim Kelber, my longtime political associate and very close friend.” So, I did talk to Mim, and Mim thought having a woman’s right person on board  was a good idea and hired me on the spot. I am immodest enough to claim when I tell this story that I turned Bella Abzug into a feminist. There is some truth to this. I don’t think Bella had thought much about women’s rights before I met her. She wasn’t exactly a closeted feminist at the time, but she may have had a latent interest, and that was the fuse that ignited that spark. It was through these kinds of unrecorded behind the scenes encounters that the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement caught fire.

After this encounter, I finished up my law review article, studied for the Bar, and went to work for Bella.I actually did not work for her for very long. Nobody worked for her for very long. I worked for her for about eight or nine months, and then got a job with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. While I was with her, I drafted some testimony that she gave on the Equal Rights Amendment, and in her name, inserted various pro-feminist things in the Congressional Record, and other odds and ends as well.

Also during this period, I met Mary Catherine Kilday, who worked for WRC-TV (the NBC affiliate) here in town, and believed that the station.had discriminated against her during her career because she was a woman. And of course, she was right about that. I encouraged her to filegrievances with the Federal Communications Commission and to file a complaint with the EEOC. I couldn’t do that for her becauseI hadn’t yet taken the bar and was not yet a lawyer.. I introduced her to Gladys Kessler, who later became a prominent judge, and Gladys represented Mary Catherine on that employment charge.

That complaint and the outcome, which was on Mary Catherine’s side, subsequently became part of the petition to deny license renewal at WRC-TV, which then went to one of the federal courts of appeals, as did the similar petition that had been filed against WABC-TV in New York. Thus, there were two media cases pending during this period,  ’71, ‘72. Sadly, we ultimately lost both of them, but the mere fact that women had filed these challenges helped bring about the dramatic changes in female on air employment that we see today.

JW:  Yes, these cases were obviously, like you say, laying the groundwork for the next phase. The petition for renewal would be denied unless they did what?

NS:  Had the commission granted the petitions to deny a license renewal, it would have been compelled to hold a hearing on the employment and other practices of the two stations at issue. And the complaints alleged not only that the stations were discriminating in terms of employment, but also that they should have been airing more programs on women’s issues. That was the strategy I outlined in my law review article.

What ultimately happened, was that the FCC, which had rarely held a hearing to deny license renewal for any station, just sat on the petitions for years and years. During that time the challenged stations started to hire women to appear on air. Seeing this change in the statistics, the Commission concluded that there was no problem and dismissed our petitions in both cases.We went to the Court of Appeals to appeal those dismissals, and sad to say, we lost.

But the reason we lost, as spelled out in the judicial rulings., was that there was no need to hold a hearing because the stations were now in fact hiring and promoting women. I don’t know to what extent my legal theory encouraged this positive change. The women’s movement had gained momentum, of course, during the interim; and more and more employers were facing pressure to treat women fairly in the workplace. In this new environment, WRC-TV and WABC-TV might have changed their policies even without the pressure of our lawsuit – but who can tell?

Then I went to work at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. While there, I argued a case called Geduldig vs. Aiello. This matter, which eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, was first litigated before a three-judge court in California. I was the EEOC’s lawyer who spoke at that hearing.Geduldig was the case in which a woman had been denied disability benefits at her place of employment for pregnancy benefits.

The employer, and I cannot remember who Aiello was, that is,what sort of employment situation this was, but the employer had a disability policy – paid time off – for other kinds of disabilities relating to men, but it did not provide disability benefits for disabilities related to pregnancy. The employee challenged that policy in federal courts.

There were other women working on the pregnancy issue at the time. There was a question in our minds about how to argue the case. Should we argue that women should be entitled to disability benefits on the same basis as men? That is, when they were actually disabled? Or should we argue for preferential treatment for women who were pregnant, whether or not they were really disabled by the pregnancy? And that dilemma represented a fork in the road with regard to litigation strategy in sex discrimination case.

Ultimately, the equal treatment approach was adopted by Ruth Ginsburg when she filed all of her subsequent cases on sex discrimination. Geduldig ultimately went to the Supreme Court under a different name. We won before the three-judge panel and then the other side petitioned for rehearing before the 9th Circuit. That’s where we lost, and that’s why the case then went to the Supreme Court, and Congress passed the Pregnancy Act.

By that time, I had left the EEOC to join the women’s rights law firm that was being formed in New York. So, I was no longer at the EEOC to help brief the government side of this. My role in the pregnancy litigation was effectively at an end.

JW:  So, tell us about the law firm. You said the feminist law firm?

NS:  Yes. At about the same time, my good friend Susan Deller Ross and her colleagues from her class at NYU Law School, decided to form a women’s rights law firm in New York City, which would take on employment cases and other instances of discrimination against women, and they invited me to join them.

So, my husband and I moved to New York City, and I worked in the law firm for four years. The firm started in ’73 and it dissolved in ’77. And during that time, lo and behold, one of the things we did was to sue NBC under the Employment Discrimination Act. This was an employment discrimination suit, not a claim under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

JW:  What happened with that lawsuit?

NS:  Well, we ultimately settled it. We settled it for what we thought was a substantial amount of money at the time, which it really wasn’t, looking back. But nonetheless, a settlement at any level encouraged the networks to make pay more attention to women’s rights and to hire and promote women. The signal thing about our case is how close we became to the women, the plaintiff group. In employment cases you do need to become close to your client.

The NBC women were particularly well-organized. They contributed to a fund that subsidized the litigation during the many months prior to the settlement. The settlement included pay-outs and personal relief for the named plaintiffs. But its most important feature was the emphasis it placed on identifying more clearly the paths to promotion within the organization. Identifying these patterns was the first step towards making sure that women got onto those promotion tracks in the future. Litigating the case and then negotiating these details was very emotional. The plaintiffs themselves were required to agree to the settlement at the end and their willingness to do so – their faith in us as their lawyers – was very satisfying.

We had some light moments during this case, and one was the morning we were allowed behind the scenes to watch the on-air/live transmission of the Today Show. It happened that Bob and Ray were the guests on that morning’s program. They performed impromptu and were so funny that even the cameramen were cracking up.

After the law firm dissolved in 1977, I moved back to Washington. We partners went our separate ways, the four or five of us. I got a job at the Justice Department and began working on environmental issues.

I was also given an assignment that there had some implications for women. This was during the Carter administration. One of the things the new administration did was to revise the selection process for the appointment of federal judges. Historically, the system then in use was rather old fashioned. Basically, the entire process was controlled by a single DOJ employee in the Deputy Attorney General’s office, who vetted judicial candidates for the federal bench and received recommendations from U.S. senators who had an interest in the appointment. His recommendations were passed on to the Attorney General who made the final decision.

The Carter people replaced the DOJ official with a committee consisting of representatives from each departmental division. Barbara Babcock as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, was one such participant. But because of her heavy workload, she chose to delegate that function to someone else in the department, and she chose me. As a result, almost overnight, I found myself on a high-level committee reviewing and recommending judicial appointments to the Attorney General with a special mandate to identify appropriate female candidates.

During my service on this committee, I saw the way that the hierarchy regarded Ruth Ginsburg, who had not yet made it to the federal bench. She was still in New York, teaching at Rutgers. She had applied and been rejected for a judicial position in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She had not yet put in an application for a seat on the DC Circuit, although such a move was expected. I was not involved in her appointment, but I did have a major impact on the candidacy of women who was appointed to the Court of Appeals in Oklahoma.

JW:  What was her name?

NS:  Her name was Stephanie Seymour. She was successful but there were some disappointed female candidates whom I was not able to help.

One such candidate was an accomplished female lawyer from a southern state who was being promoted for a federal judgeship by an influential labor union. Unfortunately, I knew her candidacy wasn’t going to go anywhere because of her age.The Carter administration, understandably wanted to appoint people, including women, who were going to be on the bench for a while. I can’t remember what we considered too old, but we really couldn’t move ahead with her appointment. She was very disappointed, as was the person who was pushing her on behalf of the union.

JW:  Were there other guidelines? I mean, age? I understand why they wanted younger people, but I wondered if there were other guidelines that the public doesn’t know about.

NS:  There were no guidelines. This was all seat of the pants.

JW:  Oh, that’s not so good either.

NS:  I don’t know that it wasn’t. My job was to identify eligible female candidates for these seats – maybe even to identify someone myself who was qualified but hadn’t herself thought about applying. And then – this was really the most important part of it – to call people out in the field who knew this candidate to find out what they thought about her as a possible judge. Then I would write up my findings and present them to the deputy attorney general. In one case, I wrote a memo to the Attorney General himself recommending a candidate who had a male competitor backed by another high-level DOJ official. The Attorney General chose my applicant. This was for the seat in Oklahoma, and I was very pleased.

JW:  Were there ideological questions, as we know there are now?

NS:  I was making up the questions as I went along, and I did not ask about ideology. I was looking for women who were clearly qualified who might be committed at some level to women’s rights. The one woman I successfully recommended to the Attorney General did not, as I recall, have any women’s rights activity in her background. So even support for the women’s movement wasn’t an absolute requirement.

But ideology, or class seemed to be an issue for some people, even though the Department of Justice wasn’t itself choosing judges on that basis. I remember a qualified woman from Missouri who ran into opposition that was hard to explain otherwise. She was encouraged to apply by a male mentor, a very respectable lawyer in her community who had some connection with Hallmark cards. As did she. Her candidacy was gaining traction when, all of a sudden, there arose a burst of opposition to her based upon her supposed liberalism.

This came from a group of women who were quite conservative, and they managed to generate enough opposition so that we were never able to move the nomination forward. Looking back, even at the time I thought, “Why are they opposing this woman?” It seemed so odd because she was a competent, respectable, upper-class woman who had had no association with political issues except that she was on the board of the local ACLU. But that was it. Apart from that, she was not identified with “liberal” causes in any way. I finally concluded that the conservative group had attacked her because they thought she was not one of them. In their view, she already had it all. She was an upper middle-class woman with a good life and an equally successful husband. I think the opposition to her candidacy was driven largely by envy.

We’re talking about a very compressed time period. 1970 through maybe 1977, when my law firm dissolved. During this period, and while I was still in law school, I had contact with another group called Human Rights for Women. HRWwas a spin off from the National Organization for Women, and the three or four women, all lawyers who made-up its membership, maintained a low profile. They all had day jobs but used their own time after hours to support women who had filed lawsuits challenging employment discrimination in the workplace.

These were some of the earliest cases alleging sex discrimination in employment, filed in the days when the idea that women routinely encountered discrimination on the job but met with considerable skepticism. Some of them challenged what was known as a BFOQ, a “bona fide occupational qualification” that an employer could assert as a defense to a discriminatory practice.  One early case was Rosenfeld vs. Southern Pacific in which the employer refused to employ women in physically demanding positions. HRW did the important work of submitting amicus curiae briefs on behalf of the female plaintiffs in several of these cases. The briefs were written but not signed or submitted by HRW members who could not publicly represent parties in litigation. These women worked behind the scenes, juggling the responsibilities of their day jobs with their private interest in women’s rights.

JW:  I have another question on the judges. Did the nominees have to be Democrats?

NS:  I don’t remember ever asking a nominee if she was a Democrat. I knew the kind of person I was looking for. I was looking for somebody who was, a) supremely qualified to be a judge, in intellect and temperament. And b) had some level of involvement in charitable and or social issues. I don’t remember ever asking anybody for her party affiliation.

JW:  I was just asking because it’s so different now. And of course, I have interviewed people from the National Women’s Political Caucus, which was bipartisan. So, in those days, there are a lot of women from both parties who work together on the issues they cared about. We’ve changed in the last 50 years. Hopefully, someday we’ll get back to that.

NS:  Can I give you one more vignette?

JW:  Oh, please, yes.

NS:  I was present at what must have been one of the first, if not the first, meeting of the National Women’s Political Caucus. It took place in a committee room in the U.S. House of Representatives during Bella’s first term. I don’t remember much about the agenda. What I do remember, vividly, is Betty Friedan’s entrance into the committee room. The room was very crowded and the meeting had not yet started. Betty came in late, her eyes lighted on Gloria Steinem, and she plowed her way through the throng to get to Gloria’s side. Bella and Betty were compelling personalities in their own right, but Gloria was something special. Everyone, including the hard charging Betty Friedan, wanted to be associated with her.

JW:  Did they agree on what the caucus should be about?

NS:   I’m sorry to say I focused more on the personalities than the agenda, so I don’t remember any discussion of the issues.

JW:  Where did you go after the Justice Department?

NS:   I went to the Federal Commissions Commission, against which I had developed the petition to deny many years earlier. This was my respite job. It was not demanding, which was fortunate since I now had a child. The job paid pretty well. My colleagues were wonderful. I worked at the Commission for several years and then subsequently took a job at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. I was the Courts Chief Mediator, a wonderful job, and I held that position until I retired some 20 years later.

JW:  Did you continue to be involved as an activist in other ways through those years?

NS:  I did not, because I was working for the federal government, and there was a prohibition against our being engaged in outside activity. I remember that during this period, there was a march in Washington. It might have been a pro-abortion march, I don’t remember. Pat Wald, who was the Chief of the Court of Appeals, sent a memo to all emloyees, reminding us that we could not attend, and she was absolutely right. Though I was not a judge, sometimes thought that, as the mediator, I could influence what happened to a case. They were wrong, but because of this perception  it was especially important that I not be identified with any political movement.

JW: You could influence it procedurally? Who was that assigned to? That sort of thing?

NS:   No, I had no control over which panel of judges would hear the appellate case nor about which trial judge would hear the case at the lower level. And because the mediation process was confidential without judicial involvement, I had no authority or inclination to talk to a judge about the merits of the case. We were quite determined to keep the mediation process separate from the decisional process if the case did not settle. But as I’ve said, despite our best efforts, lawyers whose cases were in mediation frequently did not understand this and thought, mistakenly, that I had influence over the court, particularly the trial court.

Perhaps I should explain briefly how the mediation process worked. In the Court of Appeals, I selected cases for mediation, sometimes over the lawyers’ opposition. In the District Court, the “trial court”, it was the judge who referred cases to the program. In both courts, I assigned the mediator, either one of our trained volunteers or me or my deputy. I mentioned the mediation in all cases and, in the District Court, occasionally reported back to the judge on the record and with the consent of the parties on whether or not progress was being made. Mediation did not normally suspend the litigation, which meant that unless the court ruled otherwise, briefing and argument took place under the normal schedule. Because I was the only court official apart from the judge who discussed the merits of a case with the parties, I did in fact have a certain authority. The lawyers treated me with great respect, which was most gratifying.

JW:  Well, you were a known commodity in this world, apparently. People knew who you were.

NS:  Yes. This was my dream job. People always took my calls!

JW:  And you retired after that?

NS:  I did. I was there for about 20 years, and then I retired. Since then, my activism has been limited to sending money and writing postcards to turn out the  Democratic vote.

JW:  How would you say your involvement in the ‘70s, in the Second Wave, affected your personality? We hear how it affected you professionally, but how did it affect your private life?

NS:   It gave me self-confidence and a sense of purpose that affected my private as well as professional life. When I graduated from law school, I had no idea what I was going to do professionally with my law degree. I had no mentors, and I was floundering, really. Getting involved with the women’s movement saved my life because it gave me a purpose. It generated self-confidence that allowed me to leave an inadequate marriage, to learn to love a new partner and to have a child.

This experience has given me some understanding of the Trump movement, dangerous though it is. I think that part of the appeal for the MAGA folks, especially among white guys without a college education, is that it gives them community and a sense of comradeship. They think they are involved in a righteous campaign, just as we women of the Second Wave thought our own campaign was righteous. It gives them a sense of purpose, and everybody needs a purpose.

I want to end this interview by paying tribute to two women who, because they died young, have not received the recognition they deserved for their early contributions to the women’s movement. I have already mentioned Mary Catherine Kilday, who more than anyone was responsible for the rebellion that resulted in the high level of female participation in today’s media world. She rallied other women employees at WRC-TV in the early 70s to organize and to file the job discrimination complaint at the EEOC that killed her own career at the station but opened up mass media job opportunities for countless numbers of other women. Mary Catherine is gone now, but she was a fierce fighter for women’s rights, a really good buddy and a good friend.

Whitney Adams, the second friend, was an early member of the National Organization for Women who supported the legal action based on the petition to deny. It was Whitney who organized the data collection effort that produced the statistical support for the notion that local television stations were failing to air programming that realistically related to women’s lives. She too died far too young and without much recognition for the work she had done in the 70s. She should be remembered as a dedicated fighter for women’s rights when such supporters were thin on the ground.

And finally, a word of acknowledgement to my former law partner, Jan Goodman who has not died and is alive and well in New York City. It was Jan who carried the larger load as counsel to the plaintiffs of the NBC lawsuit. Our successful result in that case was due largely. To her efforts.