THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Sharron Cohen

“I’m loud, I’m in your face, I’m borderline inappropriate at times. But if you’re going to give me a pulpit, I’m damn well going to be heard,”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, August 2025

JW:  Sharon, I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself, please, with your full name and when and where you were born.

SC:  All of my names? All of my full names?

JW:  Go for it.

SC:  Okay. Sharon Alida Perry was my birth name. Two R’s in Sharron. A-l-i-d-a is my middle name, Perry. Then I married Frontiero, Joe Frontiero, so we could tack that on. Then I married David Cohen, so we can tack Cohen onto the end of that. I was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, March 22nd, 1947.

JW:  Tell me a little about your childhood, maybe your ethnic background, your parents, siblings, stuff that you think maybe led you to the career you had.

SC:  Or the encounters I had.

JW:  And the encounters, certainly.

SC:  I grew up solidly blue collar, Catholic, and two of my grandparents were French-Canadian immigrants. On the other side, one grandfather was one generation away from French-Canadian immigration. My one lone grandmother, who was probably the most educated, accomplished member of the family, had been here longer. She was not quite from the Mayflower, but not soon after. But basically, the bulk of my childhood was Catholic, French, Canadian, blue collar.

The way that informs what I did later is that we never had a whole lot of money. Money was important, not in the sense of getting huge amounts of it, but in getting enough of it to get by. My father had a gas station that failed. He would later become a car salesman. My mother was a secretary. By the time I got ready to go to college, I was only the second person in my entire extended family of cousins to go to school, and that was a state school, the same school – he went to the other one. So when I got a chance to, my senior year, get a Air Force Institute of Technology scholarship that would pay me to stay in school, after which I would owe the Air Force three years, I took it.

It was really helpful because I was paying my own way through college. I’m the oldest of four children, by the way. I went into the service after I graduated from the University of Connecticut, and I got married to my hometown boyfriend, which he was my first husband. That should tell you how good a decision is to get married at 23.

I was stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, and I got married, and I went off to the personnel office to say, Well, I’m married. Now I get a housing benefit. Because there was no available onsite housing for married couples. I was told no, and I didn’t understand why. I went from one office to another. I was a very good Catholic school girl in those days. I followed rules. I went up the chain of command, and I was told no the whole way. Sometimes it was polite, and sometimes there was a lot of, “Why are you asking? You’re a woman. You don’t belong here at all. You’re lucky we let you into the service.”

JW:  What year was this?

SC:  I got married in December of ’69, and by December of ’70, I had found a lawyer and filed the lawsuit. I kept at it because I was too naive to understand what it was. In my family, like I said, my grandmother, she ran the rehabilitation wing of the Greenfield Hospital. She was, by far and away, the most educated, respected member of my family. I guess I must have… That was the ’50s. I was drinking the Koolaide like everybody in the ’50s when I was growing up in ’60s.

But I never actually had it so personally put to me as I now was having it put to me. “No, you’re a woman. You’re not going to get this benefit because as a woman, you don’t deserve it, and you will never deserve it,” was pretty much the message. My husband at the time, Joe Frontiero, said, Enough of this going up the ranks. There’s a law firm here in Montgomery, Alabama, that handles civil rights cases. Let’s go to them. That was Levin and Dees. I was dealing with them. While they were dealing with my lawsuit. [They] would morph into the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But at that point, they were a private firm. We went to them, we saw Joe Levin, who really was the first person who explained it to me in a way that I truly understood it. He explained to me that there will be no… I said, Write me a nice letter. Write me something. This is what I want. I want you to prove to them that they are wrong. So write me a nice letter telling them that they’re all, every single one of them, they’re misunderstanding this. And he said, “No, you’re the one who’s misunderstanding this. This is written into law. This is a statute. And the only way to change this statute is to go to court.” And so we hired him.

SC:  I paid him at the time. I paid him $800, which doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it was a month and a half’s worth of my salary. We paid that. Then afterwards, the suit, of course, would cost much, much, much, much more than that. I’ve gotten much, much more than that out of this lawsuit. But at the time, it was a time to gulp hard.

Joe Levin filed suit for us, and both my husband and I were plaintiffs. It was originally Fronteiro v. Laird, from Melvin Laird, because he was the Secretary of Defense. We went to district Court, Middle district, Alabama. It was a three-judge federal panel, and we lost. I was not expecting that. I was not expecting anything. Because in this great country of ours, you don’t discriminate, right?

I really was naieve. And by the time it came out of the district court and Joe asked if I wanted to continue to the Supreme Court, I was getting out of the service. I had served my three years. I was going back home to Massachusetts, and I said yes, mainly because I felt like I was far enough across the big muddy that I couldn’t turn around, that people had done this work for me.

JW:  Sure.

SC:  When I left Alabama, I became somewhat disassociated from the case. I wasn’t there at the Supreme Court when it was argued because I didn’t know I could be. It took me a long time to grow up. It really did. I listen to young people today. Two weeks ago, I was at a seminar put on by the Supreme Court Historical Society in Montgomery, Alabama. A lot of these high school kids are a lot more sophisticated than I was, even in my mid to late 20s. But I didn’t know I could even ask to be at the Supreme Court.

And many, many, many years later, when we met Joe Levin, my lawyer, and we’re very good friends now, he called me up one day, and he knew that I had been asked over the years, what did it feel like? That’s one of the basic questions. There are two basic questions. I’m always asked, and I always disappoint people. One is, “What was Ruth Bader-Ginsburg like when you went to the Supreme Court?” I have to say I didn’t meet her for 26 years after that.

The other question is, “What did it feel like to be in that room when your case was being argued?” I have to say I wasn’t there. Joe had heard some of those arguments, and called me up one day and he said, “Sharron, this has really been on my mind. I want to tell you why I didn’t invite you to be in the courtroom that day.” I thought he was going to tell me, “You’ve always been such a loose cannon. I couldn’t afford it.”  But what he said was, “I didn’t know I could invite you.”

He was only four years older than I was. We were both in our 20s, and I hadn’t realized that then. I didn’t realize it until I met him again. Oh, gosh. How many years later? Let me look at my cheat sheet again. I met him in 2012, again, quite a bit later, because he invited me to Washington to be part of a press conference for another lawsuit that the Southern Poverty Law Center took on that was very much like mine. Now it was two women, one woman asking for a right that would be given to a man for a spouse, for her spouse. And I met him again, and I thought, My God, this man is awfully young. He was a grown up when I was a kid. How can he not be ancient now? But we were both kids.

JW:  So back to the case. What happened at the Supreme Court?  Attorney Ginsburg also became part of the case.

SC:  She was the amicus, I guess, is the way you pronounce it. I’ve been mis-pronouncing it all these years. She was the amicus attorney for the ACLU. Joe gave her 10 minutes of his 30 minutes of time. He strategized in one way, and she strategized in another way. They had two entirely different arguments. I think that hers was the more soaring of the arguments. I mean, he did due process. Nothing duller than listening to due process arguments, where she did a more soaring, I want my brethren to take their feet off our necks. That’s all I ask. That wonderful Sarah Grimke quote.

In truth, it took both of them to win that case. Four of the justices went narrowly with Joe’s argument, and another four made the extra step to her argument. Of course, one of them went with the original verdict, which was, “Yeah, maybe it’s unfair, but let’s not inconvenience the government.” That was Rehnquist, the Supreme Court top guy. Anyway, it went in our favor, not quite all the way to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s argument about adding it as a suspect classification. They gave me back pay, and at the point my husband and I were divorced.

During this whole end of this process, the marriage was falling apart very badly, and we split up. We managed to stay together just barely long enough for the decision because I didn’t want to face what I felt I would face, which is, see, uppity women can’t keep a man. I just didn’t want to go there, didn’t want to face it. So I hung in long enough. And when they finally paid me back pay, they split it in two and sent me $800, and they sent Joe $800.

And I thought, well, yeah, now they get it. I came out with the same amount of money that I put in. But I, again, have gotten so much out of this. At first, I hid. At first, I did not like the scrutiny I was getting from press. I didn’t like people coming and interviewing me and then writing things that… Nobody was terribly wrong, but a lot of people were not terribly right. And then that’s what other people are going to… That your legacy is going to be the words the impressions of other people.

And I was still… I was in my early 30s. I’d just gone through a divorce, and the divorce was not good. I was trying to put myself together in some coherent way, and it was very difficult for me to be subject to other people’s opinions of me in that period of time. I did not appreciate a lot of it. Justice Ginsburg invited me to a few things, and I started going as her guest, and then I met up with Joe again, conferences. What I figured out was that my role here was like, and my son tells me never to say this about myself, but I always say this about myself. I’m the Vanna White of this lawsuit because the law is really dull and dry for a lot of people. So I am the living embodiment of somebody who – Did it.

JW:  You did it.

SC:  Here is due process. Anyway, by that time, I was sufficiently grown up to have some of that stuff under control and not worry too much about how I was coming across. And so in later years, I’ve really enjoyed talking to people. And I really enjoyed this thing I did two weeks ago. It was called Hometown. It’s part of a series that the Supreme Court Historical Society puts on in different towns, and they pick a piece of law that came from that town. So they can use that to show high school students how the courts work and how the Supreme Court works.

It is a fabulous program. I was able to get up in front of a room full of high school students, three quarters of which were women. One quarter, I would say, were guys, and they did three quarters of the talking. I got up at one point and said that, pretty much what I told you, that I had not been entirely comfortable because in your 20s and 30s, or in my 20s and 30s, I was trying to figure out who I was without too much intervention from people telling me who I should be.

I certainly had been told what it is to be a lady, what it is to be a woman. Even from the feminist side, I was being told, “Well, it’s all well and good, but now you should be changing the oil in your car,” which I have no interest in doing. You, of all people, should, and it would be somebody else’s garment of ideas thrown all over me. But what I told these kids was that I know how I present myself in public. I know how I was presenting myself to them. I said, I’m loud, I’m in your face, I’m borderline inappropriate at times. But if you’re going to give me a pulpit, I’m damn well going to be heard. And that resonated so much with some of the girls. One of the girls actually came up and asked me to have lunch with her. And the first thing she said was, “I want to be heard.”

Isn’t that wonderful? I’m an old lady now. I’m 78, and I really don’t care what anybody thinks. It’s a good time to say, I’m me. This is it. I still have rights. So I’ve become a lot more comfortable with the history. I’m having a good time with the perk of being somebody who gets listened to when I walk into a room like that. That’s the blessing of this lawsuit, not the $800 I ended up with.

JW:  Well, but also, I have to say the precedent it established was incredible for all women.

SC:  Yes, I’m happy about that. I think the two most important Supreme Court decisions were Reid v Reid, which was the direct precedent of mine, and the Crown Jewel, which was Roe v Wade, which was decided just a couple of months before mine was. And let’s remember what happened to that. Let’s all hold hands on that barricade.

JW:  After the lawsuit, you left the service, right?

SC:  Yes.

JW:  And so what did you do then?

SC:  I was a physical therapist. I worked for a nursing home and for a visiting nurses association. I got married again after a couple of years, had a child. I ran a craft shop out of my home for a while. Eventually, I wrote a couple of romances. I believe it was six. Then I went to work for the public schools as a library aid, and at that time, I wrote some books that could be used to encourage kids to use research sources. That’s back when we were still using books. Then after that, I ran a bookmobile in this town for a couple of years. I’ve been very career ADD. When things get a little too easy, I always find something else.

JW:  Did you lecture then about your case?

SC:  Every once in a while, if somebody would come forward and ask me to do something, I’d talk about it. I don’t usually go out and advertise it to the point where I have very good friends who, when the RBG movie came out, would say to me, “Remind me again what you did?” And I would tell them and they’d go, “Oh, yeah…. Are you going to the picnic on Friday?” When I get a chance to talk about it, I’m very proud about it. The lawsuit has opened my life up and informed my life in a lot of ways, but it is not my life.

JW:  Do you have any concluding thoughts?

SC:  I’ll say also what I told these kids, that windows open all the time in your life. And that particular window opened for me, and I stepped through. I did what I did then, and then I stepped back through the window. And even though I became a feminist because of that, and I look at a lot of things in my life through feminist eyes – I consider myself a feminist – I didn’t become a lawyer. I’m not really apt to get on a bus and go to a rally. I’m more private than that.

But there are other people who step through the window and stay there, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, like Joe Levin. But there’s also a place for people who step through the window, do it and come back. I’ve done a lot of other things. I do a lot of writing. I’ve been a lighthouse keeper and written for that organization’s newsletter. I’ve, again, written some romances because I’m almost stubbornly insistent that the right to determine what my gender is, is not going to be determined by feminists either. It’s going to be determined by me and my immediate family’s needs. That’s what it is.

I run a Death Cafe now. The idea is not original with me, but I run the one that’s here in Gloucester, where once a month people come and talk openly about death without whispering about it. And talk also about aging and loss, that group. I’ve done a lot of research. I’ve researched a local pauper’s lot and then talked enough people into reenacting so that we had a meet and greet with the dead. My husband was brave enough to play a man who died of a gangrene of the scrotum. Nobody else would take that role.

I have grandchildren, one of whom is going to show up here as soon as we’re through with this interview. So I’ve had a busy life that hasn’t been dedicated to that one thing I did between the ages of 23 and 27. Again, I’m really good friends with my lawyer. I joke with him, “I paid you $800 once, and now I have you for life.”