2021
Hello ,
If you've ever worked (in America) beside a man doing the same job and received equal pay, there is one woman's name you should know.
I doubt there is anyone who's done more in the crusade for equal pay for women in this country than Bessie Margolin. She made waves and opened doors for women while most second-wave feminists were still in diapers.
As the only woman in classrooms full of men, Bessie earned a law degree at Tulane, then a Doctorate of Judicial Science at Yale. She took her first job as a lawyer the same year Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born.
Bessie went toe to toe with Supreme Court Justices, laid the legal foundation for women's right to equal pay, and did it with style, in heels.
Bessie Margolin: The Real Deal
Who Secured the New Deal (in Heels)
By the numbers, in nearly four decades as a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Labor, Bessie Margolin oversaw 300 Equal Protection Agency lawsuits in 40 states and recovered $4 million for 18,000 workers.
She argued 24 cases before the Supreme Court - one of only three women to reach this mark before the year 2000 - she lost only three of these cases.
One of Bessie's most important cases that remains a landmark today grew from circumstances in a packing plant in New Jersey. Both men and women worked for Wheaten Glass, a manufacturer of special order glass containers.
They worked side-by-side, doing identical work at least 80 percent of the time, inspecting glass bottles and packing them into boxes. Wheaton paid the men 10 percent more per hour than the women.
Margolin supervised the federal suit that became known as the Wheaton Glass Case. The verdict after 16-days in court, was a loss for Margolin. The judge decided Wheaton Glass had the right to pay men because they possessed "great flexibility" to occasionally perform tasks women did not.
Below: An example of the myriad different, now antique, jars manufactured by Wheaton Glass.
The men running Wheaton and other corporations following the case, cheered the victory for business interests. Legal minds believed the judge's decision in Shultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. to be "reversal-proof." The judged had gone to the packing plant to see for himself the women and men working. The facts of their duties seemed clear.
Margolin didn't see it that way. She believed the women employed by Wheaton deserved equal pay and appealed to the 3rd Circuit Court. She argued the term "equal work" required jobs only be substantially equal and pay should not be determined on the basis the sex of groups of employees.
Margolin's arguments swayed judges at the appeals court and they overturned the trial verdict. No surprise that Wheaton appealed to the Supreme Court, but the high court refused to revisit the case. In May 1970, Margolin's arguments became the equal pay precedent that remains today.
This victory came late in Bessie Margolin's career after she had been changing judges minds for 37 years! She's started back in the 1930s during the Depression, defending President Roosevelt's New Deal.
Margolin came out of Yale Law School with impressive academic credentials, enthusiastic references, and a strong background in corporate law. But being Jewish and a woman in 1933, precluded her from practicing law on Wall Street. The best offer she got was to work in a law firm’s library. No law schools cared to hire her to teach, either.
Raised in a Jewish Orphan's Home in New Orleans, Margolin had confronted hardship, and throughout her years of education she had pushed through doors where other women didn't even knock. She was brilliant, ambitious, and determined.
In 1933, Congress had created the Tennessee Valley Authority, part of the New Deal that consolidated government agencies and kicked off a massive program over seven states. The law provided for building dams and desperately needed jobs, generating hydroelectric power and controlling flood plains in the Tennessee River drainage.
The TVA right away came under challenge in court. The federally-owned electrical utility tasked with managing natural resources was a serious threat to corporate interests. But the electricity it produced was life-changing for small farmers and helped raise the standard of living for poverty-stricken families in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia and others.
Below: Water pours from open spillways at the Pickwick Landing Dam, a project of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Officials were creating storage room to prevent a flood. (Photo Library of Congress)
Bessie applied for work as an attorney with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The man hiring was reluctant to put a woman in the position, but persuaded by others to hire Bessie Margolin, the first woman attorney at the TVA.
Three years later, in 1936, a case questioning the constitutionality of the TVA had made it's way to the Supreme Court. In Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority Margolin wrote a major portion of the brief defending the Roosevelt's TVA. This was her first experience participating in a case at the highest court in the land. Based in large part
on her arguments in the brief, the judges upheld the role of the TVA.
Soon Bessie sought a new challenge, and transferred to the Labor Department's Wage & Hour Administration to implement another part of the New Deal, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Her first assignment took her home to New Orleans where she made the papers.
The press played up Margolin's femininity, but Margolin's biographer, Marlene Trestman says Bessie put in the grunt work of new Wage and Hour lawyer, traveling to damp warehouses and unwelcoming factories where she reviewed invoices, payroll records, piece work tickets, and time sheets to develop the facts for the Fair Labor Standards Act injunction cases.
Bessie wrote a friend, "Must get back to [work]—my!! What a drab world this is for mill hands—and their attorneys.
After nearly ten years as an attorney, Bessie had seen a good number of male lawyers around her get promoted. She thought it was well past her turn. She by-passed her superiors (men) and took her argument straight to the top. She wrote directly to the Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, whom Roosevelt had appointed the first woman ever to serve in the president's cabinet.
She asked for the promotion she wanted, Assistant Solicitor of Labor, writing Perkin's about “a general subconscious attitude … a woman is simply not considered for the high ranking positions in the solicitor’s office.” This testament by Bessie Margolin
in 1942 called out sex discrimination in the federal government more than two decades before Congress made it illegal in Title VII.
Bessie got the job, though given a lower salary than she asked for, which the men hiring her thought was an awful lot ‘for a girl.’
Margolin had plotted the course in which she would change the lives of women in America, saying “I’m interested in labor and I’m a New Dealer. The [Fair Labor Standards] act is pretty conservative, I think, but it’s a step in the right direction and I’m right with it. Incidentally, I’m not a radical.”
But several years later, Margolin's career took a significant detour. At the end of WWII, she volunteered to work temporarily in Nuremberg for the U.S. Army. There she drafted
rules establishing American Military Tribunals to prosecute Nazi war criminals
"The longer I remain in Germany—" Margolin wrote a friend, "particularly the more I see and read about Nazis—and listen to them testifying in court, the more impatient I become of any leniency shown them, and the more concerned I become over the lack of interest shown by Americans in prosecuting sufficient numbers of them to insure against the revival of their shocking and nauseating
doctrines and crimes..."
After her part in the famous Nuremberg Trials, Bessie returned to the Labor Department where, in the words of Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren, she put the “flesh and sinews” around the “bare bones” of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy strengthened those bones with the Equal Pay Act to outlaw, "the unconscionable practice of paying women lower wages than men."
Bessie became the foremost attorney fighting to implement Kennedy's vision in every federal appeals court circuit in the land. By the time she retired in 1972, she'd written briefs and argued some 150 cases for women's right to equal pay.
According to Margolin's biographer, Marlene Trestman, Bessie had a distinctly feminine style which she did not forfeit to her biting speech and penetrating legal analyses at oral argument.
"She spoke with an engaging drawl and calm confidence that revealed her Southern heritage and the power of her knowledge. She was a striking brunette known for her elegant wardrobe and impeccable coiffure— the latter owed to regular, morning visits to the Elizabeth Arden Salon, where she often edited briefs. Whether because of her gender, her appearance, or her demeanor (or all three), Margolin
turned heads as she entered court rooms throughout the federal circuits and at the Court. 'She walked with absolute assurance that a door would be opened before she got to it.'”
Did Bessie play the "woman card" to win her cases? Trestman says Margolin “played the woman card because it was the only one she was dealt.”
It was through her knowledge and experience of the issues and growing body of law surrounding Fair Labor Standards Act that Bessie engaged with justices on the Supreme Court with a boldness that a lesser attorney would not have dared.
During the span of five U.S. presidents and nine Secretaries of Labor, Bessie Margolin served as the architect of fair labor practices and equal pay for women. Maybe she is on a postage stamp, and I just haven't sent enough snail mail to see it. Maybe we could put her on 50 dollar bill.
Sources
https://www.nola.com/news/article_2205dbc7-7654-5327-9662-6f58b2b6669f.html
https://www.whatshernamepodcast.com/bessie-margolin/
https://www.marlenetrestman.com/bessie-margolin-timeline.html
https://library.pcw.gov.ph/sites/default/files/fair%20labor%20remarkable%20life.pdf
Take a listen to Margolin at the Supreme Court on this scratchy audio clip of
her 1955 oral argument in Steiner v. Mitchell, Margolin displays grace under pressure, cool logic and humor and frustrates the heck out of one court justice.
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