On February 5 the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network (BWLN) hosted a half-day conference to celebrate the centennial of the passage of the US Constitution’s 19th Amendment, which establishes that the right to vote cannot be denied based on sex.
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BWLN conference panel -
Melissa Murray and Dahlia Lithwick -
BWLN conference panel
On February 5 the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Network (BWLN) hosted a half-day conference to celebrate the centennial of the passage of the US Constitution’s 19th Amendment, which establishes that the right to vote cannot be denied based on sex.
The conference’s two panels traced the history of voting rights in the United States and examined the current state of equity for women in governmental representation; legislation, including particularly reproductive rights; and other areas. The event culminated in a discussion between Melissa Murray, Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law and BLWN faculty director, and Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate and host of the podcast Amicus, about Lithwick’s forthcoming book, Lady Justice.
Lithwick described the book’s subject as “the women heroes of legal resistance” against inequality and injustice. Among those she profiled is NYU alumna Vanita Gupta ’01, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Civil Rights Division at the US Department of Justice.
Follow their discussion on video:
Selected Remarks:
Dahlia Lithwick: 10:01: “We both went to law school in a time of [gender] parity. I think in my law school class there were more women than men, and we all believed—and I think I stupidly believed in 1993—that we would have parity in Big Law, we would have parity in the academy.… I think in some sense, we still didn’t realize that it is still 1920 in a lot of ways.”
Melissa Murray: 47:36: “In 1920, these [suffragettes], who probably had no experience of what it looked like to vote, were like, ‘I can totally imagine myself going into the ballot box and picking a candidate, and in fact, I’m going to make that happen.’ So how do we harness that kind of radical centennial energy and make it more inclusive, update it, and then bring it forward?”
Lithwick: 52:06 “Each of [the women in Lady Justice], in some iteration or other, when I asked the question, ‘Why you?,’ all sort of said, ‘It had to be done.’…I don’t think any of them had hugely grandiose notions of changing the world…. I think many of my women heroes of the resistance are being told that they’re hysterics all the time.… I always have to remember that you don’t have to apologize for having this acute sense that something very, very profound is wrong.”
Posted April 23, 2020