Oct 22, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min · 18 segments
Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down sex discrimination, Dorothy Kenyon drew the legal blueprint…
And clearly this thread of women's rights is all throughout, right? It's not just something that's relevant to what she's doing at the ACLU.
And there's a chapter about kind of why she wouldn't have called herself a feminist.
which was really a difficult chapter to write because I was trying to explain kind of this history of how feminist feminism intersected with labor and the equal rights amendment.
And, and so Dorothy, as I've said, worked for labor and, You know, the ACLU aligned with labor rights as well.
So she was very much someone who believed that women needed protective legislation in the 1920s and 30s to kind of gain a foothold in the workplace.
And so she never supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which was drafted in the 1920s, because she had worked really hard to try to get things like minimum wage and hours legislation that would allow women entryway into a lot of the professions where they had historically been barred.
And so she thought, educating the public, educating those policymakers about why protective legislation was important, how it benefited women, and hopefully someday would be expanded to men, why that needed to be kept.
But the problem was that the ERA supporters kind of latched on to the feminist label.
And so if you called yourself a feminist, that kind of went hand in hand with you supported the Equal Rights Amendment.
And she did a lot because she had worked so hard on things like educating and advocating for minimum wage and hours legislation.
Now, eventually, she did ease her stance in the 1960s and encouraged the ACLU to support the Equal Rights Amendment because by then, women had gained footholds in industry and lots of occupations that they couldn't join before.
And so she also had kind of lost faith with the makeup of the Supreme Court and felt like the ERA was the way to go in the 1960s and early 70s.
And so, you know, she thought it would be better to use the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to litigate change on a case by case basis, rather than just having this constitutional amendment, um, say, Oh, okay.
Um, because that hadn't worked when the reconstruction amendments had been, um, uh, enacted after the Civil War that had not worked to bring, you know, racial discrimination to a halt.
And clearly this thread of women's rights is all throughout, right? It's not just something that's relevant to what she's doing at the ACLU.
And there's a chapter about kind of why she wouldn't have called herself a feminist.
which was really a difficult chapter to write because I was trying to explain kind of this history of how feminist feminism intersected with labor and the equal rights amendment.
And, and so Dorothy, as I've said, worked for labor and, You know, the ACLU aligned with labor rights as well.
So she was very much someone who believed that women needed protective legislation in the 1920s and 30s to kind of gain a foothold in the workplace.
And so she never supported the Equal Rights Amendment, which was drafted in the 1920s, because she had worked really hard to try to get things like minimum wage and hours legislation that would allow women entryway into a lot of the professions where they had historically been barred.
And so she thought, educating the public, educating those policymakers about why protective legislation was important, how it benefited women, and hopefully someday would be expanded to men, why that needed to be kept.
But the problem was that the ERA supporters kind of latched on to the feminist label.
And so if you called yourself a feminist, that kind of went hand in hand with you supported the Equal Rights Amendment.
And she did a lot because she had worked so hard on things like educating and advocating for minimum wage and hours legislation.
Now, eventually, she did ease her stance in the 1960s and encouraged the ACLU to support the Equal Rights Amendment because by then, women had gained footholds in industry and lots of occupations that they couldn't join before.
And so she also had kind of lost faith with the makeup of the Supreme Court and felt like the ERA was the way to go in the 1960s and early 70s.
And so, you know, she thought it would be better to use the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment to litigate change on a case by case basis, rather than just having this constitutional amendment, um, say, Oh, okay.
Um, because that hadn't worked when the reconstruction amendments had been, um, uh, enacted after the Civil War that had not worked to bring, you know, racial discrimination to a halt.
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