March is National Women's History Month, and the National Women's History Project is honoring several women attorneys and law school graduates as part of the month-long celebration:
- Martha Wright Griffiths (1912-2003): Congresswoman Griffiths served in Congress from 1954 to 1974. During that period, she fought successfully for the addition of language in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that would prohibit sex-based discrimination. She also worked to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX, the federal statute that prohibits sex discrimination in education.
- Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005): Judge Motley's career included many "firsts." She was the first African American woman accepted at Columbia Law School in 1944, the first African American woman elected to the New York Senate, the first woman to serve as Manhattan Borough President, and the first African American woman appointed as a federal district judge. Before she became a judge, Judge Motley worked as a staff attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and she was the only woman to serve on the Brown v. Board of Education legal team.
- Monique Mehta: A 2006 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, Ms. Mehta is the Executive Director of the Third Wave Foundation, an organization that supports "groups and individuals working towards gender, racial, economic, and social justice" through grants, leadership development, and advocacy.
Here's an interesting tidibit of local women's legal history gleaned from last Sunday's SF Chronicle: In 1911, California passed Amendment 8, which gave women the right to vote in state elections years before the successful passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Guess which city failed to pass Amendment 8? San Francisco.
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