Honoree Profile: Nancy L. Davis

Nancy L. Davis's involvement in the movement for social change began in the mid-60s when she organized voter-registration drives in the South. The experience propelled her into law school,and in 1969 she entered the University of California, Berkeley–Boalt Hall. The percentage of women in her class was the first to reach double digits and that was instrumental in establishing the Boalt Hall Women's Association, of which Davis was the first chair.

BHWA's early accomplishments included successfully advocating for the first gender-based discrimination-and-the-law course. As a law student and a recent graduate, she had the great fortune of working for Herma Hill Kay and Barbara Allen Babcock, two of the leading scholars in the emerging arena of gender-based discrimination.

In the mid-1970s Davis,Wendy Webster Williams, Mary C.Dunlap, and Joan Messing Graff established Equal Rights Advocates, a law firm dedicated to championing women's equality under the law and providing law students with a training program in the issues of sex-based discrimination. Over the years and under her leadership, ERA evolved into a formidable public interest legal organization with a multifaceted approach focusing on discriminatory practices that place a particularly harsh burden on women of color and low income women.

Among its cases were successful challenges to unsafe working conditions, employment policies that deprived pregnant women of retirement benefits, and the exclusion of women of childbearing age from lucrative industrial jobs that allegedly posed a danger to fetuses.

Davis and her ERA colleagues worked to advance the debate on issues where sound public policy had yet to be developed, such as work and family, violence against women, immigrant women's rights, and the rights of lesbians.

In addition, they were instrumental in forming new groups including the Bay Area Coalition for Civil Rights, the Immigrant Women's Task Force, the Coalition for Equality in the Trades, and the Lesbian Rights Project, now the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

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