Honoree Profile: Brenda Feigen

Brenda Feigen cofounded with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg the Women's Rights Project of the ACLU in 1972. There she litigated sex discrimination cases that involved violations of state and federal law, as well as landmark constitutional cases. She brought a successful federal class-action lawsuit against the Harvard Club of New York City in 1973 because it refused women the right to become full members.

Throughout the 1970s, she contributed research and briefs to some of the landmark cases of that era. Frontiero v. Richardson, which she and Bader Ginsburg helped bring to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, was key among them,with language used to this day to ensure that classifications based on gender are subject to heightened scrutiny. Forced sterilization of poor black women was also high on Feigen's agenda, and she filed cases on behalf of clients in North Carolina and Georgia.

Feigen's interest in eliminating gender discrimination began with a 1970 case she brought on behalf of a father against the New York City Board of Education which had routinely denied parental leaves of absence to all fathers yet granted them to all mothers. But most of all, she was passionately dedicated to ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The first article she authored for the Harvard Women's Law Journal addressed the issues raised after 37 states had ratified the ERA only to be met by pressure by the Far Right to rescind their prior ratifications. Elected National Vice President of NOW in 1970, Feigen appeared on national television and in many news stories on the subject of the ERA and more generally, widespread discrimination against women in all walks of life.

Today, she practices law in Los Angeles but she continues to write. Her article about same-sex marriage appeared in 2004 in the Harvard Women's Law Journal, four years after her memoir, Not One of the Boys: Living life as a Feminist, was published by Knopf.

In 1993 and 2003, Feigen was a featured speaker at Harvard Law School's Celebrations 40 and 50, commemorating the first class of women graduates in 1953.

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