From the handful who guided the movement and helped change antiquated laws, to the thousands who continued that work and challenged the profession. Join Veteran Feminists of America for a Salute to Feminist Lawyers: 1963-75. June 9, 2008 at the Harvard Club in New York City. Featuring a special tribute to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Honoree Profile: Herma Hill Kay

Herma Hill Kay began teaching law at UC Berkeley in 1960.After several years of teaching Family Law, it was clear to her that the field was ripe for change. It was steeped in sex-segregated roles within the family and seemingly devoted to the endless perpetuation of a rigid sex-based division between private family life and public community life.

As a result, Kay became deeply involved in three reform projects: abortion law, divorce law, and the status of women. Two of those projects began in California, and initially gave rise to a therapeutic abortion law and a no-fault divorce law. In the course of her work, she testified in favor of California's abortion law, one of three such provisions enacted in different states in 1967. By 1973, the Supreme Court had preempted the pro-choice statutory reforms by its decision in Roe v Wade.

In 1966, Kay became a member of Governor Edmund Brown's Commission on the Family, which drafted and helped lobby through the nation's first pure no-fault divorce law, enacted in 1969 and later Co-Reporter for the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, which proposed a similar no-fault law for all states.

The third project had its beginning in two federal laws, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the prohibition against sex discrimination in employment contained in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1974, Kay joined Kenneth Davidson and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in writing the first law-school casebook on sex-based discrimination that traced these and other developments. She remembers this period in particular as a heady time.

Today, all of these projects are under attack. A new conservative Supreme Court majority is chipping away at the woman's right to choose established in Roe; no-fault divorce is criticized as having significantly weakened the American family; and a woman's ability to compete on equal terms in the marketplace is still not secure. Work must continue.

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