Honoree Profile: Jean Ledwith King

Attorney Jean Ledwith King of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a 1968 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, joined U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, attorney Sarah Weddington (a Texas attorney who successfully argued Roe v. Wade in 1973 before the Supreme Court), and 29 other women attorneys who were "firsts" on law school faculties, members of major law firms, judges, and leaders in raising women's issues at a "Salute to Feminist Lawyers" celebrated in NYC on June 9th, 2008.

King is in some way typical of the 30 other honorees, though very special to Michigan. In 1970, with other academic and local women she cofounded "Focus on Equal Employment for Women," originally to oppose the appointment to the Supreme Court of an anti-feminist judge. In the same year along with with Democratic women from Delta, Genessee, and Kalamazoo counties, she founded and chaired for its first three years the Women's Caucus of the Michigan Democratic Party. With King as the attorney for the challenge, the Women's Caucus successfully remedied (using the National Democratic Party's McGovern-Fraser rules of that year) the severe gender imbalance in Michigan's delegation to the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

King successfully argued the challenge at a hearing before an administrative judge in Detroit, then with Jacqui Hoop before a credentials committee chaired by Patricia Harris in D.C. The only purely Democratic group pursuing a sex discrimination challenge on the floor of the Convention in Miami, the Michigan challenge was saved with the help of women delegates from other states. It resulted in cutting the votes of 11 white male Michigan Humphrey delegates in half and adding five African American women Humphrey delegates and six white women Humphrey delegates, each with half a vote.

By 1976 the Democratic party rule for gender distribution of each state's delegates at national conventions became hence forward one-half men and one-half women, partly as the result of the successful Michigan challenge four years previous.

In May 1970 she led Focus in filing a detailed administrative complaint (not a lawsuit) against the University of Michigan with the Department of Labor. The complaint was later transferred to HEW. It was filed under the provisions of an Executive Order which had been issued by President Johnson in September 1968. The complaint challenged University practices under an obscure footnote in that Order that prohibited sex discrimination by Federal contractors. This prohibition had been discovered by Dr. Bernice Sandler when she searched for a Federal weapon to help women at a time when neither Title VII nor the Equal Pay Act applied to academic employment.

In May 1970 when the Focus complaint was filed, the U-M had $65 million dollars in Federal contracts. Only late in 1970 did the University release the data demanded by HEW and begin to negotiate a settlement with the Feds.

In October 1970 HEW had begun to withhold contracts from the University and by December $15 million dollars of contracts were being withheld from the University. Only then did the University release the employment and other data demanded by HEW and negotiations began.

In January 1971, Professor Libby Douvan, a member of Focus, reported that the salaries of 100 women faculty were doubled (though they were so low to begin with that in doubling they didn't still reach parity with male faculty). The pay of U-M clerical employees at that time was so low that these employees (almost all women) were frequently on food stamps.

King made sure that the developments associated with Focus's complaint were continually and thoroughly reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education thus giving hope across the United States to thousands of academic women who shared the same problems of inequitable pay, lack of prestige, and disagreeable workload.

In July 1971, King was one of the 100-plus founding members of the National Women's Political Caucus who met in Washington. King co-chaired Michigan's abortion referendum which was on the statewide ballot in November 1972. It would have permitted Michigan women to get legal abortions up to 20 weeks' gestation with the approval of a physician. The referendum failed but was followed in less than three months by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade.

As a result of her experience in the fall of 1972 in Michigan combating what would eventually be called a "right to life" campaign (the first in the nation), King caused to be assembled in Washington, D.C., in April 1973 at the headquarters of the Methodist church, leaders of several pro-choice denominations. This gave her and Eleanor O'Brien the opportunity to describe to them the Michigan experience.

King and O'Brien also brought samples of the right to life door-to-door literature including pictures of fetuses in buckets. This meeting led to the foundation of what was originally called the Religious Coalition for Abortion Reform. It was clear to King then and to the other Michigan women who fought for the referendum that opposition to abortion reform would increase and not fade away despite the Roe v. Wade decision. (Both "right to life" and "pro-choice" were expressions invented in later years.)

In 1974 at the request of a group of Kalamazoo parents who had carefully studied twelve textbooks that their school system planned to purchase for elementary schools, King successfully challenged the sexist content of textbooks which ha been published by Houghton-Mifflin of Boston. The demeaning of women and girls was constant throughout the books. Females appeared only infrequently as characters in stories and plays. They were often portrayed as helpless. One book even referred to a male robin who laid eggs.

The pronoun "she" was rarely used in these books and this scarcity was defended by the Kalamazoo superintendent of schools with the argument that "she" did not appear in a high enough count on the word lists. King filed a Title IX complaint against the use of these textbooks with HEW. (At that point the regulations under Title IX had had not been finalized; later textbooks were excluded from Title IX coverage.) King released the detailed complaint to the Boston Globe.

As a result of the Title IX filing, the Federal response, and the newspaper publicity, Houghton-Mifflin hurriedly assembled a 135-page supplement to the series of books which the Kalamazoo school system had purchased over the objections of its parents' committee. They then revised their subsequent editions.

Other elementary textbook publishers, all of them having been publishing elementary textbooks which were equally anti-female, soon followed suit. The Michigan Women's Commission published 10,000 copies of a book King wrote about this effort which included the details of the Kalamazoo parents' conclusions about the books, the Title IX complaint, and the Federal response.

But King is now probably best known in and outside of Michigan for her tireless work which began in 1974, to open athletics to women and girls in colleges and high schools by using Title IX and other statutes and constitutional provisions, state and Federal, in and out of court.

She was admitted to the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1989 and awarded the high honor of Champion of Justice by the State Bar of Michigan in 2006. King had received a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan in 1948, an M.A. in History from the U-M in 1953, and a J.D. from the University in 1968.

King is running in 2008 for re-election as a Scio Township Trustee and has already been elected this year as a member of the Ann Arbor District Library Board.

She has served for many years as a member of the Washtenaw County Historic District Commission and has given special help towards the preservation of the Delhi iron truss bridge over the Huron River in Scio (the first historically designated bridge in Michigan) and to the advocates of a 67-acre viewshed before Gordon Hall. She is now leading an effort to restore the Nanry house on Plymouth Road in Superior Township, a Greek Revival house from the early 1800's which is as important historically as Gordon Hall.

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