Honoree Profile: Priscilla Ruth MacDougall

Priscilla Ruth MacDougall was propelled into action in 1972 when the Supreme Court ruled in Forbush v Wallace that married women must use their husbands' surnames on their driver's licenses, stating inaccurately that the common law required a woman's "legal"name to be that of her husband's.

MacDougall then filed a case to "establish" her name in circuit court, and in May 1972 she took the decree directly to the press. Forbush, she discovered, had been based on the false legal premise that a woman's name automatically changed because of marriage.

Her first article, "The Right of Married Women To Their Own Surnames," published in the 1973/44 Women's Rights Law Reporter, brought naming rights to the fore of the women's legal movement. She participated in legislation around the country, one of the most important being Kruzel v Prudell, in 1975 the turning-point case affirming the right of a married woman to choose her own name.

In Whitlow v Hodges (1976) she, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Robert A. Sedler challenged a driving regulation in Kentucky, but the case was declined by the Supreme Court. Before the Missouri Court of Appeals in 1975, in Natale she established the right of a married woman to use a surname invented by herself.

After a decade of litigating women's and children's naming cases, in 1981 MacDougall appeared before the Alabama Supreme Court in State v Taylor, and won the right of a married woman to vote in her own name. Her last article, "The Right of Women To Name Their Children" (July l985, Journal of Law and Inequality) remains the blueprint for litigating women's and children's naming-rights cases.

Editor's note: the following information about the honoree's background was not included in the printed program:

MacDougall received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1965, a graduate equivalent degree in Paris in 1967 and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1970, the same year a group of Michigan law students convinced the faculty not to allow a Wall Street firm to recruit at Michigan again unless and until its recruiter "explained" his comment (as reported by students who talked with him at a cocktail party), that the firm did not want to hire women.

After graduating she joined the Wisconsin Department of Justice as an Assistant Attorney General, representing the Department of Natural Resources and then the Department of Transportation until 1974. She taught Women and Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1973 and at the Green Bay and Oshkosh campuses of the university in 1974 and 1975. In 1975 she became staff counsel to the Wisconsin Education Association Council where she still works. She has been on the adjunct faculty at Columbia College in Chicago since 1988.

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