Honoree Profile: Kathleen Peratis

Kathleen Peratis was the second director of the ACLU Women's Rights Project. Having graduated from law school in 1970, she immediately began volunteering as a speaker at her local NOW chapter regarding the implementation of the sex discrimination provisions of Title VII.

In 1973, she was invited to a Ford Foundation-sponsored conference. There she met women active in the field, among them Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then the founding director of the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

A month or two later Bader Ginsburg reached out to Peratis at her Los Angeles law firm and asked if she would be interested in applying for the ACLU post — Ginsburg was about to become a full-time law professor at Columbia Law School. Peratis was hired,moved to New York, and for the next five years had what she calls "a front-row seat" at the creation of court cases leading to Ginsburg's goal: to see women's rights protected under the Constitution.

Peratis left the ACLU in 1979 to join a new law partnership which focused on civil rights and civil liberties. She is now a partner in a 28-lawyer firm that limits its practice to the representation of individuals with employment related claims. Hers has been a particular focus on claims of discrimination, sexual abuse and hostile environment. She has been president of the New York Civil Liberties Union, is an emerita member of the board of directors of Human Rights Watch and the founding chair of its Women's Rights division.

She is also a regular columnist for The Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper of interest to the Jewish world. In her column, "Only Human," she writes about women's rights and human rights.

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