Honoree Profile: Harriett S. Rabb

Harriett S. Rabb litigated civil rights and antiwar/draft resistance cases after law school graduation in 1966. In 1971, she began working at Columbia Law School, heading one of the first federally-funded Title VII law school clinics.

Between 1971 and 1980, Rabb and her students litigated federal class actions representing women law graduates who were denied jobs in New York City's major law firms or were hired only into the firms' Trusts and Estates Departments; women at the New York Telephone Company (where college-educated women were tracked into jobs supervising telephone operators); women professionals at Newsweek (who were hired as researchers while equally-qualified males were hired as reporters); women in all jobs at the Readers Digest Association, Inc. (which maintained two lists of its magazine editors, one, all male, titled "The Editors," the other titled "The Ladies"); and women at the New York Times (who, even when they worked in other than the style sections of the paper, earned less and held lower positions than did their male colleagues). They never lost a case.

Rabb offers an anecdote from one of the early law firm cases illustrating a sense of the era. At the NYC Commission on Human Rights, she and her students were in a pre-litigation settlement conference with a partner representing one of the respondent law firms; they were discussing the statistical evidence in the case. It included the usual pattern: no women partners, few women associates and all or almost all of them in Trusts and Estates. At one point in the meeting, the partner, appearing to have had an intellectual breakthrough, said that he now understood: they were complaining that his firm was "like a field with many bulls but no cows in it." For the most part, Rabb says, those days have passed.

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