Honoree Profile: Susan Deller Ross

Susan Deller Ross is a Georgetown University Professor of Law and director of its International Women's Human Rights Clinic. Throughout her career, Ross has contributed to many women's rights victories. In 1971, the Supreme Court issued its first Title VII women's rights decision, Phillips v Martin Marietta Corp., granting women with preschool-age children the same right to work as men with preschool-age children; Ross co-authored the ACLU amicus brief.

At the EEOC, she helped convince the commission to adopt new pregnancy discrimination guidelines in 1972. They protected pregnant women from being fired while they were able to work, and gave them equal medical and sick-leave benefits when they were hospitalized or recuperating from childbirth. After the Supreme Court rejected that approach, she became cochair of the Coalition to End Discrimination Against Pregnant Workers, which quickly won passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 to reinstate the EEOC guideline approach.

Later she helped insure that the Family and Medical Leave Act covered both men and women, rather than the woman only approach first suggested.

Her ACLU litigation projects helped establish women's right to equal pension benefits with men, both at the federal trial level (Peters v Wayne State University in 1979) and Supreme Court (Los Angeles Department of Water & Power v Manhart in 1978). Litigation projects at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division gave women prisoners the right to equal vocational training programs with men and insured that thousands of women in Rhode Island received more than $2,000,000 to compensate them for the denial of full PDA benefits.

Ross has been at the forefront of feminist legal writing. She co-authored one of its first casebooks, Sex Discrimination and the Law: Causes and Remedies, in 1975, as well as Sex Discrimination and the Law: History, Practice, and Theory, in 1996. Her new book, Women's Human Rights: The International and Comparative Law Casebook was published by University of Pennsylvania Press in May.

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