Honoree Profile: Wendy Webster Williams

Wendy Webster Williams discovered feminism in law school when Herma Hill Kay,one of the first tenured women law professors in the United States, called together the women students of Boalt Hall (the University of California School of Law at Berkeley) in the Spring of 1969. Kay's subject was sex discrimination in academia and its implications for women in law, and the time was right for the message. The students formed the Boalt Hall Women's Association and began working for equality of women in law school and the profession.

Upon graduation in 1970, Williams clerked for Justice Raymond Peters of the California Supreme Court; she was there when in the spring of 1971 Peters issued the first decision declaring sex a suspect classification under the Fourteenth Amendment, just in time for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to make use of in her Supreme Court brief in the pathbreaking Reed v Reed case.

Following the clerkship, Williams was a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow in poverty law, assigned to San Mateo Legal Aid Society. Sister Boalt Hall graduates Nancy Davis and Mary Dunlap then joined with Williams to found Equal Rights Advocates, a women's-rights law firm in San Francisco still going strong today. The three Equal Rights Advocates (later joined by Joan Graff ) brought gender cases under Title VII, taught women-and-law classes at several law schools, and lectured and wrote on women's rights and sex equality.

By 1975, the ERA organization was one of four or five groups doing women's legal work around the United States, collaborating on amicus briefs, speaking at the by-then annual Women and Law Conferences, and meeting to share information and plan the way forward. Williams left ERA in the summer of 1976 to teach at Georgetown University Law Center, where she has remained to this day.

[ Event Schedule ] [ Event Flyer (PDF) ] [ Event Program (PDF) ] [ Event Photos ][ Honorees ] [ Home ]