Sara Mandelbaum

"I was pretty much by myself the whole time," Sara Mandelbaum confesses, when she describes her tenure at WRP. Having arrived in 1992, Mandelbaum remained after Isabelle Katz Pinzler and Joan Bertin ended each of their 15-year terms. A few other staff members came and left in a year or two, however, Mandelbaum worked largely alone until her departure in 2000. "It was wonderful in a way," Mandelbaum recalls. "I had a lot of autonomy to bring the cases I wanted to bring; there was no one to tell me no!"

On the other hand, being alone wasn't always easy. "It got kind of lonely," Mandelbaum admits. There were not many at the national office of the ACLU who had expertise in women's rights. As a result, "I worked a lot with the affiliates," Mandelbaum describes, adding, "I made a lot of great relationships." She also did much work in coalition with other women's rights organizations. A former Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow who had entered law school with the sole purpose of pursuing women's rights, she was glad to be so involved in feminist issues: "I got my dream job. Who can complain about that?"

Mandelbaum had definite ideas of what was needed in the area of women's rights: "I wanted to do cases that could not easily be done by private lawyers." She explains that the private bar had taken on many Title VII cases against large corporations, because that was where large financial settlements could be obtained. Mandelbaum wanted WRP to represent women with few legal resources, women of color, and poor women. When women in Westchester asked her to bring a suit against a country club that denied them golfing rights on a par with men, she took a pass.

Rather than seek out easy wins, Mandelbaum chose cases that were "a bit risky." "I did a lot of cases defending pregnant women who were being prosecuted for these very bizarre crimes," she describes, referring to addicts who were charged with delivery of cocaine because they used drugs while they were carrying a fetus. Mandelbaum also devoted much of her time to fighting pregnancy discrimination, both before and during her work at the ACLU.

Prior to joining WRP, Mandelbaum had been an attorney at the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, where she was able to pursue a variety of pro-bono activities. "I did a smattering of everything while I was there," Mandelbaum reports, including death penalty and reproductive freedom cases. In fact, her first connection to the ACLU was through pro-bono work in which she collaborated with the Reproductive Freedom Project. She later worked with Joan Bertin and WRP on a suit against a battery manufacturer; the employer was firing pregnant workers, claiming that it did so to protect them from exposure to harmful chemicals. This collaboration resulted in a victory for pregnant women on the job and "a foot in the door" at the ACLU the led to her later work.

Education was another key area for Mandelbaum. She represented teenage girls denied entrance to the National Honor Society because they were pregnant and girls who were told they were too fat to be cheerleaders. And when it came to single-sex education, she rigorously challenged gender-segregated study in public schools. Mandelbaum sought to discredit the widely held belief that men and women are best served by separate academic environments. The cases in the 1990s challenging all-male schools, she explains, were very significant in beginning to rebut this notion.

The most high-profile case brought by WRP in this arena was Shannon Faulkner's suit against the Citadel, which ended in victory in 1995.

Faulkner was a high school student who was initially admitted to the all-male academy based on her qualifications, and later denied entrance when the Citadel realized she was a woman. The highly visible litigation "gave the Project a real association with education cases, which led to other opportunities in that area." During this time period, Mandelbaum also consulted with the U.S. Justice Department in its challenge to VMI's all-male policy and filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of women's admission. Both cases were ultimately successful, and "winning was very, very exciting," Mandelbaum recalls.

In the Supreme Court decision striking down VMI's all-male admissions, Justice Ginsburg's opinion rejected the use of social science data that purported to prove that men and women learned differently, data from which VMI was "drawing frightening conclusions," according to Mandelbaum. For her, an important part of the case was the Supreme Court's refusal to credit a technique she identifies as one often used by anti-feminists -- reliance on "pseudo-science" to justify discriminatory policies.

Not all of WRP's work was so successful, unfortunately. Mandelbaum considers the Supreme Court's United States v. Morrison decision in 2000, which held that Congress did not have the power to provide a civil rights remedy to victims of gender-motivated violence and struck down an important provision of the Violence Against Women Act, to be one of the largest setbacks. WRP had worked indirectly on the case defending the legislation, putting together friend-of-the-court briefs in its support.

When Mandelbaum joined WRP, there were fewer constitutional questions to resolve than in previous decades: "It was a question of how to get at more difficult day-to-day issues. That was a trickier thing." In one effort to resolve these issues, Mandelbaum worked hard in support of the Family Medical Leave Act, federal legislation ensuring that both men and women had the right to parenting leave upon the birth or adoption of a child. The FMLA effort was in part about "showing that yes, men can and should be encouraged to be active parents." Mandelbaum had to be creative in her efforts to address these entrenched societal practices.

Ultimately, Mandelbaum recognizes that much remains to be done. "I think it's an ongoing battle -- I don't think there will ever be an end to struggle for true equality versus formal equality in our lifetime." As for her own lifetime, however, Mandelbaum is pleased with her work at WRP. "We made our contributions to moving in the right direction -- we leave it to people after us to keep it up."