Joan Bertin

According to Joan Bertin, "the timing was good" for her arrival at the Women's Rights Project in 1979. Having been an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow at NYU Law School and having subsequently worked on employment discrimination at a non-profit, Bertin knew most attorneys working in civil rights at the time. After being hired as a staff attorney in 1979, Bertin stayed on with WRP for nearly fifteen years.

"Legal directors come and go, staff attorneys come and go, money comes and goes," Bertin explains. "There was certainly a lot of turnover during my tenure at WRP." However, throughout the years, she identifies a "determined focus and direction" that stayed constant. Bertin and the other WRP lawyers pursued constitutional cases on the status of women and economic justice. "I was always very proud of the work that the Project turned out," she asserts. When asked about the most important cases she worked on, Bertin doesn't hesitate. "Almost everything we worked on fell into that category," she replies. A major part of the job was identifying the important issues to litigate, Bertin explains.

Bertin was particularly involved in pregnancy discrimination cases during her tenure. She focused on fighting discrimination based on employer assertions that a workplace posed a hazard to any fetus a woman might conceive. One of the cases she was most emotionally invested in was a challenge to American Cyanamid Company's practice of requiring female workers to be sterilized to keep their jobs – jobs that the company later eliminated. Bertin worked closely with the women's union to fight for their rights, and the right of all employees to a safe workplace. The American Cyanamid case was ultimately settled, but her efforts in the area continued, as she spearheaded a nearly twelve-year campaign that resulted in an important victory before the Supreme Court.

"We fought tooth and nail on every ground," Bertin recalls. Bertin acknowledges the opposition was stiff as many weren't sympathetic to efforts to eliminate this form of pregnancy discrimination. In UAW v. Johnson Controls, a case in which WRP filed a friend-of-the-court brief, the Supreme Court ultimately held that federal law prohibits employers from keeping women out of jobs that might expose their fetuses to hazardous substances. The key, Bertin believes, was recognizing that the solution to workplace hazards wasn't to eliminate pregnant workers, but to eliminate the hazards they faced.

Bertin and WRP also focused on gender cases headed for the Supreme Court. She describes the Supreme Court practice as "exciting, challenging, and highly pressurized." One of the most contentious women's rights cases, which divided the ACLU, dealt with the rights of pregnant women.

In California Federal Savings and Loan v. Guerra, the question was whether Title VII permitted a state to require employers to offer women childbirth leave while not requiring leave for other disabilities. The ACLU of Southern California argued that Title VII permitted this. WRP and the national ACLU disagreed. They asserted that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act's mandate that pregnancy be treated like any other disability meant that if leave were provided for childbirth, the same entitlement to leave must be extended to all employees temporarily disabled. (The Court agreed with the ACLU of Southern California. It held that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was a floor, not a ceiling, for the rights of pregnant workers and did not prohibit a state from requiring childbirth leave.) Although the split was deep, the question was one of tactics, not philosophy, says Bertin. "We're all still friends," Bertin concludes, adding with a laugh, "I hope!"

Asked what her most challenging cases were, Bertin scoffs. "We didn't have many easy ones," she says. "They were all hard, or they wouldn't have come to us." Still, some cases seemed exceedingly clear to Bertin, even if they proved highly contentious in court. One example was WRP's involvement in challenges to the discriminatory admissions policies at the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute, two public male-only military academies. "They're clearly unconstitutional. I didn't see what all the fuss was about," she confesses. The challenges ultimately succeeded, and both schools today admit female students.

In regard to WRP losses during her tenure, Bertin admits, "I'm sure there were many disappointments in cases, but I've blocked them all out!" She concludes, "In the long haul, I think we generally prevailed on the issues we championed."

Still, that didn't make life at WRP easy. Bertin was fond of telling friends and colleagues, "I love my job. I just wish there were less of it!" She describes the position as overwhelming, with far too much to do and far too few resources to do it. WRP was scraping by at the time, with no paralegals to assist in research, which proved to be a serious handicap.

Bertin had two children during her WRP tenure that she describes as "ACLU babies," and found a level of personal freedom at the office that allowed her to combine parenthood and a full time job. She kept a crib and baby swing in her office and took occasional nursing breaks from round-the-clock depositions. While she describes her second child as a bit "obstreperous," Bertin considers the setup a "very workable compromise." Ultimately the approach helped her balance the demands that would otherwise have been overwhelming.

The progressive workplace also had the effect of emboldening some men at the ACLU to take time off to be with their newborns. The notion of parental leave became more gender-neutral -- perhaps to the dismay of those handling payroll, Bertin jokes.

Eventually, after fifteen years, it was time to move on. "I didn't mean to stay as long as I did," Bertin admits. It was hard to change fields, she confesses. Future employers generally saw her skills as limited to the area of sex discrimination, she realized, which was frustrating.

Not particularly interested in teaching, Bertin worked part-time in academia and part-time in advocacy. She calls the move to Columbia Law School to teach Gender, Science, and the Law "a very invigorating change," though "the academy didn't know quite what to make of me," she admits.

Thereafter, Bertin joined the staff of the National Coalition Against Censorship. Seven and a half years later, she is still with NCAC, and "still a feminist!" At NCAC, Bertin focuses on education and advocacy in defense of the First Amendment, which includes fighting against abstinence-only sex education. "My training as a women's rights lawyer made me realize that this was not just a public health issue, but also a First Amendment issue and an issue of particular importance to women."

As for that hot-button first amendment and gender issue, pornography, Bertin takes the same stance as she did at the ACLU: anti-protectionist. Asking the state to intercede in regulating even offensive speech rarely works to benefit women overall, and invites government abuse of power. Bertin is also concerned about censorship in science, from schools banning the teaching of evolution, to the obstruction of scientific research on controversial topics. Bertin describes her current career as "wonderfully interesting work" that is aimed at securing human dignity and personal freedom by sustaining the legal and social structures that allow people with diverse experiences and perspectives to coexist.

In general, Bertin feels that an integrated view of equality is the ultimate goal of feminism. "The challenge is maintaining the right degree of focus on women's issues while absorbing them into a larger perspective of women as human beings." Bertin refers to women's studies programs at colleges that have morphed into programs in which gender issues are incorporated into all relevant disciplines. She suggests that this may be an analogy for women's rights lawyers, to work on "raising consciousness across-the-board."