My Mom was a community organizer - but we didn't know it. At the time, I was decades away from learning that word and what it meant. All I knew was that Mom saw a situation that was unfair and tried to organize people to change it.
I suppose it isn't too surprising that all these years later her daughter has tried to make a career out of challenging what's unfair and working for change.
Happy Mother's Day Mom, and thank you for giving me my earliest lessons in community organizing. I'm still using them all these years later.
My Mom graduated from law school in 1976, when I was 8 years old. At the time, there weren't many women in her law school class. And there were even fewer mothers. I remember sitting in the back row of her law school class, drawing on yellow legal pads, on those school holidays when she still had to go to class. I remember her working at night over her law books. I remember going to our grandparents for a couple of weeks, so she could study for the bar exam.
What I don't remember, and only learned after I got a bit older, was that she went to law school because of the women's movement. She quit her job after getting married, and expected to stay home, raise her kids and be a "traditional wife." (Anyone who knows my Mom now would consider this portrait of her fairly hilarious.) Finding this role a really poor fit for her energy and intellect, she stumbled upon a magazine article about women beginning to enter law school in larger numbers in the early 1970's. "Well, I could do that," she thought. And she did.
Of course, it wasn't exactly that easy. Law school classmates and professors weren't always welcoming or supportive of a mother with young children. Although she got top grades, job offers from the big law firms in town weren't forthcoming. And she wasn't sure she could take a job that didn't have reasonable work hours. In the end, she took a job in the trust department of a local bank. It was that job that would land her face to face with a serious injustice.
We lived in the midwest, and Mom found herself repeatedly encountering farm widows who were being disinherited. Our state, like most states, had a traditional common law property system. If a family farm was in the husband's name, the wife would not necessarily have a claim to it - no matter how much of her own hard work she contributed to that farm over the years. If our state changed to a community property system, women would own half of all property acquired during marriage, and half of any increase in a property's value during marriage. The law would recognize the economic value of the contribution of these women to the farm, or to the family business, or to the family home.
So Mom decided to get folks together to change state law to community property. She founded a coalition. She met with legislators, she had events at our house, she got pamphlets printed up. She figured out how to talk to the media. She worked tirelessly to get people on board.
I remember her giving speeches around town about why we should have this new law. She would tell stories about the farm widows. She would hold up a dollar bill and tear it in half to demonstrate the 50/50 split. "Marriage is a partnership" she said. And the law should recognize this. This simple idea has stayed with me ever since: marriage is between two equals, who might make different contributions, at different times, but each contribution has value.
In middle America during the 1980's, this was actually pretty radical stuff. I doubt Mom anticipated how hard her state legislature would fight this change. She and her coalition worked for nearly ten years to get this bill passed. It never did. And thus, perhaps my first and most important lesson in community organizing was that important changes, those that reallocate power in society, never come easy. And sometimes they don't come at all.
But the second lesson is this - sometimes the fight still matters. Eventually our state's courts adopted many of the changes that were in the bill. It stopped short of true community property. But it dramatically improved the law for women. All the public advocacy and organizing for the legislation surely had some effect on the court.
When I joined this community, and had to pick a screen name, I adopted a short form of the phrase "feminist lawyer" - the most obvious personal descriptor I could come up with. I became a feminist lawyer, just like my Mom. And now I can also call myself a community organizer, just like my Mom.
Happy Mother's Day, Mom. Thanks for teaching me that marriage is a partnership, that lawyers can use their skills for change, and that we are the ones we've been waiting for.