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Oral History of Katherine Mazzaferri
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is Annamaria Steward, and the
interviewee is CEO Emeritus of the D.C. Bar Katherine A. Mazzaferri. The interview took place
on Saturday, April 15, 2023. This is the third chapter.
MS. STEWARD: Katherine, welcome. Tell us why you decided you wanted to go to law
school.
MS. MAZZAFERRI: In college I had majored in Latin-American literature because I love
Spanish, and I really enjoyed Spanish literature. But I really wanted to
make a difference in the community. As I mentioned, the lawyers at
Mobilization for Youth made a lasting impression on me.
MS. STEWARD: Where did you apply, and where did you decide to go?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I applied to many law schools. I applied to NYU, and I applied to some
schools in Boston. I got into all of them except NYU, where the dean said
to me, interestingly, that he had his “quota” of women with my
credentials. At the time I thought it was odd, but I didn’t really think too
much about it. In retrospect, I’m guessing many schools had those kinds of
restrictions. As it turns out, I decided to go to the National Law Center,
which is now GW Law School, because it had an excellent public interest
program as part of its curriculum. It felt like a fit. And so, I went to GW.
MS. STEWARD: So, you moved to Washington, D.C., and where did you live? What was
going on in the world at that time?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I got an apartment at first on 24th Street, Northwest, and then I wound up
moving to another studio apartment near Pennsylvania Avenue and
21st Street, right near the law school. It was a tumultuous time in the
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world. This is now 1969, and the Vietnam War was in full swing. There
were demonstrations because of the prosecution and trial of the Chicago 7.
There were protests in 1969 and 1970, and then on May 4, 1970, four
students were killed at Kent State University in a protest. There were
demonstrations in the District of Columbia, as well, and many of the
universities, including the National Law Center at GW, were closed for
the semester.
MS. STEWARD: For a whole semester?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: Through the end of the semester. The shootings at Kent State happened on
May 4th, demonstrations were significant everywhere in the country, and
the schools simply shut their doors.
MS. STEWARD: What did that mean for you and your legal education? That’s right before
exam time.
MS. MAZZAFERRI: Right. I believe we were given pass or fail grades for that semester. It
really was a turbulent time. Tough for the city, tough for everybody.
MS. STEWARD: What was your experience at GW Law School like?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I was really surprised at my experience at law school because I had never
been a minority. In each of the four sections of the law school class, there
were a hundred students, more or less, and there were ten women in each
of the sections. For the first time in my life, I felt like a minority, and I had
never understood what it was like to be in that situation. Many of the
professors were fine, but some of them were, frankly, sexist. My criminal
law professor called on women to recite the rape cases, and many of the
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professors used hypotheticals in which only men, not women were the
lawyers. It was a surprise. A few of us in law school were concerned about
what this meant for us, and we decided to form a women’s rights
committee in June of 1970.
Interestingly, one of the professors who had said to me personally
that he didn’t think women should be in law school heard that we were
discussing organizing, and he called on me in class. He said his wife was
interested in “women’s lib,” and asked if I could get her an application.
The class roared, and I felt so humiliated. I was mortified. But it also made
me realize that it was time to get organized.
MS. STEWARD: What did the Women’s Rights Committee do?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: One of the first things Linda Colvard Dorian and I as co-chairs decided to
do was to research GW’s admissions policies. We were also co-editors of
the law school newspaper. We discovered, and then published, that GW
had higher standards for women than for men in admissions. In retrospect,
I don’t think GW was alone. I think this was the way it was, just as my
conversation with the dean at NYU. But like many of the aspects of life at
law school, it was a surprise. The dean of admissions said he didn’t get
many applications from women, not as many from women as men, and we
offered to go to our alma maters to recruit women. So, for one semester,
we did that.
MS. STEWARD: You’re organizing this Women’s Rights Committee, and what other
impacts did it have or were you able to achieve during your time at GW?
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MS. MAZZAFERRI: One of the women who was ahead of us by one year in law school,
Nancy Stanley, had been part of a women’s law firm in New York, and
she said to us that Sue Ross, who was then a lawyer at EEOC, had been
instrumental in starting a Women and the Law class at NYU. So, she
urged us and was part of the process to try to get this kind of class at GW.
Some of us spoke with the dean, Robert Kramer, who was quite good on
women’s issues. He was very special. He was interested. He told us, if we
developed the curriculum and recommendations for professors, he would
consider it, and so we did. We researched the curriculum, and we
interviewed some candidates. We asked Sue Ross and Gladys Kessler,
who at that time was at a small firm, and later became a superior court
judge and then a district court judge, to teach our first class, which was
offered in the Fall of 1971. It was quite wonderful.
MS. STEWARD: These are amazing accomplishments for such a small group of women at
GW Law School. You get there, within your first year, you’re organizing a
women’s law committee, getting a Women and the Law course established
at the law school. What else were you all able to do?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: The women’s movement was in full swing, so we were in touch with
women from other law schools, and there was a lot of talk about what the
next steps could be. So a group of us began discussing whether there
should be kind of a city-wide group on behalf of women’s rights. Around
that same time, Sue Ross, from EEOC, was contacted by the National
Organization for Women. NOW wanted to know whether our little group
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in Washington was interested in being part of the NOW Legal Defense
Fund. In the Spring of 1971, Lucy Komisar, who was then the National
Vice President of NOW, came to a meeting at Sue Ross’s house. It was a
small group. As I recall, Sue and Nancy Stanley, Judy Potter, Judy’s sister,
Hope Eastman, Cindy Gitt, and myself. There were others, but those are
the individuals whom I can recall. So Lucy asked if we wanted to be a
chapter of the NOW Legal Defense Fund. We all listened. It was an
intriguing idea.
MS. STEWARD: You had a national organization reaching out to you?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: Right. I guess NOW had heard of us, I don’t know quite how. It was an
interesting possibility. But after Lucy left, the group of us in Sue’s living
room talked about it and decided that we wanted to form our own group.
We decided to create the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, which is now the
National Partnership for Women and Families. Gladys Kessler was the
first president, and I was the second.
MS. STEWARD: Tell us about WLDF. You’re getting Gladys Kessler, first she’s teaching a
Women in the Law course, and now she’s the first president of the
Women’s Legal Defense Fund, and you’re the second. So what was
WLDF able to do?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: We had organizing committees. We had an employment committee, a
name change committee, those were the main ones that I can recall. We
were interested in working on legislation that affected women. We
realized, pretty shortly after we started, that we really couldn’t do it as a
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group of volunteers and we needed to have a staff. As a board we
interviewed candidates, one of whom was Judith Lichtman. Judy was a
civil rights lawyer and was a fantastic attorney and organizer. She became
the executive director. She started in July of 1974 and served until July
2004. She really made the National Partnership into a key player on the
many important issues facing women in this country.
MS. STEWARD: I’m sensing a theme of strong women in your life. We have of course your
mom, your Aunt Florence. We have Judge Kessler and allies with Dean
Kramer. So now you’re moving on and you’re in law school and you’re
organizing courses. What happens next for you? What internships did you
have?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. Sue Ross reached out
to me and asked me for the summer of my second year of law school if I
would be interested in interning at EEOC. EEOC had brought a case, a
matter in front of the FCC against AT&T for gender and race
discrimination in employment. EEOC didn’t yet have enforcement
authority. That came in 1972, but the EEOC had intervened in a rate case
arguing that AT&T shouldn’t have a rate increase if it was discriminating
based on race and gender. Sue was asking me if I wanted basically to take
the lead or help significantly on the gender case, and, of course, I jumped
at the opportunity. What a chance to make a difference.
MS. STEWARD: Tell us about that case. How were you able to back door race and gender
into an issue that was involving rate increases? It seems like a novel idea.
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MS. MAZZAFERRI: I can’t take any credit for the legal theory. David Copus, who was the head
of the task force, was I think the mastermind behind the concept. It was a
small group: just a couple of lawyers, a researcher, a financial person, a
couple of secretaries, and me. David asked Sue Ross to draft the
complaint, and when she drafted it, she drafted it for gender and for race.
She said to me recently when I spoke with her that she wasn’t sure that
David would have included gender in the complaint because it wasn’t
something that EEOC was particularly pursuing at that point. But she
drafted it, and she included it, so it was a part. Sue was the resident expert
at the agency on gender discrimination, so she was a tremendous resource
for me. In addition, she directed me to speak with Catherine East, who was
then the head of the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor.
Catherine became a wonderful resource for me as well.
MS. STEWARD: In preparation for this, you all are litigating this big case against AT&T, a
huge corporation. Tell us about the proceedings leading into it and your
role.
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I was asked to identify some expert witnesses, and two of the most
fascinating ones were a couple, Doctors Sandra and Daryl Bem. They
were psychologists from Stanford University. I also helped prepare a
couple of medical experts who would testify about the ability of women to
work during pregnancy. But the Bems were particularly helpful because
the way AT&T and its 24-hour operating companies worked, they had
entry-level jobs. They had telephone operators and they had line workers,
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and they basically hired men to be line workers and women to be
operators. Although the requirements were the same, the entry-level pay
was different, higher for line workers than for operators. But there wasn’t
any reason that we could find for women only being considered for
operator jobs.
One of the interesting projects that Drs. Bem and Bem did was to
create a survey of high school students to gauge their interest in applying
for jobs at AT&T. They crafted job advertisements. Some were just like
AT&T ads. Some were gender neutral, and some were what we call
“gender reversed”. They invited men who had sexy voices to apply for
operator jobs and women who wanted to be slim and trim to apply for the
line workers jobs, and in this sample, the pay was the same in both line
worker jobs and operator jobs. What they discovered was that with the
gender reversed ads, more women would apply to be line workers, and
more men would apply to be operators than any of the other options. Their
research demonstrated that AT&T really was getting the type of
employees that it was seeking, and if it changed its recruitment techniques,
it could have men for certain jobs and women for other jobs. The Bems
testified together, as a team. It was special.
I should have mentioned that there was another player added to the
EEOC team. Judy Potter was brought in as a trial attorney. It was very
helpful to have her on the team because at that point, EEOC didn’t have
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court-enforcement authority, and didn’t have a lot of experience doing
trial work. So Judy was a significant player in that FCC hearing.
MS. STEWARD: What ultimately happened with the case?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: Ultimately, AT&T and EEOC settled. It was in January of 1973. At that
time, it was the largest single award of back pay in the nation’s history.
The settlement included one-time payments of $15 million for 15,000
then-current employees. I understand that about 13,000 of them were
women. Also, the settlement included a new wage adjustment plan that
increased the wages of both minorities and women by $23 million a year.
After the settlement, AT&T began using some of the very ads that Drs.
Sandra and Daryl Bem had developed during the litigation. And I believe
that’s why we have male operators today.
Interestingly, there’s a book that was written about this AT&T
case. It’s entitled, The Bell Women, a story of the landmark AT&T sex
discrimination case, and it’s by Marjorie Stockford.
MS. STEWARD: What was the impact of all this? You’re in law school. First, how long
were you working on this case with the EEOC, and second, what was the
impact on you of going through this experience on a novel issue of law
bringing in gender and race on a wage hike issue and with the attorneys
that you worked with?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: It was a life-changing experience really to understand that the law is
important. What the law says is important, and interestingly, it gave me
some insights into my life at GW Law School. I noticed that there were
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job advertisements at the law school inviting women to be secretaries and
men to be law clerks, and I wondered whether it was a violation of
Title VII. It didn’t seem right to me, so I went to Dean Robert Kramer,
whom I mentioned before, and he was surprised. He hadn’t noticed them.
He walked over with me to the bulletin board, reached in his pocket and
pulled out the key to the glass covering of the bulletin board and ripped
them down. He said to me that it wouldn’t happen again. And it didn’t
because he understood that it wasn’t a good thing.
I worked on the case about a year. I thought it was so important
for me to understand how enforcing the law can bring about change.
After I graduated from GW, I wrote another article for The
Advocate, the school newspaper, about gender bias, and I also talked about
how fair and unbiased Dean Robert Kramer had been. He was a man
before his time.
MS. STEWARD: At GW you started off with the Women’s Rights Committee during your
first year and later you worked with the EEOC. With what was going on in
the country during that time, did you feel like women’s rights had made a
substantial jump and advancement?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I think I felt like we were on the cusp, we were at the beginning, but that
there was a lot more work to do. But I also thought that there were laws on
the books that could be helpful, that this was a moment in time when the
law was ahead of society, that the law had requirements for equal
opportunity that society wasn’t in many areas ready for, but that the EEOC
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was an agency that had the authority to enforce those laws. So, for me it
was an interesting time to begin to understand the relationship between
society and the law. I decided to continue to work at the EEOC because I
thought it gave me the opportunity to try to enforce some of those laws.