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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 Mazzaferri. The interview took place on
Sunday, October 13, 2024. This is the fifth chapter
MS. STEWARD: Good afternoon, Katherine. Let’s pick up where we left off. Why don’t
you tell us about your time at the League of Women Voters.
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I began at the League in October of 1975 and was there until July of 1978.
The League of Women Voters Education Fund, or LWVEF, is the
educational arm of the League of Women Voters of the United States. The
LWVEF had a small litigation department, which primarily handled voting
rights cases. When I arrived at the litigation department, Trudy Levy, an
attorney, was already on the staff. Trudy was an expert in election law,
which was great since I was a novice in that area of the law.
We worked with state and local leagues, primarily in election and
citizen participation cases. We helped them fund some cases. During my
time there, we funded and supervised twenty-five cases in state and federal
courts in voting rights, campaign finance, and sunshine laws. Although the
leagues were involved in other areas, such as natural resources,
international relations and social policy, their primary focus was election
laws.
MS. STEWARD: Tell us a little bit more about the League itself. How big was your team?
Where did the funding come from? Tell us a little about the people who
were there.
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MS. MAZZAFERRI: There were just four of us on the LWV’s litigation team. As I mentioned,
Trudy was the other attorney, and we had a secretary and a law student.
We were funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation. Esther Schachter,
who was our Ford Foundation officer, was very supportive of our work.
Initially, Joanne Hayes was the liaison from the League Board to
the Litigation Department. Later, Dot Ridings became our liaison. Both of
them were strong, smart, incredibly effective women. It was really a
wonderful experience for me to get to know them. We called them the
“League Ladies.” They were such amazing women. and the work they did
as volunteers was truly impressive.
MS. STEWARD: What kinds of cases did you handle when you were at the League?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I had been active on the Employment Counseling Committee of the
Woman’s Legal Defense Fund, and WLDF found lawyers to handle
certain types of cases. WLDF had been hearing about women having
difficulty getting jobs in the construction area, so Judith Lichtman, who
was executive director of the WLDF, reached out to me about this. We
decided that the LWVEF Litigation Department and WLDF would
convene a national meeting on the issue of women in the construction
industry.
We asked whether the Ford Foundation would extend our grant,
which had been directed to voting rights, to fund this meeting and
ultimately to fund the litigation which was an outcome of this meeting.
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The Ford Foundation agreed to provide additional funding for this
meeting.
We called together people from San Francisco, Seattle and
Tacoma, and Washington D.C. to brainstorm about what was happening
with women in construction. An Executive Order 11246, which prohibited
racial discrimination and required affirmative action by federal
contractors, had been amended by Executive Order 11375 to include
women. We convened the meeting to talk about what else could be done.
MS. STEWARD: What was the issue? You have an executive order, but what was the
problem you all were addressing?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: The issue was that although the executive order required affirmative
action by federal contractors for women and minorities, it wasn’t being
enforced.
Joan Graff, who was a lawyer from Equal Rights Advocates in San
Francisco, came to the meeting. Joan is a dynamic attorney. She’s still
working. She’s also a dear, lifelong friend.
Joan and I both had backgrounds in Title VII, and we had both
worked at the EEOC. We realized that Title VII wasn’t enough. We
needed the Executive Order 11246, which required affirmative action, to
be enforced. So, we convened this meeting together. From our
brainstorming at the meeting, we concluded that we needed to bring a
mandamus action against the Department of Labor for its failure to
enforce the executive order.
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MS. STEWARD: When was the meeting, and who was there?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: The meeting was in late 1975. Judith Lichtman and Joan were there, and
there were other participants from San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, and
Washington, D.C. I believe that some lawyers from the Center for Law
and Social Policy also attended. It really was just a brainstorming meeting,
and, as I said, the conclusion was that we needed to bring a mandamus
action.
MS. STEWARD: Can you walk us through what happened after that meeting?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: Sure. I asked Judith Lichtman if the Women’s Legal Defense Fund would
be of counsel in the lawsuit, and she agreed. There was another lawyer
looking into the issue. At the beginning, two cases were filed, and later we
consolidated them.
In addition, the Department of Labor was seeking comment on
proposed regulations to implement E.O. 11246, so we decided to file
comments on proposed regulations. The Center for Law and Social Policy
was very helpful in preparing those comments. The League of Women
Voters of the United States, which could lobby, and the Center for Law
and Social Policy filed a petition which we helped draft, seeking goals and
timetables in federally funded affirmative action and in apprenticeship
programs.
We filed the lawsuit, Advocates for Women v. Usery, on May 14,
1976. In March of 1977, Joan and I went to the Women and the Law
conference that was being held in Madison, Wisconsin. We went because
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Karen Clauss, who was the newly minted Solicitor of Labor, was
speaking.
We listened to her presentation, and we waited for her afterwards.
We told her who we were and asked her whether she thought the Secretary
of Labor, then F. Ray Marshall, might be interested in speaking with us;
she said she’d ask him. So, I sent letters with a proposed agenda to
Karen Clauss, and we had a meeting that included the Secretary of Labor
and also Alexis Herman, who was head of the Women’s Bureau. Several
of our plaintiffs also came with us. They told graphic stories about how
difficult it was for them to get jobs, and once on the job, working in
construction. The Secretary of Labor appeared moved by all of this.
Lois Schiffer from the Center for Law and Social Policy also
attended that meeting. She was very helpful, and she sent a detailed
follow-up letter to the Secretary about all the issues that we had talked
about.
MS. STEWARD: After that meeting, what did you all decide to do?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: We had filed suit, and we were trying to gather information about the
experience of women in construction. We learned about a gentleman by
the name of John Heneghan, who was the Director of the Office of Civil
Rights for the Maritime Administration at the Department of Commerce.
He was responsible for enforcing the very same Executive Order 11246, as
amended, for shipbuilders. John Heneghan is one of my heroes.
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Mr. Heneghan had found that women were interested in these jobs,
that women going through apprenticeship programs could do these jobs,
and that women were very reliable, effective, responsible, talented
workers for the shipbuilders. So, we had a life experience case that
showed us that if the government would enforce the law, women could
perform these jobs and they were great employees. Learning about
Mr. Heneghan’s work made us realize that we were on the right track.
MS. STEWARD: Can you, tell us why John Heneghan is one of your heroes? Tell us more
about him.
MS. MAZZAFERRI: I didn’t know everything about him when I was working with him on this
case. When he passed away in 2007, I came upon his obituary, and I
learned that he had been on the initial task force in 1965 that helped set up
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, so early on, he was
interested in equal employment issues. In 1966, he was the deputy
regional director of EEOC in Atlanta.
Two years later, he moved to the Maritime Administration in
Washington, D.C. Over the next ten years, according to his obituary, he
increased the shipyard employment of women in blue collar jobs from
.2 percent to 5.4 percent and for skilled black workers from 14.6 percent to
25.6 percent.
You can see why he is a hero of mine. How remarkable. One man
seeing what the law is and enforcing it was effective in changing the
employment lives of all those women and men in the maritime industry.
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MS. STEWARD: So now here you are in the construction industry, and you have an
executive order, the same one that Mr. Heneghan had, and the biggest
problems were the regulations. What was your approach to getting
regulations implemented?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: Even as we filed the lawsuit, we needed to have those regulations. We
filed comments on proposed regulations, and we followed up. We had
another meeting with the Secretary of Labor. We just kept the pressure on
to help the government do what it had to do to make this work. And later,
as I mentioned, there had been another case that was filed. We
consolidated those two cases.
Ultimately, the regulations for goals and timetables for federal
contractors were published in final form in April of 1978. The contractor
regulations were published in April of 1978, and the apprenticeship
regulations were published in May of 1978. So, we were successful in
getting those much-needed regulations adopted.
MS. STEWARD: During your advocacy for this, you also were public with this advocacy.
Tell us about your time on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
MS. MAZZAFERRI: Right. Cynthia Goodrich Kuhn, who was part of the small PR department
at the League, snagged an interview for me on the MacNeil/Lehrer Report.
Cynthia later became the communications director for the D.C. Bar, where
she was a great hire for me.
In August of 1977, Robin MacNeil interviewed me and a
construction representative on the PBS show. PBS at that point was on
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9
th Avenue in New York City, which was just down the street from my
Aunt Florence, so I stayed with her, and she walked me over to the
interview. It was lots of fun.
It was my first time ever doing a television interview, and I was
very restrained. After the interview, the union rep and I had a heated
exchange. Robin MacNeil asked me afterwards why I hadn’t done that on
the air, and I said that it was because I thought in this moment it was
important for women to be restrained and not be strident. I don’t know
whether that was the right approach, but that was the approach that I took.
The interview helped publicize the case, and I was happy to do that.
MS. STEWARD: Ultimately you all did get the regulations published.
MS. MAZZAFERRI: We did. The regulations were published. Unfortunately, both Trudy and I
were leaving the League in July of 1978, but Marcia Greenberger and
Margy Kohn at the Center for Law and Social Policy picked up where we
left off, and the consent decree was finalized. We had been in negotiations
before Trudy and I left, but they wrapped it up on December 5, 1978. So,
the litigation was ended, there was a consent decree, and there were rules
in place. I felt like, at the end of the day, we had moved the needle
somewhat.
These cases and these issues are detailed in a book by Carrie
Baker. It’s called The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment. It
talks about the work that we did, but it also points out how much more
work there is to be done.
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MS. STEWARD: You mentioned the construction industry, but you also worked in other
areas. Can you talk about some of those?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: There was another case that the Ford Foundation helped fund as well.
Trudy and I participated as local counsel in Owens v. Brown, which was
filed by the ACLU as lead counsel. Sue Ross was at the ACLU at the time.
Owens v. Brown was filed in November of 1976. It was a class
action on behalf of past, present and future women in the U.S. Navy
challenging the constitutionality of a law prohibiting the assignment of
women to sea duty aboard Navy vessels, except hospital ships and
transports. There was a hearing on March 15, 1978. There were cross
motions for summary judgment. On July 27, 1978, U.S. District Judge
John Sirica certified the class action, and he granted the plaintiffs’ motion
for summary judgment.
MS. STEWARD: Katherine, when you look back at your time at the League of Women
Voters Education Fund, you discussed two very pivotal industries on
which you had an impact. What are the lessons that you take from your
time there?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: The lessons are that if you see a problem, you have to figure out how to
address it, and there is not always a straight line. Sometimes it takes a lot
of different approaches and a lot of different players to find the solution. I
think that in the women in construction cases, for example, dealing with
the regulations, handling the underlying lawsuit, and identifying other
players who could be constructive was important.
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The other lesson was that personal relationships that I already had
led to meaningful collaborations. For example, I again tapped Sandra and
Daryl Bem, the psychologists whom I mentioned I had worked with when
I was at the EEOC. I asked them to do a study asking if the law were
enforced and there was affirmative action, whether women would be more
likely to apply for construction jobs. Not surprisingly, their research
showed that women would. And of course, John Heneghan’s real life
experience showed that with affirmative action women applied in greater
numbers.
There were many relationships in my work at the League where I
collaborated with individuals I knew from the Women’s Legal Defense
Fund. The WLDF brought us the women in construction case and was a
partner throughout. And Sue Ross, who was at the ACLU, asked us to
become involved in the Navy case. The relationships that I had established
over time were important to the work that I did at the League.
MS. STEWARD: We talked about the construction industry, and previously we talked about
your work at the docks. The bravery of these women cannot be
overlooked. Can you talk about the experiences that these women and
minorities were going through at this time and why you all ended up
taking on those cases?
MS. MAZZAFERRI: With women in the construction industry, first, women had a very hard
time even getting into apprenticeship programs, and once they were in
them, they were harassed. It was physically dangerous for them to be in
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those jobs. So, I think they had to confront significant barriers to get the
jobs in the first place, but then they had to overcome the incredible
harassment and physical threats once they were in the jobs.
In fact, one of the things that John Heneghan recommended to the
contractors was that they hire a group of women, not just one woman,
because having a group of women to support each other was helpful, from
his perspective, in making the work experience more palatable for the
women. What he described was the fact that as women became more
prevalent in the workplace, men accepted them more. I think he found the
same to be true for minorities.
The black longshoremen I worked with while at EEOC faced very
similar barriers and challenges. The bravery of the individuals I met in the
course of both of those cases was incredibly impressive and awe inspiring.