Acknowledgments for Equal (excerpt)
Early on a series of mornings in January 1995 at the Supreme Court, I unlocked an oak door leading to a ground-floor corridor. Ahead stretched doors with names including Ginsburg, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Souter, and Scalia. These were rooms where Justices could store documents. I walked to the door marked "Ginsburg," unlocked it using a key that I had borrowed from the Justice's chambers, and entered a windowless room. Nine paces long and five paces wide, with dim fluorescent lights suspended from high ceilings, it resembled an abandoned squash court.
Documents from some of Justice Ginsburg's earlier court cases filled some of the 17 file cabinets along the far right wall, I understood. Justice Ginsburg had told me not to look in them.
Each morning I turned instead to the near left corner and a mustard-colored cabinet, full of letters and briefs that Ginsburg had saved from her days as an attorney trying to improve the law for women. To take notes, I had brought a Macintosh Powerbook 100. The room had one table and one electrical outlet, both far away. Each morning, I moved the table to the files. From my briefcase I pulled out two extension cords, which combined to give me electricity to type.
Each day, I also brought a sandwich for lunch and snacks for dinner. I could continue to work, we had agreed, so long as I did not impose on Justice Ginsburg's chambers, far upstairs. My key, needed to enter the room but not to lock it closed, was on loan to me each day from one of the Justice's staff members, Gerald Lowe, who usually left the building at 6 pm. So long as I had his key, I could leave and re-enter the room, and I did occasionally, because the rest rooms were a few corridors away. After he retrieved his key around 6 pm, I was permitted to stay in the room as long as my stamina lasted. I usually left near midnight.
The research in that Supreme Court cell, like many other moments of privileged research that made this book possible, I owe to generosity that I will always find remarkable and impossible to express adequate thanks for. A few months earlier, in the chambers of Justice Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, as part of an interview, we had been talking in the late afternoon after her staff had gone home. I had already interviewed former students and friends of hers from the days when she was Professor Ginsburg at Columbia, and I had read many files from the archives of the American Civil Liberties Union, kept at Princeton. Late in our conversation, Justice Ginsburg said, more or less: for you to do this book as well as you seem to wish, you need access to my files. And so I wound up working late on many nights in her storage room, often with a ravenous appetite.
Similar early conversations led to time in the some of the most fascinating repositories of memory I have entered: A long night in Pat Barry's law office north of Los Angeles. Long study in Catherine East's basement in suburban Virginia. Days with Catharine MacKinnon's files, some now nests for mice. Laptop note-taking in Wendy Williams' files in a caged space within Georgetown University Law Center's parking garage, where exhaust fumes filled my head with pain.
[ * * * ]
Help for this book started, chronologically, with Catharine MacKinnon, before I imagined writing the magazine article for the New York Times Magazine from which this book eventually began. At Yale in 1990, when MacKinnon came to offer her last course in her wandering years as a visiting professor before she was finally offered tenure by the University of Michigan, I walked a couple of blocks from my office to check out the first class in her 13-week course. As I entered the room, I could feel a buzz of anticipation.
MacKinnon began speaking, and class time flew. She talked about the course's expectations: Anyone who raises a hand gets called on. You can write about your own life, as it pertains to this course, "as it will." You can write in your own voice; don't act "like you're nobody, from nowhere." About the law, she added: "I remain unreconstructed in the view that law is about the world."
It was one of the best opening classes I had heard, and I returned for the next session. The buzz had grown louder. This time I sat with an old friend, a former English professor who had shifted to the study of law. She leaned toward me, just as MacKinnon was about to speak, and said: "I love her hair." My jaw dropped, no word came, MacKinnon's voice filled the room, and class accelerated.
As it ended, I decided I should ask MacKinnon's permission to keep attending. Anyone can listen, she said, but who are you? I said I taught writing at Yale and also reported for magazines, and that one reason I wanted to visit her course was that I might try to write something about what she was teaching. She said that I was always welcome in the classroom, and that everything she said was public, but that she would probably not help me. She said she was particularly uninterested in any writing that was not about her work but about her. Finally, as things turned out, she helped a great deal as I reported an article that became "Defining Law on the Feminist Frontier" in the New York Times Magazine of October 6, 1991. It received a small award from the American Bar Association and a critique from some attorneys, particularly Professor Nadine Taub of Rutgers, who said that women's fight to redefine law was a bigger battle than the article showed. This book is partly an acknowledgment of her challenge.
— Fred Strebeigh, New Haven, Connecticut, spring 2008
[ * * * ]
[These are two excerpts from the Acknowledgments section of Fred Strebeigh, Equal: Women Reshape American Law (W. W. Norton, 2009), listed in the Norton catalog and also at Amazon.com. The full Acknowledgments offer thanks to many more people whose help was invaluable in the reporting of Equal.]
Documents from some of Justice Ginsburg's earlier court cases filled some of the 17 file cabinets along the far right wall, I understood. Justice Ginsburg had told me not to look in them.
Each morning I turned instead to the near left corner and a mustard-colored cabinet, full of letters and briefs that Ginsburg had saved from her days as an attorney trying to improve the law for women. To take notes, I had brought a Macintosh Powerbook 100. The room had one table and one electrical outlet, both far away. Each morning, I moved the table to the files. From my briefcase I pulled out two extension cords, which combined to give me electricity to type.
Each day, I also brought a sandwich for lunch and snacks for dinner. I could continue to work, we had agreed, so long as I did not impose on Justice Ginsburg's chambers, far upstairs. My key, needed to enter the room but not to lock it closed, was on loan to me each day from one of the Justice's staff members, Gerald Lowe, who usually left the building at 6 pm. So long as I had his key, I could leave and re-enter the room, and I did occasionally, because the rest rooms were a few corridors away. After he retrieved his key around 6 pm, I was permitted to stay in the room as long as my stamina lasted. I usually left near midnight.
The research in that Supreme Court cell, like many other moments of privileged research that made this book possible, I owe to generosity that I will always find remarkable and impossible to express adequate thanks for. A few months earlier, in the chambers of Justice Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, as part of an interview, we had been talking in the late afternoon after her staff had gone home. I had already interviewed former students and friends of hers from the days when she was Professor Ginsburg at Columbia, and I had read many files from the archives of the American Civil Liberties Union, kept at Princeton. Late in our conversation, Justice Ginsburg said, more or less: for you to do this book as well as you seem to wish, you need access to my files. And so I wound up working late on many nights in her storage room, often with a ravenous appetite.
Similar early conversations led to time in the some of the most fascinating repositories of memory I have entered: A long night in Pat Barry's law office north of Los Angeles. Long study in Catherine East's basement in suburban Virginia. Days with Catharine MacKinnon's files, some now nests for mice. Laptop note-taking in Wendy Williams' files in a caged space within Georgetown University Law Center's parking garage, where exhaust fumes filled my head with pain.
[ * * * ]
Help for this book started, chronologically, with Catharine MacKinnon, before I imagined writing the magazine article for the New York Times Magazine from which this book eventually began. At Yale in 1990, when MacKinnon came to offer her last course in her wandering years as a visiting professor before she was finally offered tenure by the University of Michigan, I walked a couple of blocks from my office to check out the first class in her 13-week course. As I entered the room, I could feel a buzz of anticipation.
MacKinnon began speaking, and class time flew. She talked about the course's expectations: Anyone who raises a hand gets called on. You can write about your own life, as it pertains to this course, "as it will." You can write in your own voice; don't act "like you're nobody, from nowhere." About the law, she added: "I remain unreconstructed in the view that law is about the world."
It was one of the best opening classes I had heard, and I returned for the next session. The buzz had grown louder. This time I sat with an old friend, a former English professor who had shifted to the study of law. She leaned toward me, just as MacKinnon was about to speak, and said: "I love her hair." My jaw dropped, no word came, MacKinnon's voice filled the room, and class accelerated.
As it ended, I decided I should ask MacKinnon's permission to keep attending. Anyone can listen, she said, but who are you? I said I taught writing at Yale and also reported for magazines, and that one reason I wanted to visit her course was that I might try to write something about what she was teaching. She said that I was always welcome in the classroom, and that everything she said was public, but that she would probably not help me. She said she was particularly uninterested in any writing that was not about her work but about her. Finally, as things turned out, she helped a great deal as I reported an article that became "Defining Law on the Feminist Frontier" in the New York Times Magazine of October 6, 1991. It received a small award from the American Bar Association and a critique from some attorneys, particularly Professor Nadine Taub of Rutgers, who said that women's fight to redefine law was a bigger battle than the article showed. This book is partly an acknowledgment of her challenge.
— Fred Strebeigh, New Haven, Connecticut, spring 2008
[ * * * ]
[These are two excerpts from the Acknowledgments section of Fred Strebeigh, Equal: Women Reshape American Law (W. W. Norton, 2009), listed in the Norton catalog and also at Amazon.com. The full Acknowledgments offer thanks to many more people whose help was invaluable in the reporting of Equal.]
A note on this website for Equal: Women Reshape American Law
As of May 2012, Microsoft has ended its long-running website service called Microsoft Office Live, on which I built this site, www.EqualWomen.com. I am now rebuilding the site on a new website service, but for a while this site may remain in progress.
Many apologies, Fred Strebeigh