When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg came to Harvard Law School as a first-year student in 1956, she clearly wasn’t welcome.
“The dean asked me to explain what we were doing, taking a seat that otherwise would have gone to a male applicant. I mumbled something about my husband being in the second year and thinking it important for a wife to understand her husband’s work, and I sat down.”
The reaction to Ginsburg and other career-seeking women in the 1950s was typical: School was viewed as a path to finding a husband, not a future job. But some women defied prevailing attitudes and went far in their professions.
Four are profiled in “Paving The Way,” a documentary that will air at 10 p.m. Tuesday on WTTW-Ch. 11. In addition to Ginsburg, filmmakers interviewed Maj. Gen. Jeanne Holm, U.S. Air Force retired, the first woman to achieve the rank; U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii), the first Asian-American woman elected to Congress, and Rev. Addie Wyatt, the first female president of the Packinghouse Food and Allied Workers Union and current co-pastor at the Vernon Park Church of God, in Chicago.
Says Emma Joan Morris, the program’s producer/director: “These stories are worth telling so we can appreciate how we’ve gotten to where we are.”