I'm Pamela Parker. My aunt is the very cool Karen Chadwick, who writes this blog. She’s been writing as long as I’ve known her. When I was young she would send me long, wonderful letters full of stories but also her heart and soul. She was definitely the “cool” aunt, filling me in on some parts of life her sister, my mother, sort of glossed over. So I am not surprised by the wonderful writing she posts here and by the full length memoir she completed about her time working for Jane Blaffer Owen. She’s been working up to that her whole life.
She and I share a sense of outrage at injustice in the
world. We can’t fix it all, and we both know that, but I think we both
have this belief that you have to at the very least call it out because to
ignore it is to help perpetuate it. This is kind of how I wound up in law
school. The injustice I am most passionate about, because it affects me
most directly, is the subjugation of women. I grew up in the ‘70’s just
as major changes were taking place in the legal rights of women, so while
I did not live under most of the draconian absolute walls that had been built
to control women, I was acutely aware of them because they were falling left
and right as I was maturing into a young woman myself. By the time I
turned 18, contraception was widely available, women were guaranteed the right
to credit cards and loans without permission from a man, pregnancy did not come
with a mandatory loss of your job, the higher paying “male” jobs in
construction, law enforcement and firefighting were no longer legally
prohibited to women, and abortion was legal. But all of those things had
happened in the ten years before I reached adulthood, so I knew I was
lucky.
I learned more about the history of and fight for women’s rights in college. I took classes in the brand-new Women’s Studies program, where I read pieces by feminist thinkers like Betty Friedan, Simone De Beauvoir, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. I joined the Association for Women Students and eventually became the president. We organized education and training on “date rape” and planned a protest when Playboy came to campus to shoot the Women of the Atlantic Coast Conference, ACC, a college sports affiliation. We held career planning sessions, where women students could think about how to further “the cause” when pursuing their livelihood and not just fall into the trap of trying to be one of the boys. And we grieved in outrage together when the Equal Rights Amendment seemingly died a quiet death in 1983.
But that, in part, led to my senior year of college decision to go to law school. I wanted to write about and promote feminism, so it seemed like a good idea to get a grounding in how public policy is shaped. My first jobs out of law school were with the Texas branch of the ACLU and as a lobbyist for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault. Both were kind of my dream jobs, but neither was a long-term option. I worked representing public school teachers in employment matters for a long time. When I started, it was pretty darn common for the high school principal and vice principal to have been former football coaches. Consequently, I didn’t run into many women principals in the early days of my career. Ten years later it was starting to change, to the betterment of Texas public education.
Eventually I left and opened my own firm, which focuses on representing families who have children with disabilities like Down Syndrome, Autism, Cerebral Palsy, and others. It’s a segment of our population with a lot of need for legal services, but not that many attorneys who work in that area. It’s been a great fit for me, advocating for those who are often overlooked or shoved aside in our legal system and in our public policies.
And then this past spring, my interest in women’s legal and public policy issues came back to the forefront. Through a series of unexpected events, I had the opportunity to work on a legal brief in support of the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which, it turns out, possibly did not die in 1983. A lawsuit has been filed in federal court asking that the Court find the Equal Rights Amendment was properly ratified and is now a part of the US Constitution. Along with two other attorneys I wrote and filed an amicus brief on behalf of 80 organizations, with more than a million individual members, who support equal rights for women, with the United States Supreme Court.
Very few attorneys are ever involved with a case in the Supreme Court, and I am pleased to have met that elusive career highlight. But more than that, I feel proud to have spoken out on behalf of women who have been treated and regarded as inferior to men for no other reason than that men were in control of all areas of public life and made it that way just because they could. I think back to the male teacher I had in high school who asked for discussion on women’s equality, and when I voiced my opinion that women should be drafted if men were going to be drafted, belittled me in front of the class by pretending to be me stomping around in a pair of army boots, as if that was clearly the most ridiculous thing that could come to pass. Belittling women has long been a way to keep them from speaking out about injustice. Fortunately, my genes include the same DNA as Karen Chadwick, and my mother, and my grandmother, and a long line of women who have stood strong despite the belittling. Even if all you can do is call it out, fighting injustice is worth the effort.
Parker Counsel
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Texas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey
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