In December of 2017, I visited the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York. It wasn’t until that year that I knew such a place existed. In that location, the first Women’s Rights Convention was held in 1848.

Just a short distance away is the north end of Cayuga Lake, one of the finger lakes of New York. On the south end of Cayuga Lake is Ithaca. At the Ithaca Women’s Center in 1973, I learned to recognize my own oppression as a result of being a woman, which changed my life. I hadn’t realized how close I was to where the movement for women’s freedom began.

In the Declaration of Sentiments, an eye-opening and radical document signed by those at the convention, they stated:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

It goes on to list the many ways this was demonstrated. A great many of those grievances have been addressed and resolved, but not to the extent you would expect considering it was written nearly 170 years ago.

At the Ithaca Women’s Center, I frequently attended a pot luck dinner that was followed by discussion. Many of the attendees were students at Cornell and some of them were law students. I lived south of Ithaca on a commune that was based on equality and rejected gender roles, which gave me the ability to explore this new freedom and understand how the rules and restrictions for women had impacted my life.

I now wonder how many of the law students were familiar with this line from the Declaration that had been written just north of Ithaca:

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

There are those who would say women did have a voice in forming the laws in 1973 because they could vote. But if you’ve ever had a job in leadership or you’ve ever had a boss, you know that creating policies versus having one voice out of many to influence those policies is vastly different. The leadership decides what they will hear or not hear, and what they choose to implement and not implement. If you are not the leader, your voice is but a raindrop in a puddle in the office. Do you believe your voice is heard by your government? I believe that depends on the leaders.

That’s why the women from Cornell Law School in 1973 sat in a room one night and explained to all of us that we were at a moment in time when law schools were finally being forced to admit more women, and how that would change our country. Hillary Clinton, a name none of us knew, had just graduated from law school a few months earlier.

“Men aren’t going to give up control voluntarily,” one of them said. She went on to declare that only by women becoming feminist lawyers could they litigate cases, set precedents, then go on to run for office and change the laws. This was the only way we would find a path to equality.

When my friend and I left the center that evening, we discussed our future on the drive home, and wondered what it would take for us to become feminist lawyers. She was a high school dropout and I had just graduated from high school a few months before. We lived on a commune making crafts to sell and growing food. Neither of us had jobs. The following month she enrolled in the local high school and graduated the following year. We each went on to pursue education and careers, although not as lawyers.

That evening was only one part of my awaking, but it was a big one. I thought of it later while working for the state courts in the technology department. I became a leader there, and participated in improving and replacing the outdated systems and processes in the court houses along with women who were judges and lawyers. These were the women who heeded that call to become lawyers and were using their knowledge to change people’s lives.

In 1972, the year before I sat in that room in Ithaca, the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution had been passed in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and was sent to the states for ratification.  My friend and I who attended the Ithaca talk bought bracelets with the letters ERA on them and wore them for years. I think I had to remove mine during childbirth. The first version of that amendment was introduced in Seneca Falls in 1923 on the 75th anniversary of the Woman’s Rights Convention, nearly a hundred years ago.

We are still waiting.