Grace and Grit (32 page)

As we approached Washington, the crowds grew larger. The train arrived in Union Station at night as crowds waited along Pennsylvania Avenue to watch the president-elect make his way with his family to his temporary residence.

At the swearing-in on the steps of the Capitol, the crowd was unbelievable. Looking at the kaleidoscope of faces, I marveled at the beauty and diversity all around me, soaking in the fact that it hadn’t been so long ago that only miles away from my hometown the infamous Scottsboro trial had taken place. So much had changed within my lifetime. Yes, so much more had to be done, but for that historic moment, I could celebrate progress. It was with wonder and great excitement that I watched the first African American president being sworn into office. Truly, it’s not an event I thought I’d ever see.

Afterward, with the north wind bearing down on us, Vickie and I grabbed a hot dog from a street vendor and limped in our boots back to the hotel, where we thawed out and watched the parade on television.

Y
OU WOULD
think that winning a national championship in ballroom dancing would prepare you to dance with just about anybody. Well, I thought I was quite the hotshot dancer until I danced with the president at the Neighborhood Ball the evening after the inauguration.
A small group of us were whisked to the elevated stage, where the president was dancing his first dance with Michelle. I was pleased to be wearing my favorite silver sequined skirt from my dancing days, but I was so thirsty I couldn’t stand it. I was told that if I left the stage, I couldn’t come back, so I ignored my scratchy, dry throat and started dancing along with everyone else in high spirits.

We were all moving to the music when a nice young man who had been on the inaugural train ride tapped me on my shoulder, grabbed my hand, and said, “Come with me.” Next thing I knew, he marched right up to the president.

“Mr. President, here’s someone you need to dance with,” he said like they were the best of friends.

The president smiled his electric smile, took my arm, and off we went. I was concentrating so hard on making my body move the right way, I couldn’t say much. As he guided me on the dance floor, I heard someone below the elevated stage say my name. I glanced down. It was Kevin Russell, who’d argued my case before the Supreme Court, and his fiancée. I smiled at them.

As I tried to make my stubborn feet act right, the president assured me, “We’re going to do this.”

My tongue felt like stone and my words were blunted, but I thought to myself,
Now, I know he’s not talking about dancing. He’s talking about the Ledbetter bill
.

O
N
J
ANUARY
15, the bill had passed the House, and only two days after the inauguration, it passed the Senate. I was elated, but when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to congratulate me, she pulled me aside and asked me, “How are you doing?” clearly wanting the honest truth about my state of mind after the loss of Charles.

Frankly, I was more than a bit of a mess inside. But I said, “Fine, just fine.” I just couldn’t go there, to my core, in that moment.

The day President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act into law, I walked with him on the red carpet to the East Room of the White House. As I settled into place to hear the president’s remarks, I missed Charles more than I ever had. Listening to President Obama talk about my struggles and the hardships so many families face, I appreciated his remarks about his grandmother, thinking of my own grandmother Lillie, who died of cancer at such a young age and left such a crippling legacy for my own mother to bear.

After he finished his remarks, the people in the packed room stood and applauded as he returned to his desk for the signing. I saw Vickie and her family sitting next to Michelle Obama. Jon sat behind them. Even though I knew he wasn’t there, I scanned the room, looking for Charles’s piercing blue eyes and wide smile. In that moment, I felt the unbearable emptiness of that place beside me I’d leaned into for as long as I could remember. The crowd’s applause lessened. President Obama looked at me, and I stepped forward to say a few words. I thanked God for all the good people around me who had worked so hard to pass the law, but sorrow sifted through my happiness all during that day as I did my best to hold my shoulders high and smile a hundred smiles.

Right after the bill had passed the Senate, I’d flown to New Jersey to speak at an American Association of University Women meeting. As I ate my breakfast that morning in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, I was reading an article about me in the
Wall Street Journal
. When the waitress poured me some more coffee, she noticed the article about the bill and the picture of me. She looked at me and then at the paper and back at me. And I said, “Yes, I’m Lilly Ledbetter.” I finished my breakfast and the paper and kept waiting for my bill. It never came, so finally I asked the young woman, and she said it was covered. I said, “No, no. You don’t need to do that.” She said, “All the waitresses wanted to thank you for what you’ve done.” The next morning, the waitresses covered
my bill again. These unexpected gestures, along with the incredible passage of the bill, helped me slowly find my way through my sadness.

A
S
I finish telling you the story behind the legislation that carries my name, at the age of seventy-three, I travel the world, speaking to law schools, high schools, women’s professional groups and organizations, government agencies, and political groups on the state and national level, as well as at military bases and Democratic fundraisers. I often speak at universities, something I especially enjoy.

I’ll never forget the day I spoke at Harvard. I’d scooted out to go to the ladies’ room before my speech. I hurried into the stall, afraid I’d be late. Fumbling with the lock, at first I didn’t notice the poster plastered on the stall door. It was my picture staring right back at me on the announcement for the lecture. I smiled back at myself, and even laughed out loud a little. Here I was, unable to go to college myself, speaking to the brightest young minds in the country. I just prayed that in these difficult economic times these young folks would have the power, voice, and passion to create a truly equitable workforce for all working families.

I told the Harvard undergraduates what I tell all of my audiences. For almost two decades, I was cheated. That’s the way I see it. In 1979, when I began my career as one of the first women ever to work at Goodyear, my pay was equal to that of my male supervisors. But in 1981, shortly after I finally came forward about being sexually harassed and was consequentially labeled a “troublemaker,” Goodyear implemented a merit-based program to award annual salary increases based on performance. My salary started slipping, despite positive performance reviews. By the end of 1997, I was being paid as much as 40 percent less than the male managers, taking home $3,727 each month while the lowest-paid male area manager received $4,286 and the highest-paid pocketed $5,236 per month. Of course, I had no idea. After giving almost twenty of the best years
of my life to Goodyear, in the end I lost more than $224,000 in salary and even more in overtime and retirement money.

But what really enrages me is that my experience is not uncommon. Today, 71 million women work to support themselves and their families but continue to make seventy-eight cents for every dollar a man takes home. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research calculated that a typical twenty-five-year-old woman who graduated from college in 1984 and who was in her mid-forties in 2004 has lost more than $440,000. In 2004, the median annual earnings of women aged fifteen and older was $31,223, compared with $40,798 for men. If women in the workforce earned the same as men who work the same number of hours; have the same education, age, and union status; and live in the same area of the country, their annual income would rise about $4,000, and their poverty rates would be cut at least in half.

When I set out on my Goodyear career in 1979, it wasn’t part of my grand plan to someday have my name be on a Supreme Court case or an act of Congress. I simply wanted to work hard and support my family. The rest, I believed, would take care of itself.

Clearly, fate had other plans for this Alabama girl. After all, I started out as a supervisor at a tire plant. Thirty years later, I’ve been a litigant, an advocate, a lobbyist, an author, and a public speaker. Sometimes, life throws us curveballs. We may not have asked for them, we may not have even expected them, but we still have to deal with them.

After all that’s happened to me, I’ve realized that the true test of an individual is not so much
what
happens to her, but
how
she reacts to it. When we see an injustice, do we sit and do nothing, or do we fight back? When we experience failure, do we passively accept it, or do we learn from it and do better the next time? When we get knocked down, do we stay down, or do we get back up? Each of us, every day, breaks through barriers for women and girls simply because we choose to believe the future can be better.

It’s important to recognize that there’s still much that needs to be accomplished to achieve true pay equity for women. To help end wage discrimination based on gender, the Paycheck Fairness Act still needs to be made into law. It has passed the House but was filibustered by the Republicans in the Senate in November 2010; it lacked two of the sixty votes necessary to end the debate and proceed to a vote. It has now been reintroduced to Congress by the indomitable Senator Barbara Mikulski and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, both champions of my bill. This act strengthens and updates the Equal Pay Act passed by President Kennedy in 1963. Among other things, it will bar retaliation against workers for discussing salary and facilitate class-action Equal Pay Act claims.

Those young waitresses who recognized me the day after the bill had passed and all those bright-faced young folks I speak to across the country might bear the fruit of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act. But more than that, I’m hopeful that the Ledbetter Act will impact future generations, generations of women and men I will not live to see but my granddaughter and great-granddaughter will.

G
RANNY
M
AC
was right. The day I heard the whippoorwill call on my way to work, a death occurred. When I found the note, life as I knew it ended. All I’d ever dreamed of as a young girl was escaping the hot, dusty cotton fields, leaving behind the long sack dragging around my neck that I never could fill. But those endless rows of cotton that pricked my hands until they bled were my saving grace on the journey I began that spring day so long ago. My transformation from an unknown tire manager facing an all-too-common injustice to a woman people now recognize as “the grandmother of equal pay” took every ounce of grit I’d gained picking cotton on my grandfather’s farm in Possum Trot, Alabama.

MY SPEECH AT THE 2008
DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION

G
OOD EVENING
. Many of you are probably asking: Who is that grandmother from Alabama at the podium? I can assure you, nobody is more surprised, or humbled, than I am. I’m here to talk about America’s commitment to fairness and equality, and how people like me—and like you—suffer when that commitment is betrayed.

How fitting that I speak to you on Women’s Equality Day, when we celebrate ratification of the amendment that gave women the right to vote. Even as we celebrate, let’s also remind ourselves: The fight for equality is not over. I know that from personal experience. I was a trailblazer when I went to work as a female supervisor at a Goodyear tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama.

My job demanded a lot, and I gave it 100 percent. I kept up with every one of my male co-workers. But toward the end of my nineteen years at Goodyear, I began to suspect that I wasn’t getting paid as much as men doing the same job. An anonymous note in my mailbox confirmed that I was right. Despite praising me for my work, Goodyear gave me smaller raises than my male co-managers, over and over.

Those differences affected my family’s quality of life then, and they affect my retirement now. When I discovered the injustice, I thought about moving on. But in the end, I couldn’t ignore the discrimination. So I went to court. A jury agreed with me. They found that my employer had violated the law and awarded me what I was owed.

I hoped the verdict would make my company feel the sting,
learn a lesson and never again treat women unfairly. But they appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court, and in a 5-to-4 decision our highest court sided with big business. They said I should have filed my complaint within six months of Goodyear’s first decision to pay me less, even though I didn’t know that’s what they were doing.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the ruling made no sense in the real world. She was right. The House of Representatives passed a bill that would make sure what was done to me couldn’t happen again. But when it got to the Senate, enough Republicans opposed it to prevent a vote.