More Perfect: Sex Appeal

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Speaker 4 Hey y'all, Lulu here. Okay, so before we get going with today's show, I'm gonna hand it off to producer Sara Kari, who's going to tell us a brief story.

Speaker 8 Yes, okay, so this is a story that starts in the middle of the night a few months ago in Waco, Texas, when a man named John Lowe is startled awake.

Speaker 9 So I hear a horrible, loud, sort of gurgly, gaspy, snoring type sound.

Speaker 8 He turns his head and he realizes it's coming from his wife, Angie, who's lying next to him in bed.

Speaker 10 She is laying flat on her back and her head is tilted way off to the side. But then when I turn to her head her eyes are wide open, just glassy.

Speaker 10 And I can see her lips are starting to turn blue.

Speaker 10 And I cannot wake her no matter how hard I try.

Speaker 8 He has this horrible realization that his wife is likely having some kind of cardiac arrest. And for an instant, he does what any of us would do.

Speaker 13 He freezes.

Speaker 8 But then...

Speaker 10 This was where the Radiolab episode How to Save a Life came into play.

Speaker 8 John told me that not long before this moment, just a few weeks before, he had heard an episode we released called How to Save a Life, in which doctor/slash Radiolab correspondent Avira Mitra told everyone about a new way of doing CPR.

Speaker 15 Sort of a new form of CPR that's trying to make things things a lot simpler and it's just hands-on CPR where it's literally just push hard and fast on the chest.

Speaker 8 Of course there is a particular method to it. Definitely listen to the episode for more on how to do it.

Speaker 8 But the idea is there's no mouth to mouth, there's no counting breaths, just pushing on the chest.

Speaker 10 That's it.

Speaker 8 Now John had actually heard about this technique a couple months earlier when he was in a CPR training at work.

Speaker 10 But at the same time, I am, you know, a middle-aged guy, out of shape, overweight. I have just kind of always in the back of my mind assumed I would be on the receiving end of

Speaker 10 CPR.

Speaker 8 So he told me that that night with Angie.

Speaker 10 Because I had just listened to that episode of Radio Lab.

Speaker 8 The hands-only technique had sort of been refreshed in his mind. Correct.
Along with one other thing Avir had said.

Speaker 10 When he was talking about the curve.

Speaker 17 So this is a survival curve.

Speaker 8 He had talked about how when a heart stops, like in a cardiac arrest.

Speaker 15 It really comes down to time. Every minute that passes, your chances of coming back just exponentially decreases.

Speaker 8 Unless you start CPR as soon as possible.

Speaker 10 So I just knew we had to act immediately. This wasn't a, oh, I'll call 911 and wait till they get there kind of situation.
This was, she is going to die unless I start doing something right now.

Speaker 8 And so the part of him that's frozen thaws. He calls 911.

Speaker 10 And while I was on the phone with 911, he's starting to do things that he'd heard about in the episode.

Speaker 8 Getting Angie off the bed and onto the floor, getting his hands ready for the hands-only chest compressions.

Speaker 8 And what it means is that, all in all, starting from the moment that he first notices something going wrong with Angie, I had her on the floor and started chest compressions in maybe 30, 45 seconds, just pushing.

Speaker 19 And now.

Speaker 19 Hi, Sarah. Oh, my God.

Speaker 20 Hello.

Speaker 8 It's clear every second made a difference. How are you feeling?

Speaker 21 I really feel very good. Yeah.

Speaker 8 This, of course, is none other than Angie Lowe.

Speaker 21 I would say that I feel better than even before.

Speaker 8 Oh, and what Angie would later learn is that night, John did six and a half minutes of hands-only CPR, no small feet. And then an ambulance arrived and took her to the hospital.

Speaker 21 And then once I woke up, we were still, both of us, were just in different ways, just processing everything that had happened.

Speaker 8 Over the next few weeks, as she stayed in the hospital to recover.

Speaker 21 I was feeling a little bit lonely and all of that. And so one day, John said, I really want you to hear this episode.
And so we listened to it together.

Speaker 8 And she says, it got her thinking about this idea called the chain of survival.

Speaker 21 Where, you know, as soon as that cardiac arrest begins, it begins with identifying the cardiac arrest and then CPR and then the AED with the first responders, and the advanced care at the hospital, and then the post-care, which is like cardiac rehab, you know, what I'm doing right now.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 with each step being done, your chances of survival just go up and up and up.

Speaker 8 And she and John have both been thinking a lot about all the people that were a part of her chain of survival.

Speaker 10 Once everything was stabilized with Angie, and we knew we were in a good place, that she was doing well, we just had this period of just immense gratitude.

Speaker 10 We brought a barbecue, you know, catered barbecue over to the fire department. We bought trays of cookies to bring up to the ICU nurses that took care of Angie.

Speaker 10 We contacted the folks over at the AMR ambulance service to thank them.

Speaker 10 And because Radiolab and that episode really did play a part in this whole experience and Angie's outcome, we were just kind of filled with immense gratitude.

Speaker 10 So I wanted to just let y'all know how thankful I was for everything that you do at Radio Lab, but specifically for that episode and helping me

Speaker 10 help Angie through that horrible, you know, potentially tragic event.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 21 And we're, you know, we're really private people. You know, we're kind of in a sense, we're shy.

Speaker 21 But we knew we had to get the word out to all of you to, you know, at Radio Lab that people are listening and they're paying attention and that your job is so important.

Speaker 8 That's incredible, you guys. I mean, I know I speak for everybody on the show when I say that knowing that we were one small part of that chain of survival is like mind-blowing.

Speaker 8 And just so, I think we were all just so grateful that it made a difference.

Speaker 7 We're so glad.

Speaker 4 And just coasting on that swell of gratitude, we wanted to thank you. All of you listening, whether you ever do chest compressions on someone or not, you are helping keep us alive at Radiolab.

Speaker 4 Simply by listening to the show each week, maybe by sharing it with your friends, perhaps by donating or becoming a member, Radiolab is alive because of you. You are part of our chain of survival.

Speaker 4 And if you are feeling moved to support us, you can sign up to become a member at any time at radiolab.org slash donate.

Speaker 4 On with the show.

Speaker 4 This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.
It is Women's History Month.

Speaker 4 Sort of a weird time to be celebrating, you know, with the overturning of Roe v.

Speaker 4 Wade, the elimination of certain Title IX protections, and recent attempts to freeze government funding to proposals that use the word woman or women or gender.

Speaker 4 It sort of feels like an avalanche of rights being stripped away.

Speaker 4 And all this kind of got me thinking about how rights are won. You know, sometimes it's straightforward.

Speaker 4 The founding fathers believed certain people should get rights, wrote them down, and boom, there they were.

Speaker 4 But sometimes it is sneakier. And so today, we're bringing you a story about one of the all-time greatest sneaks.

Speaker 4 It is a story of brilliant legal strategy of navigating loopholes and Trojan horses and beer.

Speaker 4 So much beer.

Speaker 4 And so, cheers.

Speaker 4 In honor of a more side-door entrance to legal rights, Happy Women's History Month. Please enjoy a tale from our sister show, More Perfect, that originally aired a few years back called Sex Appeal.

Speaker 9 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 7 You're listening

Speaker 7 to Radio Lab.

Speaker 7 Radio Lab from

Speaker 14 WNYC.

Speaker 14 This is More Perfect. I'm Chad Abum Rod.

Speaker 14 Today, a story from our producer, Julie Longoria.

Speaker 5 So, I've been working on an episode about sex discrimination for like months now. Yeah.
And we're supposed to release it.

Speaker 5 Sexual harassment scandals have engulfed Harvey Weinstein, Senator Al Frankie, Katie, and Louis C.K.

Speaker 6 This week.

Speaker 25 Actor Kevin Space candidate Roy Moore today.

Speaker 5 The story we're going to tell is not about sexual harassment, but I can't think straight with all the stuff that's happening. Look at what's happening with

Speaker 5 thousands posted the claims online using the simple phrase, me too.

Speaker 8 This has been happening since the beginning of time, but now people are finally talking about it.

Speaker 5 And I can't help but think that we've seen this before.

Speaker 5 This outcry for public change and

Speaker 24 a backlash.

Speaker 14 They claim there's a war on women out there.

Speaker 5 No one takes them seriously.

Speaker 28 If you can't handle some of the basic stuff that's become a problem in the workforce today, right? Like, you don't belong in the workforce.

Speaker 5 Like, we're in our respective corners and we need men to help us. Letting out a big screen.

Speaker 29 How did people not know? But

Speaker 5 when things quiet down,

Speaker 5 will there be a change?

Speaker 14 And what kind of change is the kind that will stick?

Speaker 14 Today's story is about a time in the not-so-distant past when there was a similarly loud, raucous division in our country over sexual equality, and one woman quietly, strategically, laid the foundation for real change.

Speaker 32 The Honorable, the Chief Justice, and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Speaker 32 Oh, yay, oh yay, oh yay.

Speaker 3 All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States are admonished to draw near and give their attention.

Speaker 3 For the court is now sitting.

Speaker 3 God save the United States and this honorable court.

Speaker 14 Here we are. I'm going to ask you an utterly false question, which is where would you like to start?

Speaker 11 As if we haven't been doing this for so damn long.

Speaker 6 Okay,

Speaker 5 so let me outline the basic dilemma that's at the heart of the story here. And I'm going to put it to you as a question.
Bring it.

Speaker 5 If you were to do a control F in the Constitution, like how many times do you think the word sex comes up?

Speaker 22 Oh.

Speaker 14 That's interesting.

Speaker 19 Six?

Speaker 7 I'm guessing what was the answer?

Speaker 5 It's one. One time in the 19th Amendment, which grants people the right to vote based on sex.

Speaker 9 Really?

Speaker 7 Yes. That's the only time.

Speaker 5 That's the only time, which is crazy because we all know that.

Speaker 14 Is there a sex word that's not sex like gender or something something nothing is there like ladies in the constitution

Speaker 5 women no really okay constitutionally women have a problem which is that basically we're not in the constitution except like in this one little spot so when it comes to discriminating against women some people have argued that you

Speaker 5 there's nothing in the constitution that says you can't do it.

Speaker 34 Certainly, the Constitution does not require sexual

Speaker 34 discrimination on the basis of sex. The Constitution doesn't require it.
It simply doesn't forbid it.

Speaker 5 That's the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Speaker 34 It doesn't. Nobody ever voted for that.

Speaker 34 So where do you get it from?

Speaker 14 There was nothing that said that. I mean, not those words explicitly, but there was nothing that says you can't discriminate?

Speaker 35 Not on the basis of sex.

Speaker 5 That's legal editor Christian Farius.

Speaker 35 We had a 14th Amendment that told people that we are equal under the law, that everyone has equal protection of the laws.

Speaker 7 But doesn't that say, man, it's kind of no.

Speaker 36 They never applied the 14th Amendment to women.

Speaker 5 They didn't apply the 15th. That's Martha Griffith's congresswoman.

Speaker 5 When you think about the history of the 14th Amendment, as legal editor Linda Hirschman says, the 14th Amendment was passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, along with the 13th and the 15th.

Speaker 5 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and 15th Amendment essentially giving black people, really black men, the right to vote.

Speaker 35 If you understand the 14th Amendment to be a part of that trio of amendments, you're like, oh, okay, it was meant to bring equality to black people.

Speaker 36 When the 15th Amendment had been written, which said every citizen could vote,

Speaker 36 in the name of heavens, why couldn't women vote?

Speaker 36 Why did you have to have the 19th Amendment?

Speaker 36 Well, of course, the answer was they didn't consider women people.

Speaker 5 There was this basic assumption in the law that, you know,

Speaker 5 equality for black people is one thing, but men and women,

Speaker 5 they're different.

Speaker 29 It was the case that the Supreme Court had never once met a distinction between men and women it didn't like.

Speaker 5 Wendy Williams, law professor emeritus at Georgetown.

Speaker 5 What are some greatest hits of the ridiculous distinction?

Speaker 7 Okay, here,

Speaker 29 there was a case called Bradwell, and it was 1873 or 1804.

Speaker 29 In that case, a woman wanted to become a lawyer.

Speaker 5 Illinois bars said no.

Speaker 29 And the justices said that that was a perfectly good rule because the justice system

Speaker 29 could be seen as not appropriate for women. Now, let's jump clear into the next century here.

Speaker 5 1948.

Speaker 29 This case was called Gessert v. Cleary that went to the Supreme Court.
And the issue was whether women could be bartenders.

Speaker 29 The court thought that that was pretty humorous, that it made sense that women could not be bartenders unless their husbands or fathers were in charge of the bar.

Speaker 5 Both those laws, you know, women are not supposed to be at the bar. At either bar.
Yeah.

Speaker 29 Those two cases represent attitudes almost 80 years apart that women belonged in the private sphere. That was not only their place, it was built into their bodies.

Speaker 5 And that was the assumption for a long, long

Speaker 5 time.

Speaker 29 But just about 67.

Speaker 38 There are a lot of women in this country who feel like they're being pushed around.

Speaker 37 Things had started to come to a boil.

Speaker 38 And they have become very vocal. They call themselves the Women's Liberation Movement.

Speaker 40 Sex and race, because they are easy visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups.

Speaker 5 So, in the late 60s and early 70s, people like Gloria Steinem

Speaker 41 free from the diseases of racism.

Speaker 5 Audrey Lorde.

Speaker 41 Of sexism, of classism.

Speaker 5 They get some traction, saying, Okay, it's time to put us in the Constitution. Hurry up.

Speaker 26 Some historians say it's a constitutional convention for women. I move the adoption of the following resolution.

Speaker 5 And what you see is this push for something called the Equal Rights Amendment.

Speaker 26 The Equal Rights Amendment should be ratified.

Speaker 5 What are your hopes for it? Do you think it will be ratified?

Speaker 42 It will be ratified early next year.

Speaker 36 I'm quite sure of that.

Speaker 4 In 1975, it will be ratified.

Speaker 5 But it didn't get the votes in 1975.

Speaker 43 I hope 1976 will be the year.

Speaker 5 Or in 1976.

Speaker 44 A special report on the 1977 National Women's Conference.

Speaker 5 Or in 1977.

Speaker 26 And the movement is stalled.

Speaker 7 Why?

Speaker 14 What stalled it? Well,

Speaker 20 a lot.

Speaker 5 But much of the credit goes to this woman.

Speaker 45 Phyllis Slafly of Alden, Illinois.

Speaker 5 A woman named Phyllis Schlafly.

Speaker 45 I would like to thank my husband Fred for letting me come today.

Speaker 45 I love to say that because it irritates the women's livers more than anything that I say.

Speaker 5 She was a lawyer and a self-described housewife who started a movement called Stop ERA.

Speaker 43 The whole thing is misrepresented as a woman's rights amendment. In fact, the principal beneficiary will be men.
It will give men a great opportunity to get out from under their obligations.

Speaker 5 Her position was that the Equal Rights Amendment would actually strip women of the special privilege that they have that comes from being a woman. Certainly not.

Speaker 43 I think the laws of our country have given a very wonderful status to the married woman, and the wife has a great deal of many rights.

Speaker 43 For example, she has the legal right to be supported by her husband.

Speaker 5 And she said, if this amendment passes, there will be certain unintended consequences.

Speaker 46 The Equal Rights Amendment says you cannot discriminate on account of sex.

Speaker 46 And if you want to deny a marriage license to a man and a man, or deny a homosexual the right to teach in the schools or to adopt children, it is on account of sex that you would deny it, and that would be unconstitutional under ERA.

Speaker 5 And that argument caught on.

Speaker 47 I would caution the members of this platform committee that there are things that could happen from the passage of an ERA amendment that none of us would like to see happen.

Speaker 48 I think that families would, generation after generation, deteriorate. I think that there there would be homosexuals who expect preferential treatment.

Speaker 47 He said, brother, we're all in danger.

Speaker 49 You got to hear what I have to say. Because you know what's going to happen if they pass the ERA.
There will be women in all of our bathrooms, women using all our stalls.

Speaker 49 They'll be wasting the paper towels. They'll be hogging the urinals.
They'll be pushing the old soap squirters, pushing the hot air dryers, too.

Speaker 49 They have to pass the ERA. Lord, I don't know what we're going to do.

Speaker 37 Had the Equal Rights Amendment passed, legal editor Linda Hirschman again, it would have looked a lot like the racial civil rights movement did. But the Equal Rights Amendment did not pass.

Speaker 5 It fell three states short. To get a constitutional amendment passed, turns out you need three-quarters of state legislatures to say they want it.
That is, 38 out of 50, they only ever got 35.

Speaker 7 Dude.

Speaker 5 So the question is: if you want to get equal rights for women written into the law, what do you do? There's no ERA. The women's lib movement sparked a backlash.
Like, what do you do?

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 5 enter stage left.

Speaker 3 There she is.

Speaker 9 is the notorious RBG.

Speaker 5 Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Speaker 44 RBG can do 20 push-ups and not the so-called girl kind.

Speaker 5 Now, before she was a Supreme Court justice

Speaker 5 or a workout sensation.

Speaker 34 Show us all the moves. Before all that,

Speaker 29 Ruth Ginsburg, she was at the ACLU.

Speaker 5 This was in the 70s.

Speaker 29 And one of the characteristics of Ruth Ginsburg, which exists to this day. Very well.

Speaker 5 You can hear this. It's the first time she argued in front of the Supreme Court in 1973.

Speaker 29 When you'd ask her a question, there would be silence.

Speaker 29 Enough silence.

Speaker 18 Mrs.

Speaker 27 Ginsburg.

Speaker 29 To make a person nervous and start trying to help her answer the question.

Speaker 29 You had to wait.

Speaker 5 But we can imagine that it was in one of those long pauses that Ruth Bader Ginsburg rescued some of the key principles behind the ERA, repackaged them, and marched them in through a side door.

Speaker 25 Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, sex like race is a visible characteristic bearing no necessary relationship to ability.

Speaker 25 Sex like race has been made the basis for unjustified, or at least unfroved, assumptions concerning an individual's penalty.

Speaker 14 Wait, so back it up a second. What exactly did RBG do?

Speaker 5 So let me walk you through it now because it's

Speaker 7 beautiful.

Speaker 5 The ERA fight is underway, and RBG and her colleagues are watching this happen, right? And they're getting worried.

Speaker 33 What if the ERA doesn't pass?

Speaker 5 So what are we going to do if that's the case? How are we going to get equal rights for women? So they decided, okay, as an alternate approach, let's go back to the 14th Amendment.

Speaker 16 The 14th Amendment's immediate objective was to provide national protection for the newly freed slaves.

Speaker 5 You know, which, as we said, was designed from the beginning to be only about race.

Speaker 16 But its sweeping provisions suggest broader objectives. The states were prevented from depriving any person equal protection of the laws.

Speaker 5 Well, it says the word person,

Speaker 4 so that

Speaker 5 should include women.

Speaker 5 If they could just get the courts to see it that way, then by default almost, we would have a sort of ERA.

Speaker 37 And accordingly, the task was showing that the racially inflected 14th Amendment applied to sex.

Speaker 5 So what about the law is she trying to change? What does she want the court to say?

Speaker 37 She wants the court to say that sex would be treated just like race.

Speaker 5 And here's why that's so important. When the court sees racial discrimination happening, under the 14th Amendment, it takes a a really hard line.

Speaker 5 It looks at it really, really closely, or at least it's supposed to. Whereas other kinds of discrimination, not so much.
Because actually, some discrimination is necessary.

Speaker 29 The law discriminates. It has to.

Speaker 5 It discriminates between 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds, between criminals and non-criminals. There would be chaos otherwise, right? But the courts decided that race is going to be a big red flag.

Speaker 5 They're going to ask governments, legislatures, presidents to have a compelling reason

Speaker 5 to do race discrimination. Otherwise, it's gonna be unconstitutional.
You with me so far?

Speaker 14 Yes. To discriminate based on race, you need to pass a really super hard test.

Speaker 5 By the way, the legal name for this test is

Speaker 18 strict scrutiny.

Speaker 5 I know they should have called it like we mean business or something like that.

Speaker 5 But anyway, the point was that like they took it seriously, which, you know, back in the day, they weren't doing with sex discrimination at all.

Speaker 5 Because when legislatures would come up with these laws, like this women can't be bartenders law, the Supreme Court would be like, you know, you guys probably have a good reason for that.

Speaker 35 It doesn't have to be the reason. It can just be a reason.

Speaker 14 It doesn't have to be very good.

Speaker 35 It doesn't have to be good. They could even maybe even make it up on the fly.
It just has to be a reason for upholding this law.

Speaker 5 Like in the case of the bartender's law, bars are dangerous.

Speaker 33 Women need more protection.

Speaker 7 And courts would be like, okay, sure.

Speaker 5 So RBG needed a way to convince the court to be as intense about sex discrimination as they were about race discrimination. But how do you convince an audience of men

Speaker 5 who are used to discriminating on the basis of sex, who've been doing it for years?

Speaker 5 How do you convince them that discrimination is a bad thing?

Speaker 13 That's coming up after a quick break.

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Speaker 4 Lulu, Radio Lab. So just before the break, Ruth Bader Ginsburg needed a way to convince an audience of men that discrimination on the basis of sex is wrong.

Speaker 42 I think people who want to keep women down would like nothing better than to women go off in the corner and speak only to women. Nothing would happen.

Speaker 5 This is her giving a recent talk about her 1970s strategy.

Speaker 42 You need to persuade men that this is right for society.

Speaker 5 Part one of her strategy, choose your words carefully.

Speaker 42 I had a secretary at Columbia.

Speaker 42 who said, I'm typing these things for you and jumping out all over the page is sex, sex.

Speaker 42 Don't you know that the audience you are addressing, that the first association of those men with the word sex is not what you're talking about.

Speaker 42 So

Speaker 42 why don't you use a grammar book term, use gender?

Speaker 5 Because you know what the word sex has a charge to it. Gender is cooler.

Speaker 5 And part two of her strategy, choose your cases carefully. This is all happening in the 70s when RBG is the head of the ACLU Women's Rights Project.

Speaker 5 So she's deciding which kinds of cases the ACLU is going to support as they make their way to an all-male Supreme Court.

Speaker 5 And her strategy was, if we live in a man's world right now, we need to find cases. that nine men at this moment can handle.

Speaker 37 So for example, early on in her tenure at the Women's Rights Project, the other lefty lawyers are suggesting that the women's movement needs to take up the cause of lesbian rights.

Speaker 37 And she says, not yet.

Speaker 43 And I think go slow

Speaker 42 is the right approach.

Speaker 5 She said, first, we need to go after that small and insidious idea. that the Supreme Court had been keeping alive for years.

Speaker 43 The laws of our country have given a very wonderful status to the married woman.

Speaker 5 That Phillips Laughly idea that discrimination is actually good for women.

Speaker 42 Gender classifications were always rationalized as favors

Speaker 42 to women.

Speaker 5 And so RPG decided not just to bring cases where women were the victims of discrimination.

Speaker 52 Okay.

Speaker 52 My name is Curtis Craig.

Speaker 5 She brought cases where men were the victims. Who were you as an 18-year-old?

Speaker 52 That's a great question.

Speaker 52 I was like any 18-year-old young man,

Speaker 52 invincible, you know, thought I was quite the ladies' man.

Speaker 52 You name it.

Speaker 5 He made it into Lambda Chi Alpha at Oklahoma State, and he was living

Speaker 51 at the frat house.

Speaker 52 Our fraternity was primarily made up of wrestlers. So it was when you went down the hall,

Speaker 52 you were about to be taken down at any moment. You'd be thrown into the wall and you'd leave a body print.

Speaker 5 What do you mean, like an indentation literally in the wall, or like the beer?

Speaker 19 Oh my god!

Speaker 11 Yeah, it was amazing.

Speaker 52 There was a lot of partying going on.

Speaker 10 A lot of beer.

Speaker 52 The yard would be filled with beer cans.

Speaker 5 And here's the key: if they wanted to get all that beer,

Speaker 5 they had to enlist the help of the ladies. Yeah, I mean, you know, the sorority sisters.

Speaker 52 Yes, you would have a female buy you beer and you'd go out and party.

Speaker 14 They need the women to buy the beer?

Speaker 6 Yep.

Speaker 5 Why? Because in Oklahoma state at the time.

Speaker 42 Oklahoma had a very silly law. Girls could buy beer at age 18, but the boys had to wait until 21.

Speaker 52 There was something about the level of maturity, I guess, for women versus men at that time.

Speaker 5 The basic principle was that

Speaker 5 boys got into more car accidents, so they should be trusted with less beer.

Speaker 5 And did that make you angry?

Speaker 52 Oh, absolutely. Well, it was extremely unfair.
Yeah, I would say it made, I think, most men angry at the time.

Speaker 5 And a Supreme Court case

Speaker 5 was born.

Speaker 42 So the thirsty boys at fraternity

Speaker 42 brought this case.

Speaker 14 So the RBG gets involved in this beer case?

Speaker 7 Yes. But

Speaker 14 this is a situation where women have rights men don't have. Why would she want to argue this case? I would imagine she'd want the opposite.

Speaker 5 Well, this is where her strategy is kind of like a Trojan horse. If you look at this case, right, on the outside, it looks like a case about men being discriminated against.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 But if you think about it,

Speaker 5 Beneath that discrimination is actually this kind of unspoken idea about women. So, go with me on this, right? If men are irresponsible, they can't handle beer, then women

Speaker 37 are more responsible and well-behaved,

Speaker 5 more delicate, they could be trusted with something like beer because they won't abuse it, you know.

Speaker 5 So, with that line of thinking, it's not long before you're trying to protect women, protect them from, you know, scary places like bars or courtrooms or

Speaker 6 political office.

Speaker 5 Using this case,

Speaker 5 RBG is able to walk into the court this discrimination about men, but also the discrimination against women that's attached to it or inside of it.

Speaker 11 Wow, that's clever.

Speaker 5 We're just getting started.

Speaker 5 better than I was out with my sins. I will not be better than I was out with my son.

Speaker 14 More perfect continues in a minute.

Speaker 14 This is More Perfect. I'm Jad Abum Rad here with Julie Galongoria, who's telling us the story of a case involving boys in beer that became a kind of Trojan horse

Speaker 14 in the battle for women's rights.

Speaker 14 Now the story of the Trojan horse, maybe you know this, it's, you know, ancient Greece, you've got Sparta fighting Troy.

Speaker 14 The Spartans want to get into the city of Troy, but it's this giant walled city, too big, they can't get in. And so Odysseus comes up with this clever plan.

Speaker 14 We'll give the Trojans this giant wooden horse. They'll bring it into their city.
They'll think it's a gift that we're retreating, which is what they thought.

Speaker 14 And then at night, our soldiers who are hidden inside the horse will come out.

Speaker 14 And they will take the city. Now, in our case, Odysseus is RBG.
The city she's trying to get into is the all-male supreme court. But in order for this very,

Speaker 14 admittedly imperfect analogy to work, we need someone in the horse to come out, the warrior in the horse, the woman warrior.

Speaker 5 And in our case, that woman warrior.

Speaker 5 She didn't even know she was going to go into battle.

Speaker 14 Julia, you take it from here.

Speaker 51 So I got in the car and I drove a long time.

Speaker 5 This tiny little gravel road leading up to a narrow street of houses to Sparta, Sparta, North Carolina.

Speaker 6 It's called Sparta. I know.

Speaker 5 Cows and horses and Trump signs.

Speaker 6 Tractor up front. No trespassing sign.

Speaker 5 And so I walk up to this house. It's this beautiful cream-colored cottage perched on top of a mountain.

Speaker 11 Wow.

Speaker 5 And I can hear Whitney Houston saving all my love for you, blasting.

Speaker 23 Are you Carolyn?

Speaker 7 Hi, Hi, very nice to meet you.

Speaker 5 And I meet

Speaker 5 Carolyn Whitener.

Speaker 13 I'm 76, soon be 77.

Speaker 19 She

Speaker 5 immediately offers me a course. I've got a course wine.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 23 Will you have a beer with me?

Speaker 13 No, I can't. I'm a diabetic.

Speaker 13 I can drink a little, but not much.

Speaker 5 Thank you.

Speaker 13 And I've got some brownies over here.

Speaker 14 What does she look like? Describe her.

Speaker 5 Reddish blonde hair, green eyes.

Speaker 5 She's wearing golden hoops.

Speaker 5 She has like this. What's going on here? This air about her that she could have been a beauty queen, you know?

Speaker 5 But she also could have been a car mechanic.

Speaker 13 Tell me about yourself. Well, I am.

Speaker 5 So we get to talking. I tell her a little bit about who I am, about the story.

Speaker 5 She actually told me like upfront. She's like,

Speaker 13 I'm proud of the young women. I have a granddaughter.
I'm so proud of you.

Speaker 5 Your generation. They're finishing the fight I started she just and I was essentially like no no no no this stuff like your story has like a huge impact on like

Speaker 5 women like me you know generation imagine

Speaker 13 but see my name was never tied in with it it was always Craig's name

Speaker 13 so

Speaker 13 you know it wasn't that big a deal

Speaker 5 She told me she grew up bouncing around different oil fields.

Speaker 13 So I was an oil field trash.

Speaker 31 That's what we were called, oilfield trash.

Speaker 5 That meant Carolyn and her brother and sister split the school year between two or three schools a year.

Speaker 7 We moved a lot.

Speaker 5 She says school didn't come easily to her.

Speaker 13 But my dad, he taught all three of us how to weld.

Speaker 6 He was a welder, how to work on a car.

Speaker 5 She was very independent. And when she was about 13, they moved to Chickashay, Oklahoma.

Speaker 22 It happened in old Oklahoma.

Speaker 5 And that

Speaker 5 is where she met Dwayne.

Speaker 13 That was the first boy I went with.

Speaker 5 They met in high school, and they were roughly the same age, but he was three years ahead of her in school. And what attracted you to him?

Speaker 13 His mind. He had an excellent mind, and he was just a farm boy with no education.
He never went to college, but he could have been about anything he'd have wanted to have been.

Speaker 5 What do you think attracted?

Speaker 5 him to you. Like, what do you think he saw in you?

Speaker 13 I was somebody new in town.

Speaker 5 Talking to Carolyn, I got the sense she did not have any shortage of suitors.

Speaker 13 But I married him when he turned 18.

Speaker 13 I don't know who that is.

Speaker 19 Let me turn that off.

Speaker 13 And when I married my husband,

Speaker 13 I was equal to him except the money, and he didn't think anybody could handle that but him.

Speaker 13 He acted like he was raising me and he probably was.

Speaker 5 She She says she was really comfortable with him. He was a quiet man with this brilliant mind.

Speaker 13 But he just

Speaker 13 was pure German, girl. Have you ever met a German man?

Speaker 13 Okay, they are in total control.

Speaker 14 And how does Carolyn connect to the case with the Frat Boys in RBG?

Speaker 5 Okay, so here's what happens: it's 1962. Carolyn and Dwayne are about 20 years old at this point, and they moved to a town called Stillwater, Oklahoma to open a business and stillwater

Speaker 5 is a college town it's that college town okay you got oklahoma state university right there tons of fraternities including lambda with the wrestlers huge homecoming drawing over 40 000 alumni we didn't know what homecoming was had no idea what homecoming was but shortly after moving to stillwater they opened the doors to the hunk and holler

Speaker 13 And where we went in was just about three blocks, four blocks from the college. And we went into business there.

Speaker 5 A drive-through convenience store.

Speaker 13 It was like the real old gas station with the oil pit in the floor.

Speaker 5 Here's how it would work. Customers pull up to the side of the convenience store and they'd drive through,

Speaker 5 hunk their horn, holler their order.

Speaker 13 And you'd have to go out and wait on them, come back in and get what they wanted and take it back out.

Speaker 5 So it's a lot of in and out and in and out

Speaker 6 all night long.

Speaker 13 You wear tennis shoes out real fast.

Speaker 13 So it was all sheer energy and guts.

Speaker 5 Homecoming night. We were supposed to close at 11.
The store is flooded with customers.

Speaker 13 Till, I think, two or three o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 5 They're like thrilled because they've never run a business by themselves before and all these college kids are coming in and buying Coors beer, including, of course, a steady stream of girls buying beer, presumably for their boyfriends.

Speaker 13 And it, yeah, I never did get to see homecoming.

Speaker 13 All I saw was cars coming in and out.

Speaker 5 Fast forward a few years, it's 1972, back at the university.

Speaker 52 He was a tall, had long blonde hair.

Speaker 5 Curtis Craig's buddy named Mark Walker.

Speaker 52 He was the president of the Lamb Nakai House at the time.

Speaker 5 He's in a political science class.

Speaker 5 And the professor starts talking about the whole fight for the ERA, which is is happening right at that moment.

Speaker 5 And at this point, Oklahoma hasn't ratified the ERA.

Speaker 5 And somehow the conversation turns to this beer law. Mark's like, talk about discrimination.
This beer law is discrimination against us.

Speaker 52 And the professor challenged him about doing something about the bear laws if he was going to complain about them.

Speaker 13 So one day... I was behind the counter, people coming in and out.

Speaker 5 Mark Walker walks into the honkin' holler.

Speaker 13 The young man came in to talk to me.

Speaker 5 She doesn't really have time to talk. She's running in and out.
But he stood there waiting patiently.

Speaker 13 I bet he was in there four hours and he was looking at the beer license.

Speaker 5 He looks at the license and he notices that Carolyn's name is the one on it. Because actually, my husband lost his license after he sold beer to a young man.

Speaker 13 So he put him in my name. Anyway, at a certain point, in between all the honks and hollers, he asked me what I thought about the beer laws.
And I told him I was very vocal about it. I always had been.

Speaker 5 She says it doesn't make any sense. We send these young men off to war.

Speaker 31 They were being drafted at 18.

Speaker 5 But we don't let them drink beer when they come back. Was that just? Not to mention the liability issues.
You have these 18 year old girls coming in, buying beer, slipping it to their boyfriends.

Speaker 5 How am I supposed to stop that?

Speaker 13 You can't prove who buys what. So eventually when Mark Walker asked for her help, he said he was going to do a term paper.
She's like, sure, why not?

Speaker 13 I was always willing to help them because they had helped us get started. And I still thought it was a term paper.

Speaker 5 So was he not being completely honest with you then?

Speaker 13 Well, I didn't hear half of what he said. I was busy every time he came in.
So, you know,

Speaker 13 it wasn't that important at the time.

Speaker 20 So I didn't think any more about it.

Speaker 13 He left. My husband was gone.
He was out of state working.

Speaker 13 And I didn't didn't even say anything to him about it. It wasn't important.
You know, I just thought it was a conversation.

Speaker 5 But it wasn't just a conversation. Because before that meeting, Mark had gone out looking for a lawyer.

Speaker 52 That's correct.

Speaker 5 And Curtis and Mark and the other Fratt brothers had tried to raise some money.

Speaker 52 That was flawed in a campus town. Everybody uses their last dollar for that last bear.

Speaker 5 But they managed to find this lawyer who would do it on the cheap.

Speaker 53 All right. Well, I'm just Fred Gilbert, attorney at law.
No big thing, no big deal.

Speaker 52 I remember him always wearing his military boots. Actually, I believe he wore them even to the Supreme Court.

Speaker 5 Fred had worked on another male discrimination case in the past, and to him, this case was pretty straightforward.

Speaker 53 Men couldn't buy beer until they were 21, but the most irresponsible and drunken woman in the state could buy it in unlimited quantities at 18. Well, that was discrimination.

Speaker 53 It was kind of more a male rights case.

Speaker 5 Well, it was. And do you remember corresponding with Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

Speaker 11 Yes, I knew

Speaker 53 Ruth Bader Ginsburg before she was on the court.

Speaker 5 Somehow, Ruth Bader Ginsburg noticed this case, and she watched as Fred made his way up the courts, losing at every level.

Speaker 5 And by this point, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was head of the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU.

Speaker 5 She'd already argued a few cases before the Supreme Court, which had inched the court slowly toward the idea that sex was like race. And she thought that this case was interesting.

Speaker 5 She gave Fred a call.

Speaker 53 You know, we have a problem in a personal relationship. It was no question.

Speaker 53 I was something of an unreconstructed male chauvinist, and she was not.

Speaker 5 Fred did not see this as a women's rights case.

Speaker 53 It was just kind of an unnecessary insult to man for no reason at all.

Speaker 5 And Ruth, looking at this case, thought, no, Fred, it's more than that.

Speaker 29 It didn't matter to her if the plaintiff was a man or a woman, because in most of those cases, the discrimination against the man was derivative of a prior and worse discrimination against the woman.

Speaker 12 Here's to the ladies, the fair and the weak. How do they do it? Where do they find all that energy, that seemingly inexhaustible store of pep and ginger?

Speaker 5 Again, Ruth was after the stereotype about women that was nestled inside the beer loft, that women are more responsible and well-behaved.

Speaker 5 But in order for her to make that connection, she needed Fred to write his brief in a way that would be useful to her. So refer not just to male discrimination, but discrimination based on gender.

Speaker 23 Well,

Speaker 19 I supported her.

Speaker 53 I just never was, shall we say, a militant feminist.

Speaker 5 So like, Ruth had her work cut out for her.

Speaker 50 At this point, she was getting sort of used to dealing with these rubes from the sticks.

Speaker 5 So with other local lawyers that she'd worked with in the past, Ruth had been more forceful, insisting that she make the argument. But that had backfired.

Speaker 50 So she likes, okay, you argue it, right?

Speaker 5 She wrote to Fred telling him that she didn't need to be the one to present oral argument before the court. She was fine if he'd do it.

Speaker 5 But she very gently, very persistently, was able to convince him to let her help him with his legal brief.

Speaker 13 But uh,

Speaker 13 I think it was uh a couple of months later, because my husband was out of state every month.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, back at the Honkin' Holler, Carolyn has no idea what's going on.

Speaker 23 No.

Speaker 13 No idea.

Speaker 23 And I got a phone call.

Speaker 13 My husband was on the phone. Well, I had salesmen in, and I had people coming in and out.
And

Speaker 13 he was irate.

Speaker 13 He was furious.

Speaker 13 I couldn't figure out what was going on.

Speaker 5 She was like, Case?

Speaker 7 What are you talking about?

Speaker 13 Well, he had picked up a newspaper in North Carolina in a bank, and it was on the front page of the newspaper with my name and about us suing.

Speaker 13 It looked like we sued everybody in the state of Oklahoma that was in office, all the way down to the garbage man.

Speaker 33 He's like, what did you do?

Speaker 5 How are you? We don't want to get mixed up in this.

Speaker 33 We don't want our name on this.

Speaker 5 We don't want to make a fuss. Like, this could hurt business.

Speaker 33 Like, how dare you?

Speaker 13 You know, I didn't know what had happened. I really didn't know.

Speaker 5 And eventually she figured out, it must have been that kid who came in here. And now it's like at the Supreme Court?

Speaker 7 What?

Speaker 13 I was back and forth on that phone with him, trying to wait on customers. And I bet that took about three hours.
And he would not let up. I mean, he kept calling back and calling back.

Speaker 13 He called a lawyer. He was mad.

Speaker 13 And then the last phone call, he said, I am flying back in. And he said, you pick me up.

Speaker 5 A couple nights later, she drove to the airport.

Speaker 13 Picked him up. and

Speaker 13 he was still mad.

Speaker 13 That was the longest car ride.

Speaker 5 As they drove back, she says he just lectured her the whole ride.

Speaker 13 I just listened to him.

Speaker 5 What did he say?

Speaker 13 I don't know what he said, word to word.

Speaker 13 I just know he was strong with what he said.

Speaker 13 With my husband, it was best to just be silent.

Speaker 13 I was never afraid of him, but I knew how far to push it.

Speaker 13 Time we got from the airport to the other side, it was about an hour and 20 minutes. That's a long hour and 20 minutes in a car where you can't get out.

Speaker 5 And over the course of that hour and 20 minutes, she said something in her just kind of shifted.

Speaker 5 And at a certain point, she basically turned to him and was like, no.

Speaker 5 Like, I know you want me to drop this case, but I'm going to fight this.

Speaker 13 He threatened me every which way. I didn't budge.

Speaker 7 And probably

Speaker 13 the reason why I didn't budge because he fought me so hard on it.

Speaker 13 You know, I believed in it. But I had never stepped out like that.
That's the first time I really

Speaker 13 put my foot down and didn't budge.

Speaker 13 I gave so much to him. I mean,

Speaker 13 I didn't get a salary for 25 years.

Speaker 13 I didn't ask for it.

Speaker 13 I figured we were equal. I figured I worked the same hours he did,

Speaker 13 and I figured I stood beside him, not behind him and not in front of him.

Speaker 4 Coming up, Carolyn goes to court. Stay tuned.

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Speaker 4 RadioLab Lulu, when we left off, the Supreme Court was getting ready to hear a case about gender discrimination. That's gender discrimination against men.
I'll let Julia take it from here.

Speaker 5 October 5th, 1976, the day of oral arguments. The lawyer, Fred Gilbert.

Speaker 13 I haven't ran across very many people that I didn't care for. I didn't care for Fred.
He was so pushy.

Speaker 5 Insists that Carolyn needs to come to D.C.

Speaker 13 where I didn't have the money to go and I didn't want to go. I never traveled anywhere by myself.

Speaker 9 What I recall that day.

Speaker 5 Curtis Craig came too.

Speaker 52 I was dressed up.

Speaker 37 Suit and tie.

Speaker 13 I had borrowed a dress, plastic, looked like leather.

Speaker 52 Walking up those stairs. High hills.
I remember that distinctly.

Speaker 13 It was so big.

Speaker 7 Beautiful building.

Speaker 13 I felt like I was walking forever up those stairs. I was burning up.
I was sweating.

Speaker 38 We'll hear arguments next in 75-628, Craig against Borin.

Speaker 38 Mr. Gilbert, you may proceed whenever you're ready.

Speaker 5 Fred Gilbert starts starts things off. He walks up to the podium in his combat boots.

Speaker 38 The law is broad and all-encompassing in its sweep.

Speaker 38 It says that all females, even those that are the most drunk, most alcoholic, most immature, and most irresponsible, may purchase 3.2% beer at age 18 in absolutely unlimited quantities.

Speaker 38 The law doesn't say it in quite those words, does it?

Speaker 5 And by all accounts,

Speaker 5 he didn't exactly kill it.

Speaker 38 No, Your Honor. And the law doesn't doesn't say it in quite the words that all males hate to say.

Speaker 52 The justices just kept hammering.

Speaker 38 Your Honor, the Vendor still has it. The only way he can get relief is to move his age back and drink.

Speaker 18 Hammering. In a technical sense.

Speaker 38 I don't technical sense.

Speaker 38 Yes, Your Honor. That is technical.
The only complaint is drafted. And what is before the court? Well, but you say, you say what's before the court.
What's before the court is your complaint.

Speaker 13 Curtis was sitting beside me, and I kept punching him. What does that mean? What are they talking about? What does that mean? And he kept saying, shh, shh.

Speaker 13 Just be quiet until it's over. I'll tell you.
Your door still doesn't weigh so much.

Speaker 38 It's the Ven Doerr who is trying to sell.

Speaker 13 I didn't understand what they were doing.

Speaker 38 The beer law that we challenged today was originally enacted in 1890.

Speaker 5 But she says what caught her ear was a moment when Justice Rehnquist. When he called me...

Speaker 38 When you say we,

Speaker 38 you're referring to your client who is the tavern keeper.

Speaker 53 A saloon keeper.

Speaker 38 Yes, Your Honor. And there's...

Speaker 13 I tell you when he called called me that in the Supreme Court, I came so near standing up and correcting him. And I've always wondered to this day why I did that.

Speaker 5 As arguments went on, Fred did at least try to do the thing that Ruth wanted him to do.

Speaker 38 Your Honor, I would say anything could be you could pass a law saying no Negro will drive while intoxicated.

Speaker 5 Compare sex discrimination to race discrimination.

Speaker 38 Now, this relates to the public thing, but the thing is you can't discriminate, even for something like public safety, on the basis of certain criteria.

Speaker 38 Well, has the court ever held that discrimination of this sort is of the same class as discrimination on the basis of race? Your Honor, this court has come very, very closely.

Speaker 38 Well, I asked you a question. Has it ever held? No, it has never held that it is totally to be treated the same as race, Your Honor.

Speaker 5 To make a long story short,

Speaker 5 by the end of oral argument,

Speaker 6 things weren't looking great for Fred.

Speaker 38 I mean, I think that depends on the thrust of ours.

Speaker 38 All right, let me explain this.

Speaker 5 First of all, we do At one point, he even interrupts a Supreme Court justice.

Speaker 5 You don't do that.

Speaker 27 It just, uh,

Speaker 5 yeah, wasn't happening.

Speaker 38 Well, I don't have time for a parting thought. I thank you for your time.
Thank you, gentlemen. The case is submitted.

Speaker 14 Well, you win some, you lose some, right, ladies?

Speaker 19 What?

Speaker 6 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 5 Here comes the craziest part of the story. Okay.

Speaker 5 It's like a double Trojan horse, horse within a horse, because after the Fred Gilbert debacle, there was another case at the Supreme Court that afternoon.

Speaker 5 Thanks, Jim. And it just so happened

Speaker 5 that it was a case being argued

Speaker 5 by none other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Speaker 24 Somehow she organized, I've now forgotten how, to get that argued the same day.

Speaker 5 That was on purpose? Yeah, oh yeah. Oh my god, that's genius.

Speaker 33 Yeah, no, she's a genius. Mr.

Speaker 25 Chief Justice, and they had pleased the court.

Speaker 14 Wait, you're saying she somehow managed to get herself in the court on another case on the same day?

Speaker 20 So I couldn't confirm that for sure.

Speaker 5 I don't even know how you would do that.

Speaker 5 But what I can tell you is that she arranged to go second because she knew there was probably a good chance that Fred, the completely incompetent lawyer, was going to be, you know, less than amazing.

Speaker 50 The court was asking him questions and he was completely incapable of answering. So finally the court just went, oh, never mind.

Speaker 50 And then when Ruth stood up to argue her case, they asked her about Greg V.

Speaker 6 Bohr.

Speaker 54 We had a case this morning, just to be concrete, involving a law that would not permit males to make certain purchases that females could make, and was attacked as a discrimination against males. Yes.

Speaker 54 My question is whether we should examine that law under the same or a different standard than if it were a discrimination against the others.

Speaker 25 My answer to that question is no, in part because such a law has an insidious impact against females.

Speaker 5 And then she told Justice Stevens, even in this case, where it seems like men are the ones who are being discriminated against, beneath that discrimination is a more insidious one.

Speaker 25 Against females. It stands then docile, compliant, safe to be dressed.

Speaker 54 But your answer always depends on their finding some discrimination against females. Is it your view that there is no discrimination against males?

Speaker 25 I think there is discrimination against males.

Speaker 54 If there is such discrimination, is it to be tested by the same or by a different standard from discrimination against females?

Speaker 25 My response to that, Mr. Justice Stevens, is that almost every discrimination that operates against males operates against females as well.

Speaker 54 Is that a yes or a no answer?

Speaker 54 I just don't understand you. And are you trying to avoid the question?

Speaker 25 No, I'm not trying to avoid the question. I'm trying to clarify the position that I don't know of any line that

Speaker 25 doesn't work as a two-edged sword.

Speaker 5 They go back and forth a bit. Justice Stevens is basically like, why do you keep insisting on this?

Speaker 5 Like, why do you keep saying that discrimination against men contains within it discrimination against women? They're different. And she's like, no, they're not different.

Speaker 54 So your case depends then on our analyzing this case as a discrimination against female?

Speaker 38 No.

Speaker 25 My case depends on your recognition that using gender as a classification,

Speaker 25 resorting to that classification, is highly questionable and should be closely reviewed.

Speaker 5 She makes this point again and again. All discrimination based on gender is bad, and it should be checked with something at least approaching that hardcore standard that the court uses for race.

Speaker 13 That was really something

Speaker 13 seeing this little woman get up.

Speaker 25 I don't know of any purely anti-male discrimination.

Speaker 13 I'll never forget that because she was small.

Speaker 25 In the end, the women are the ones who end up hurting.

Speaker 22 Yes.

Speaker 13 She's so small in person, but she had a lot of force.

Speaker 38 The case is submitted

Speaker 5 About two months later, the judgment

Speaker 38 and opinion.

Speaker 5 December 20th, 1976.

Speaker 38 Craig against Borum.

Speaker 5 Justice William Brennan announces that the court,

Speaker 5 we reverse, is striking down the beer law.

Speaker 38 We hold that Oklahoma's gender-based differential does constitute an invidious violation.

Speaker 35 of the Equal Protection Clause.

Speaker 5 This silly beer case was basically the first time the court clearly said that when you discriminate based on gender, you need to pass a harder test. It wasn't as rigorous as race.

Speaker 5 It wasn't strict scrutiny. They settled on a standard that we now call intermediate scrutiny.
And it was pretty damn close.

Speaker 5 RBG would go on to strengthen this standard over time, but this was the case.

Speaker 5 That first got us a kind of equal rights amendment through a side door.

Speaker 42 We wished that the court had picked a less frothy case to make that announcement.

Speaker 42 But of course, we were very, very pleased that after that.

Speaker 5 The day the decision was announced.

Speaker 13 I had just came in from work. I was at home by myself there in Stillwater.

Speaker 5 She's by herself in the kitchen. And the phone rings.
And who calls?

Speaker 23 Who called?

Speaker 13 National News called to tell me that we had won.

Speaker 13 I didn't ask what we had won.

Speaker 13 I didn't ask anything.

Speaker 13 I just said, okay.

Speaker 5 She hung up.

Speaker 13 Stood there for a little bit, and then Craig called and he wanted me to come down and celebrate with the guys there at his fraternity. Fraternity, yeah.

Speaker 5 She told him, no, thanks.

Speaker 5 And then she hangs up the phone and she gets one more phone call.

Speaker 13 And it was my husband. He was in North Carolina again.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 he heard something about the case, but he didn't hear it all. And he said, what's going on now? And I said,

Speaker 13 we won.

Speaker 5 And he says, is it over?

Speaker 13 I said, it's over.

Speaker 13 It's totally over with. He said, good.

Speaker 23 And he hung up.

Speaker 13 I fixed me a very good drink, vodka and Coke. Sat down in the middle of the floor, and that's the way I celebrated.
I drank that drink all by myself, and it was over with. It was over with.

Speaker 5 Carolyn says that for decades after this case, she didn't understand what it meant.

Speaker 5 She didn't understand what it meant as a legal principle or that it ushered in this new era for women in this country.

Speaker 5 But even so,

Speaker 6 in her own life,

Speaker 5 this case

Speaker 5 was a beginning.

Speaker 13 Probably a couple of years after we won that case, I went into China right after it opened up.

Speaker 5 She saved up money and went with her sister-in-law because Duane didn't want to come with him.

Speaker 13 I did. I was so curious.
And we never went like the tourist went. We'd get on a train, and if we saw something we wanted to stop and see, we would stop.
We never had a schedule.

Speaker 13 I never did really go to shop. I was just curious about the people and how they lived.
I saw so much, and I talked to so many people while I was gone, that

Speaker 7 it was like a hunger,

Speaker 13 and you grow from it.

Speaker 13 And I just wanted to see things, and that was just open, that just opened the doors for me.

Speaker 14 What happened to Carolyn in the end?

Speaker 5 She and Dwayne divorced in 2007.

Speaker 14 Huh. And

Speaker 14 when you said she didn't know the effect her case had for decades, like when did she figure it out?

Speaker 52 Or when did, what, what, how?

Speaker 5 So, in around 1996, this professor, a guy named Bob Darcy, calls her up and invites her to speak at a class.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 she is kind of learning from the students and from the professor like what the case actually stood for and then eventually the professor puts her in touch with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and they meet again

Speaker 5 in person

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 it sort of starts to dawn on her

Speaker 13 one of the letters I don't know if that's the one

Speaker 5 when we were sitting in her bedroom she was looking through some old letters and pulled out one with the Supreme Court seal on it can you read it no I don't have my glasses you have to read it.

Speaker 20 Okay.

Speaker 5 Dear Carolyn, as I told you in 1996 when we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Craig v. Bourne, you are the true heroine of that case.

Speaker 5 Although no financial gain was at stake for you, you realized the potential the case had in paving the way for the court's recognition of equal citizenship stature of men and women as constitutional principle.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 13 I was gonna get that framed,

Speaker 13 but I haven't done it yet.

Speaker 5 Signed Ruth Beter Ginsburg.

Speaker 13 I need to get it laminated before I have it primed.

Speaker 14 Producer Julia Longoria.

Speaker 14 I'm Jad Abinrod. Thank you for listening.
And here is More Perfect and Radio Labs David Gable to read the credits.

Speaker 17 Supreme Court audio is from OYA, a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell.

Speaker 17 Leadership support for More Perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 7 That's it? I want to read more!

Speaker 17 More Perfect is produced by me, Jad Abenrod, Susie Lechtenberg, Jenny Lawton, Julia Longoria, Kelly Prime, Sean Ramaswaram, who's no longer here, Alex Oberton, and Sarah Kari.

Speaker 17 I didn't even get to say it.

Speaker 17 Anytime, I love doing this.

Speaker 17 I used to do it. I did voiceovers when I lived in Japan because I was a native.
I used to sing at Tokyo Disneyland, and my side gig on my days off was recording voiceovers at a little Japanese studio.

Speaker 17 I did a lot of language lessons for kids.

Speaker 18 Listen and repeat.

Speaker 18 I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think I think.

Speaker 18 I think it's so open up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up. I think it's so

Speaker 18 funny, I've been up and up, and I've been up and up and up and up and up and up and up. I think it's so.

Speaker 39 Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK.

Speaker 39 Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betsy Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Seymour Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 30 Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P.

Speaker 8 Sloan Foundation.

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Speaker 1 Uh, so are you just gonna watch me eat?

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