Name Mary Eastwood | ||
Mary Eastwood (1930-2015) was an American lawyer.
Contents
Education
In 1955 she graduated the University of Wisconsin Law School.
Career
After graduating she worked on a temporary study project for the National Academy of Sciences. In 1960 she joined the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, serving as an attorney advisor and later (1969-1979) as an equal opportunity advisor. In 1961 Eastwood became the associate special counsel for investigation in the special counsel's office of the Merit System Protection Board, which investigated allegations of illegal personnel practices in the federal government.
In 1965 Eastwood published the landmark article (coauthored by Pauli Murray), "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII", in the George Washington Law Review. The article discussed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as it applied to women, and drew comparisons between discriminatory laws against women and Jim Crow laws.
Feminism
In 1966 the National Organization for Women was founded by 28 women who became founders at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women in June (the successor to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women), and another 21 women and men who became founders at the October 1966 NOW Organizing Conference, for a total of 49 founders. Both conferences were held in Washington, D.C. The 28 women who became founders in June included Mary Eastwood. They were inspired by the failure of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; at the Third National Conference of State Commissions on the Status of Women they were prohibited from issuing a resolution that recommended the EEOC carry out its legal mandate to end sex discrimination in employment. They thus gathered in Betty Friedan’s hotel room to form a new organization. On a paper napkin Friedan scribbled the acronym "NOW". Eastwood was part of NOW's first Legal Committee, along with Catherine East, Phineas Indritz, and Caruthers Berger. NOW’s picket of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in protest of their sex-segregated Help Wanted ads was organized at Eastwood’s apartment, and a photo of her picketing was in the Washington Post the next day.
Eastwood was also a board member of Human Rights for Women (HRW), which was founded in 1968 to help finance sex discrimination litigation and research projects on women's issues, and a member of Federally Employed Women (FEW), which fought to end sex discrimination in the federal government. In 1977 Eastwood became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP).
Some of Eastwood's papers are held in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.