Serena Mayeri spoke about the parallels between the racial justice and women’s rights movements during the 1960s and 1970s in front of an audience of more than two dozen students and faculty members in room 375 of McKenzie Hall on Thursday afternoon. She also talked about how these movements led to the creation of a “women and minorities” category in the legal system.
In her presentation titled “Reasoning from Race: Legal Feminism in the Civil Rights Era,” Mayeri discussed the evolution of the Equal Rights Amendment and various landmark events that have led to the current state of feminist atmosphere.
The presentation focused on the first part of a book project Mayeri is working on that explores how lawyers, judges, activists, politicians and ordinary citizens have examined the relationship between the civil rights and women’s rights movement.
Mayeri is especially interested in the strategy of pursuing the Fourteenth Amendment litigation and Equal Rights Amendment advocacy simultaneously, which she discussed at length Thursday. She also focuses on the use of sex segregation as a method of racial desegregation and the origins of reasoning about race and sex inequality.
Mayeri pointed to the early 1970s as a landmark period for the reasoning from race movement. During this time, a coalition was built between the women’s rights and civil rights movements. Despite opposition due to a lack of resources for dealing with both issues, as well as the difficulty in convincing lawmakers and judges, this coalition was able to break through with a benchmark case in 1973 in which women and minorities were put into the same category.
Ellen Herman, an associate professor of history and Mayeri’s former thesis adviser, brought Mayeri to campus. The two have known each other since Mayeri’s time at Yale, where she attended law school and later obtained a doctorate in history.
While introducing Mayeri, Herman extolled Mayeri’s work and her academic accomplishments thus far in her career. Mayeri has won prizes for her work in academia.
Danny Johnson, a third year political science major, said he attended the event because he is learning about similar topics in his Feminist Theory class.
“There were definitely parallels with what we are learning,” said Johnson. “This was more from a history point of view, but it certainly relates to political science theories. There were lots of similarities and it definitely piqued my interest.”
Mayeri concluded her presentation by fielding questions from the audience. She was asked about the reluctance to couple class-based discrimination with gender and race discrimination. She was also asked to critique the perspectives of other theorists and to relate reasoning from race to contemporary marriage issues.
Mayeri answered all of these questions and handled the entire event with great composure. The most stressful part of her day took place prior to the event upon her arrival in Eugene. Her plane landed not long before she was scheduled to begin the presentation, and she arrived at McKenzie Hall just moments before the 3:30 p.m. starting time.
Mayeri flew in from San Francisco by way of Philadelphia, where she currently is a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, which she joined in 2006. Before that, she was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University Law School.
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