Women's History Month: Sylvia Roberts

Sylvia Roberts, fourth from the left, with colleagues in the National Organization of Women.

Sylvia Roberts (1933-2014), an attorney from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, volunteered for the National Organization for Women when it was founded in 1966, offering to represent any female worker who had been discriminated against on the job on the basis of sex.

NOW assigned her to the case of Lorena Weeks, who had been denied a promotion to switchman at Southern Bell Telephone because of a rule that women could not be hired for jobs that required them to lift more than thirty pounds. When arguing her case before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Roberts requested that every tool involved in a switchman's job be brought into the courtroom. She proceeded to pick up each one and walk around with it while she talked. The petite, 92-pound attorney hoisted a 40-pound workbench on her shoulder as she pointed out that women hauled sacks of groceries weighing more then 30 pounds all the time.

In one of the first major victories for NOW's legal defense team, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled in 1969 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allowed women, not their employers, to decide whether they wanted untraditional jobs. This was a critical success of second-wave feminism in the United States.

Learn more about Sylvia Roberts.