Dorothy Kenyon

 ( 1888 Births ) 

For most of her career, Kenyon devoted a great deal of her energy to advocating for social justice and a variety of liberal and progressive causes such as the New Deal, women's rights, the labor movement, and consumer cooperatives. In 1930, Kenyon established the law firm of Straus and Kenyon with Dorothy Straus, with whom she worked in partnership to campaign for women's advancement until 1939, when she became a justice of the municipal court. Kenyon was appointed as a member of the New York City Comptroller's council on taxes for the relief of the unemployed in 1934. In 1936 she chaired a committee to study procedure in women's courts where she called for more sympathetic treatment of sex workers and stronger prosecution of their clients and pimps. Kenyon gained national prominence as a feminist activist in 1938 when she was named the U.S. representative to the League of Nations Committee for the Study of the Status of Women, a group of seven lawyers charged with studying women's legal status internationally. World War II interrupted the committee's work and it was never completed. Kenyon resumed her commitment to improving women's status around the world through her work as the U.S. delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women from 1946 to 1950.

Already well-known in academic, legal, and political circles, in 1950 Dorothy Kenyon made national news when Senator Joseph McCarthy named her as the first person to be investigated by the Tydings Committee. McCarthy alleged that Kenyon had been a member of 29 Communist front organizations. Two "reliable former members of the Communist party" reportedly told McCarthy that "she had one job and one job only and that was to attach herself to a prominent individual... high in public life and try to influence the writings of that individual." Kenyon responded aggressively to McCarthy's accusations by declaring: "He's a lowdown worm and although it ought to be beneath my dignity to answer him, I'm mad enough to say that he's a liar and he can go to hell." Of her involvement with communist organizations, she said "I am not, and never have been, a supporter of, a member of, or a sympathizer with any organization known to me to be, or suspected by me, of being controlled or dominated by Communists." In the wake of her confrontation with McCarthy, Kenyon received widespread support from the press and from respected public figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt. Although the Senate subcommittee cleared the charges against her on July 17, McCarthy's accusations ended Kenyon's career in public service.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Kenyon prepared briefs for the NAACP and worked for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). She continued to push the ACLU to take a stand against sexist policies and institutions, and was the sole woman on the board of the ACLU for many years. She worked with African-American activist and attorney, Pauli Murray, on preparing briefs for cases that challenged sex discrimination in the 1940s and 1950s. She joined the pro Equal Rights Amendment forces, and also teamed with much younger feminists in the emerging women's liberation movement where she participated in the 1971 Women's Strike for Equality and in the burgeoning movement to legalize abortion.

In 1966, Murray and Dorothy Kenyon successfully argued White v. Crook, a case in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that women have an equal right to serve on juries. When attorney and future Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote her brief for Reed v. Reed—a 1971 Supreme Court case that for the first time extended the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to women—she added Murray and Kenyon as coauthors in recognition of her debt to their work.