User:Sammielh/Jean Witter

Jean M. Witter (née Peindl; July 23, 1927 – June 25, 2008) was an American lawyer and social activist.

Early life

Witter was born Jean M. Peindl on July 23, 1927, in the suburb of South Hills in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received a bachelor's degree in crystallography from Duquesne University, but she could not find a job in a laboratory. She initially began work as a chemical librarian before finding a job in crystallography research at the University of Pittsburgh. By 1968, she was a chemist with the U.S. Bureau of Mines. She married DuWayne Witter, a postal worker, and the couple had two sons, Ray and David.

Social activism

Witter first became involved in women's rights activism during the 1960s. She and her husband were members of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh in the neighborhood of Shadyside and the idea for a local chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) was first discussed in the church basement. The couple, along with their first son, became charter members of the new Pittsburgh chapter. She was elected president of the chapter in 1970, and was serving in this role when the Allegheny County Common Pleas Court upheld a decision by the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations to require The Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to stop segregating its classified advertisements by sex. This decision followed a complaint raised by the chapter in 1969 and was later brought to the Supreme Court in 1973 as Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations. She also served as chair of the legislation committee, when she spearheaded the inclusion of a sex amendment to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act in 1970. [...] [Love, p 497]

Witter, Heide and Gardner testified before a hearing of the Department of Labor in August 1969 about employment discrimination, where Witter spoke about her difficulty finding a job as a chemist despite her college degree.

Witter became a member of NOW's national board of directors in 1968 and was re-elected in 1970. [Ran for election to the state legislature?]

In 1968, Witter helped to found KNOW, Inc., a feminist publishing house, with Wilma Scott Heide, Jo Ann Evansgardner, Gerald Gardner and Phyllis Wetherby. It published speeches and articles from various feminists, including "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" by Jo Freeman and I'm Running Away from Home, But I'm Not Allowed to Cross the Street by Gabrielle Burton.

Witter filed as a candidate for the 1970 election, running for election to the 27th district in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in the Democratic primary against Robert A. Geisler and Charles Savrese. In the 1982 election, she ran against Thomas C. Petrone in the Democratic primaries to represent the 27th district but lost with only 1,942 votes to his 4,267 votes.

Equal Rights Amendment

In 1968, Betty Friedan asked Witter to join a national NOW committee alongside Ti-Grace Atkinson and Muriel Fox to promote passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) by the 91st Congress and she became the chair. She accompanied Heide and Cindy Judd Hill in testifying in support of the ERA before a sub-committee of the Democratic Congressional Platform Committee in August of the same year. The three women also signed an open letter to the senators James O. Eastland and Birch Bayh demanding asking them to bring a vote on the ERA.

Witter and Heide led twenty members of the Pittsburgh chapter of NOW to disrupt a U.S. Senate hearing of the sub-committee on constitutional amendments on February 17, 1970, which was debating a proposal to allow eighteen-year-olds to vote. The women gathered in the galley, holding signs with messages in support of the ERA and urging the Senate to pass the amendment. Following the hearings, they met with Bayh who agreed to hold hearings on the ERA later in the year. These would be the first hearings to be held on the ERA since 1956. Bayh later credited this demonstration with convincing him to act on the issue. The ERA passed Congress on March 22, 1972.

Following the amendment's passage through Congress, Witter enrolled at Duquesne University Law School in 1972 while in her forties so that her work on the ERA would have more credibility. She passed the bar exam three weeks after the death of her husband.

In March 1977, the idea that NOW could campaign for the ERA's ratification deadline to be extended was passed by law students Catherine Timlin and Alice Bennett to two members of the organization's national board, Judith Meuli and Toni Carabillo, and the president, Eleanor Smeal. At a dinner the next day, Smeal mentioned this to Representative Elizabeth Holtzman who sat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Witter wrote a legal opinion stating that Congress was able to change the deadline for ratification of a constitutional amendment if the original time limit was not specified in the wording of the amendment. This was used by Congress to extend the deadline for ratification of the ERA from 1979 by three years. However, despite her efforts, the amendment was still three states short by the revised deadline.

Later life

Following the failure of the ERA campaign, Witter continued to work as a lawyer, primarily focusing on affirmative action employment policies and representing women who were filing sex discrimination lawsuits. She died of lung cancer on June 25, 2008, in Pittsburgh, at the age of 80. Her papers are ...

References

Works cited

• Burrell, Barbara C. (2004). Women and Political Participation: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, C.A.: ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-85109-592-6.
• Davis, Flora (1999). Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-06782-2.
• Griffith, Randy (May 11, 2016). "Noteworthy Connections | Ferndale native was NOW chair, face of feminist movement in 1970s". The Tribune-Democrat. Retrieved March 17, 2022.
• Haney, Eleanor Humes (1985). A Feminist Legacy: The Ethics of Wilma Scott Heide and Company. Buffalo, N.Y.: Margaretdaughters, Inc. ISBN 0-931911-02-8.
• Love, Barbara J., ed. (2006). Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-03189-2.
• Schultz, Jeffrey D.; Van Assendelft, Laura, eds. (1999). Encyclopedia of Women in American Politics. Phoenix, A.Z.: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-1-57356-131-0.