My first published work was a letter to the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, around 1959, defending the African independence fighter, Jomo Kenyatta against the paper’s characterization of him as a terrorist. I guess I don’t change very readily, because I have spent much of the rest of my life weighing in on behalf of less powerful players in every imaginable situation. Although the privileged and educated women of the Times wedding announcements started me working on the current book, Get to Work” their decisions make them the less powerful players in their marriages, and the family injustice their lives revealed to me applies in every heterosexual family where the woman bears a disproportionate share of the housework and child rearing.

After college (Cornell University, B.A. with honors) and law school (University of Chicago, J.D.), I practiced law for fifteen years, representing working men and women in their labor unions in all sorts of litigation, helping them to keep their jobs, to hang onto their collective bargaining rights and to earn legal overtime pay. As a union side labor lawyer, I participated in three cases in the United States Supreme Court: one win, one loss and one tie. When it became clear in the early eighties that organized labor was beginning its precipitous decline, I took some time out of practicing to teach law school and do some writing on behalf of less powerful people, including an essay on why the abortion movement needs to use moral language to justify its claims, “Bronte, Bloom and Bork: An Essay on the Moral Education of Judges,” published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the first of many articles on behalf of women in situations of need. While teaching law school, I won a national prize for scholarship from the Bar Association and a prize for teaching while visiting at Northwestern.

By 1988 it seemed clear that the court system where I had represented unions was getting less and less useful to them, so I decided to stay in teaching and went back to get a PhD in philosophy, while I taught. I received my PhD (University of Illinois at Chicago) in 1994. In 1995 I accepted an offer to occupy the Allen/Berenson Chair in Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Brandeis, where I taught until 2002. I have written two books, one with legal historian Jane Larson, Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex, (Oxford, 1998) and one myself, A Woman’s Guide to Law School (Viking/Penguin 1999), as well as many articles, scholarly and popular.

I have had two husbands, including the present one, a biological daughter and two stepdaughters and one standard poodle, Alexis de Tocqueville. The three daughters have, among them, four graduate degrees and three jobs.