How Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Gloria Steinem Fought For Your Right to Get a Beer

Mallory O'Meara on a Surprising Gender Discrimination Case

October 19, 2021

Many of us are familiar with the second wave of feminism's fights for birth control, abortion and equal pay, but you may be unfamiliar with something else activists battled for during the 1960s and 70s: the bar stool.

During the 1960s, gender discrimination was a widely accepted feature of the bar. It was ubiquitous, like cheap beer and little bowls of salty snacks. Depending on the state, women were only allowed into bars at certain times, or only with male escorts, or sometimes, not at all. There were states where women couldn't work in bars, even if they owned them.

The 1948 Supreme Court case of Goesaert v. Cleary upheld a Michigan law which prohibited women from bartending in all cities that had a population of 50,000 or more, unless their father or husband owned the establishment. The plaintiff in the case, Valentine Goesaert, owned a bar in Dearborn. She wanted to be able to bartend in her own goddamn bar and she wanted her female staff to be able to, as well. But Goesaert lost the case, because the court ruled that, since bartending could lead to "moral and social problems" for women, Michigan (and any other state) had the power to prohibit them from being bartenders.

Sound like bullshit? It is, of course. Unfortunately, it's bullshit that predates bars themselves.

At the time Goesaert v. Cleary was being decided, gendered drinking discrimination had been around for over a thousand years. Since the days of Babylon, in cultures all over the world, women were not allowed to drink in public, or at all. In the early days of Rome, women could be put to death if they were found drinking.

>>> This ancient sexism also masked itself with concern for "moral and social problems". In the code of Hammurabi—the legal document that essentially established the patriarchy— it was written that "godly" women could not drink. It came from the male fear that women would act like people, instead of like property. The code of Hammurabi set in stone that women and their reproductive rights were the property of men, either fathers or husbands. If a woman went off to party and drink, she might have a fling that resulted in the loss of her virginity, a direct financial blow to her husband or father. It wasn't about morals. It was about control.

So, public drinking culture, with some exceptions, developed over the centuries as a mostly male space. By the time bars as we know them today started popping up in America, "women shouldn't drink in public" was an accepted social rule, just like "everyone should wear clothes."

Until one December evening in 1967.

On that night in Syracuse, New York, a journalism student named Joan Kennedy had just finished Christmas shopping with her mother, and the two women decided to go into the bar at the Hotel Syracuse. The bar, named The Rainbow Lounge, denied them entry on the grounds that they were without male escorts. Kennedy was furious.

Soon afterwards, she approached Karen DeCrow, who was then a law student active in the brand spanking new chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in Syracuse.

At first, NOW had a lot of internal disagreement about whether it should be a priority for the organization to make the barstool a battleground for the women's rights movement. Equal pay seemed to be a lofty pursuit, but was having a beer in public just as lofty? Lots of members didn't think so.

DeCrow, however, did.

It seems trivial, being able to drink in a bar. But since the earliest days of civilization, the public watering hole was crucial to popular culture, to professional partnerships, to the creation of neighborly bonds, the maintenance of community, and the dissemination of news and local knowledge. A lot of important stuff happened at the tavern and the bar, a place where women were unwelcome.

DeCrow argued that going to a bar was a symbol of being a free person and a way to get women integrated into the workplace. She thought it was crucial for women to be able to leave the home and hang out in the public sphere, where networking and business meetings happened. Since so many states, cities and towns allowed discrimination behind the bar as well, it also kept a lot of women out of a potential job. In 1964, twenty-six states still prohibited women from bartending.

The rest of NOW eventually agreed with DeCrow, and then she launched a plan.

NOW activists traveled from all around the country to participate in a sit-in that she organized at The Rainbow Lounge. Unfortunately, the hotel was ready for them. The owners had taken precautionary measures—right before the protesters arrived, the hotel staff changed the numbers on the occupancy limit sign in the bar from 110 to 6. To top it off, they removed the seats from all the bar stools. It didn't deter the NOW protesters, though. Afterwards, DeCrow issued a lawsuit against the Hotel Syracuse.

The next year, after a few more sit-ins, DeCrow brought the issue of gendered bar discrimination to the 1968 NOW Convention in New York City. The convention was held at the Biltmore Hotel, which was perfect for the point DeCrow was trying to make: the hotel had a men-only bar.

In February of the following year, DeCrow organized "Public Accommodations Week" with other members of NOW. Part of the week of activism and protests involved "drink-ins" at men-only bars across the entire country. At the Plaza Hotel's Oak Room in New York City, Betty Friedan's party of three was refused service by the bartender.

McSorley's, a bar in Manhattan, had never served a woman in all 115 years of its existence. The bar sported a sign on its front door proclaiming, "No Back Room In Here For Ladies." The owners were proud that they had "thrived for over a century on good ale, raw onions and no women."

For DeCrow's drink-in that week, she marched into the stinky atmosphere of McSorley's with a group of fellow NOW members. The women were ignored by the bartenders and when one man tried to buy drinks for all of them, an angry crowd of men grabbed him and quite literally threw him out the door.

By the next year, NOW's protests and drink-ins had finally paid off. In 1970, New York City law eliminated gender discrimination in all public places. Some bars refused to comply with the law and had to be forced to let women in. Some bars welcomed their new customers. Some tried to turn the whole affair into a publicity stunt, such as Berghoff's, who publicly invited Gloria Steinem (and a whole bunch of media) to come and have a drink.

In 1976, the Goesaert v. Cleary decision was overturned by another discrimination case. Craig v. Boren started in Oklahoma, where 3.2 percent ABV beer was available for purchase by women at the age of eighteen, but not by men until the age of twenty-one. This was a holdover from the practice of women buying beer to bring home for their families. The thinking was that women needed to be able to bring home beer for their husbands and families to drink, but men only bought beer for themselves to drink. A 20-year-old man named Curtis Craig and a female liquor store owner named Carolyn Whitener agreed that the law needed to be changed. The two teamed up to challenge it in court.

The lawsuit was in rough shape until a brilliant legal counsel at the Women's Rights Project at the ACLU offered some assistance. It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, future Supreme Court justice herself. She wrote to the lawyer on the case, saying that she was "delighted to see the Supreme Court is interested in beer drinkers."

With Ginsburg's help, the case was argued successfully. The Supreme Court ruled that the Oklahoma law made unconstitutional gender classifications. With this ruling, a new standard for review in gender discrimination cases was set and Goesaert v. Cleary was overruled.

Next time you have a beer, raise your glass to Karen DeCrow, second wave feminists, and RBG.

Meet Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's groundbreaking 1st female conductor

Nathalie Stutzmann shared her journey of realizing a childhood dream to become just the second woman to lead a major U.S. orchestra.

Scott Stump/ NBC Today/ Oct. 18, 2021

A dream that began as a child is now a groundbreaking reality for Nathalie Stutzmann after she was named the first female music director in the 77-year history of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

The 56-year-old native of France spoke with Jenna Bush Hager on TODAY Monday about becoming just the second woman to be selected as music director of a top-tier U.S. orchestra. Stutzmann conducted her debut concert last week.

"Oh my gosh, I have no words," she said. "It was so moving, and the welcome of the audience, which I met actually yesterday night for the first time, was just amazing."

Stutzmann is the only woman to currently lead a major U.S. orchestra, following in the footsteps of Marin Alsop, 64, who was named music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007. Alsop was the first woman to hold the position at a major U.S. orchestra, and she concluded her historic 14-year tenure this year.

Stutzmann's ascension to leading the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is the culmination of a dream she had as a young girl.

"I very much remember, I must have been 7 or 8, and I was in the orchestra pit and I watched the conductor," she said. "And when he was taking his baton I thought he was Mickey Mouse in 'Fantasia,' because he was taking this baton and he was doing this.

"And the sound was coming there. For me, I couldn't explain. I said, 'How is it possible that this guy does this?' And I say this guy, because it always was a guy. So I was dreaming to have a baton in my hands. And I must tell you, I have been conducting in my heart, in my soul, all through my life."

Stutzmann is the daughter of two opera singers and studied music in school. When she was repeatedly passed over as a conductor in favor of men, she became a celebrated contralto (the lowest range of a classical female singing voice) while still harboring aspirations of breaking through as a conductor.

"It was so frustrating," she said. "It was so sad for me that after a couple of months it was clear to me that at that time, as a woman, forget it, because you will never make it (as a conductor)."

She performed as a contralto in some of the world's most prestigious opera houses while studying the maestros in the pit.

"I sang with all the greatest conductors in the greatest orchestras of the world, but I think my conducting dream was always there," she said.

"But of course, I was enjoying to watch all the greatest maestros and no young conductor can have a better teaching course than so many years of music making with the greatest people."

When she decided to pursue a career as a conductor, she not only had to overcome skepticism of a singer making the transition, but also being the rare woman on the podium

"I must admit that I spent many nights coming back to my hotel in tears, and thinking the next day I stop," she said. "Because if conducting is this, if I'm going to be treated so bad, I will stop. And the next morning I was going up again."

Stutuzmann described what has been so magnetic to her over the years about being a conductor.

"I must say, it's probably the most addictive thing on Earth," she said. "Everything you do with your body language, with your eyes, with what you ask to the musicians, has an impact on the sound.

>>> "And when you feel 100 people at the edge of your hands, of your body, of your soul, and everyone going in the same direction, it's like when the birds are flying for the migration, and you are amazed to see them all flying in the same direction. It's completely impossible to understand how it works. This is the same feeling. It's heaven."

Now that she has reached a historic milestone, she takes pride in knowing she is helping pave the way for more women to conduct major U.S. orchestras.

"I dreamed about it, and it's like that," she said. "Now it feels really natural to me.

"When I'm on the podium I feel this is where I should be. And this is a very special feeling."

This was too funny not to share, so I took a bunch of screen shots of it: