Edie Windsor

Hillary and Chelsea

Chelsea

Edie Windsor didn’t set out to change the course of American history. Born in 1929, she grew up at a time when a woman was generally expected to settle down, get married, and let her husband support her. Instead, at twenty-three years old, Edie was divorced, living on her own in New York City, and supporting herself. But Edie didn’t let that stop her. She got her master’s degree in math and became a computer programmer at IBM in the 1950s and ’60s, when women were still very much in the minority across the company. The photos from the time show Edie looking determined, standing in front of a computer the size of a room; or sitting behind a desk, in charge, and clearly loving it. When Maya Angelou declared, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it, possibly without claiming it, she stands up for all women,” she could have been describing Edie.

While Edie was making history in her professional life, she was also in the process of making history in her personal life. In 1963, she met a graduate student named Thea Spyer, and the two danced all night. Over the next two years, they fell in love. Before Stonewall, before Pride parades, before two women could legally marry anywhere in the world, their devotion to each other was its own quiet, revolutionary act. They loved each other through good times and hard times—including the hardest time of all, Thea’s diagnosis of progressive multiple sclerosis. For decades, Edie gladly took care of Thea.

After being told in 2007 that Thea had no longer than a year to live, they flew to Canada and were legally married. When Thea died two years later, Edie was overcome with grief. That grief was compounded by the realization that she owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes she wouldn’t have had to pay if she had been married to a man—as Edie used to say, “if Thea had been Theo.” She knew she had two choices: Accept this painful injustice or fight back. She chose to fight, all the way to the highest court in the land. With her brilliant lawyer, Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, by her side, they made the case for her marriage, indeed the case for equality, forcefully and poignantly.

Hillary

Through it all, Edie’s strength never wavered, though she did confess to one moment of panic: the day she saw her name in print as “United States v. Windsor.” It’s only fitting to know that’s how she will be immortalized in history books, in a landmark decision synonymous with equal rights and dignity under the law.

Edie’s battle affirmed the fact that progress—especially in a vibrant pluralistic society like America—takes a whole lot of persistence. True to form, after Edie won her fight, she didn’t quit. She kept on fighting for others. She mentored and supported women in technology. She assiduously corrected misinformation about MS, because she couldn’t stand the thought of causing more fear and uncertainty for anyone living with the disease, or for their loved ones. She was a source of inspiration and friendship for Jim Obergefell, who later brought his own case to the Supreme Court, which made marriage equality the law of the land in every state. The LGBTQ community had given Edie the strength to live her truth, and she dedicated her life to paying it forward.

Chelsea

I’ll never forget joining advocates back in 2011 during the ultimately successful fight to pass marriage equality in New York; we had failed to pass it in 2009. Marc and I had gotten married in 2010, and it was the happiest day of my life to be able to marry my best friend. It also renewed my commitment to marriage equality. It seemed obvious that every New Yorker—every American—should have the same right I had. I was very proud in 2013 when the Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional. My father had signed DOMA in 1996. It never should have become law and I will always be grateful to Edie for helping ensure it didn’t stay law.

Edie felt strongly that as necessary as it was, marriage was just the beginning—and she was right. She talked often about how wrong it was that LGBTQ Americans in many parts of the country can be married on Saturday, evicted from their home on Sunday, and fired on Monday simply because of who they are. She also spoke out about laws passed at the state level that treated LGBTQ Americans as second-class citizens; about LGBTQ youth homelessness; about the cruel and inhumane practice of so-called conversion therapy, which is child abuse by another name; and about the crisis of violence against the transgender community—especially transgender women of color. “It’s been the joy of a lifetime to see the world change for the better for LGBT Americans before my very eyes,” she said. “But even though I’m not so young anymore, I’m not willing to stop fighting.”

Hillary

It was hard to say goodbye to Edie in 2017, but she left us with so much. She pushed us all to be better, stand taller, dream bigger. She didn’t just want us to say the right thing, she wanted us to do the right thing. She embodied the words of Mary Oliver: “There is nothing more pathetic than caution / when headlong might save a life, / even, possibly, your own.” Edie did everything headlong, including fall in love again—something even she never thought was possible, until she met her second wife, Judith Kasen-Windsor.

Because of Edie, people came out, marched in their first Pride parade, married the love of their life. Women followed in her footsteps in science, technology, engineering, and math, shattering stereotypes and breaking barriers of their own. Advocates and activists watched her stand up to injustice and found renewed determination to wage their own battles. After she died, people took to social media to share their favorite memories—everyone from friends to fans to a fact-checker who once worked on a profile of her. (All hail the fact-checkers!) One man told the story of running up to Edie at the Container Store on Sixth Avenue, with a little encouragement from his then boyfriend, now fiancé. He thanked her and told her that she and Thea had changed his life. Edie grabbed his arm, winked, and said, “Don’t thank me. Just get married. It’s the most magical feeling to wake up married.”

The magic of Edie Windsor was simple but powerful: She had a fierce belief in the value of being true to yourself. Whether she was reminding friends of her and Thea’s credo, “Don’t postpone joy,” or standing before the Supreme Court, Edie Windsor was always exactly herself and no less. When her lawyer, Robbie, asked her to make fewer references to her love life with Thea in order to make herself more palatable to the Supreme Court, Edie reluctantly agreed, on one condition: that their deal expire the moment the case was over. (And, as Robbie tells it, expire it did.) In her final days at a hospital in Manhattan, Edie still insisted on having her nails manicured and hair set, even if the only visitors she saw that day were her nurse and her wife.

Edie was brave, endlessly determined, the kind of person you always want in your corner. It meant the world to me to have her support in my campaign. During some of the toughest days of the election—and the days that followed—I thought about Edie and her long struggle. I thought about how she never got discouraged. How she experienced loss, grief, and injustice, but how that only made her more generous, more openhearted, and more fearless in her fight. She refused to give up on the promise of America, and she refused to shrink any part of herself in order to fit into the America she dreamed of. Through determination and sheer force of will, and by being the most honest version of herself that she could imagine, she brought us one step closer to that more perfect union.