photo © ACLU
“Dissent is patriotic.”
—LENORA LAPIDUS, former director, Women’s Rights Project, ACLU
Lenora Lapidus was a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). For the past eighteen years she’s led its Women’s Rights Project, an initiative that was cofounded by US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1972 to equalize women’s rights under the US Constitution.
On May 5, 2019, at four-thirty in the morning, Lenora died from her fourteen-year battle with metastatic breast cancer. She was fifty-five years old. In addition to mourning her loss, I was distressed that I hadn’t had a chance to interview her for my book. But then I thought, who better than her daughter to provide insight, stories, and experiences about her mother? I contacted Lenora’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Isabel, who goes by Izzy. Since Lenora was a long-time Facebook friend of mine, it was not difficult to find Izzy online. I sent her a message requesting an interview, and we met one afternoon after school let out. Izzy is a senior at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, the famous high school featured in the 1980 popular film, Fame.
Izzy is already seated at Lincoln Center’s Prelude Café, just two blocks away from her school, when I arrive. She closes her laptop when she sees me walk in and tucks it into her schoolbag. She’s a pretty young woman with bright blue eyes and long, wavy, blondish-brown hair. The powder-blue sweater she is wearing augments her eyes. Her mother had dark brown hair and eyes, but as soon as Izzy smiles, it’s as if her mother were here in the room with us. It is the same smile: bright, warm, and welcoming.
I’d met Izzy three years earlier when Lenora and her husband, Matthew Bialer, brought her to Women’s eNews’s 21 Leaders for the 21st Century awards gala in New York City where Lenora served as one of our 2016 honorees. It was the first gala I’d hosted, and Lenora was honored for her activism for women’s rights. As an attorney, she had worked at the ACLU for close to two decades, where she challenged and fought for the protection of women, even taking on major corporations in the highest court in the land, the US Supreme Court.
One such case involved an issue close to Lenora’s heart—and her health. She worked with the ACLU to join forces with the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) to challenge Myriad Genetics, a major biotech company that was monopolizing the testing of mutations in genes that could increase risk for ovarian and breast cancer. Although the ACLU originally expressed concern that joining this case could impede future scientific research on other issues that impact women’s health, Lenora took a stand. She believed the ACLU had an obligation to halt efforts to impede treatment for these two diseases. Furthermore, she argued, Myriad Genetics’ monopoly was stifling research and increasing the cost of the test. The ACLU was ultimately convinced, and proceeded to file a lawsuit against Myriad Genetics in 2009. Four years later, the US Supreme Court also agreed with this assessment, marked by a unanimous decision in 2013. A photo of Lenora at the Supreme Court remains on her Facebook page. Her comment reads: “Here I am at the Supreme Court! Almost time for our argument in AMP v Myriad Genetics, challenging patents on the BRCA genes, which are associated with breast and ovarian cancer. Fingers crossed the Court will find the patents invalid!”
Other major cases Lenora took on, and won, included those defending female victims of domestic violence. In one case, brought on behalf of Tiffani Alvera, a woman who was evicted from her home in Seaside, Oregon, Lenora argued in court that applying “zero-tolerance against violence” policies to victims of domestic abuse is discriminatory because more domestic violence victims are women. Alvera had notified her landlord of the restraining order she had obtained against her husband after being assaulted by him in her apartment, and the landlord’s response was to deliver an eviction notice two days later citing a “zero-tolerance policy” against violence. A settlement was soon reached, requiring the landlord to pay Alvera compensatory damages and agreeing to not evict or discriminate against tenants for being victims of violence.
In another case arguing for victims of violence, Lenahan v. United States, Lenora won a decision from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, declaring that the US violated international human rights law for failing to respond adequately to gender-based violence.
As I sit opposite Izzy, I am amazed by the perpetual twinkle in her eye and the constant smile on her face. Yes, this is a teenager who lost her mom just six months ago, but it’s clear that her mother had given Izzy so much confidence and hope.
“At home she was my biggest cheerleader,” Izzy says about her mom. “I knew that when she wasn’t at home, she was changing the world, but when she was with me, it wasn’t about her at all. She was very subtle and modest about her work. I believe I came into my own at an early age because I was always supported to be who I wanted to be, rather than what she wanted me to be.” Citing an example, Izzy recalls a story about her mom taking her to the monkey bars every day after school. “Although she wanted me to get all the way across those monkey bars, she would just stand back and watch. She knew I had to do it on my own. She helped me learn all that I am capable of, and now I don’t stop at anything until I complete it.”
Izzy then tells me that her mom’s battle with breast cancer had been a constant throughout Izzy’s life, and that she always had an understanding that her mom wasn’t going to be there forever. The day before her mom passed, when it was clear that she was near the end, Izzy was walking in a park with two close friends. “I remember saying something about my mother not having to be there to know how successful I will be in the future. She already saw that the person I will be is the person I already am.”
At her mother’s memorial service, Izzy read a tribute to her mom. It appears as part of a collage of photos of Lenora with Izzy on Izzy’s Facebook page. It reads:
“One of the many gifts my mother gave me was strength. She taught me how to look pain in the face and breathe through it; to feel and accept it rather than run away from it. She taught me that life would not be filled with people handing me whatever I wished for, and in order to get what I wanted, I had to fight. From a young age, she instilled the idea into me that I can achieve anything I want if I just try hard enough.”
One of the photos in the collage also shows Lenora and Izzy at the Women’s March in January 2017 in Washington, DC., holding up signs that read: DISSENT IS PATRIOTIC and WE THE PEOPLE, both featuring the ACLU logo.
I reminisced with Izzy about some of my own memories of her mother’s kindness and thoughtfulness. When a mass email was sent out to Women’s eNews’s subscription list announcing my role as its new Executive Director in July 2016, Lenora was one of the first to respond. When I first invited her to be a guest on our radio show, Women’s eNews Live, in June 2018, she couldn’t appear because she was already scheduled to testify before the New York Department of Labor in support of One Fair Wage, which would eliminate the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. “I’m sorry I can’t appear,” she wrote to me in an email. “I hope you are well.”
Not long after, when she finally had a Wednesday morning available to appear on my radio show, she eagerly welcomed it. “I want to talk about the various factors that contribute to the gender wage gap, and legislative initiatives—at the state and federal level—that are being introduced,” she wrote to me in advance of the interview. “These factors include lower wages, lack of transparency, salary history, occupational segregation, pregnancy discrimination, and lack of paid family leave,” she continued. “I can also discuss our current litigation, particularly challenging pregnancy discrimination—and employers’ lack of accommodations for pregnant or breastfeeding women, using anti-discrimination laws that already exist. How does that sound?” I told her it sounded great.
In the 2017 film, Equal Means Equal, a documentary exploring the need for the Equal Rights Amendment to be added to the US Constitution, Lenora and I were both among a number of women interviewed about the challenges women face in the quest for true equality. “The workforce is designed around the normative view of the worker as being a man who is married and has a wife at home who can take care of the family without that man needing to have any family responsibilities, and that notion really needs to change,” Lenora says in the film. “It is important that, if we are really striving for equality, we need to open up the workforce to enable women to have an equal role, and to make family care and family responsibility more attainable for men and fathers who want to play that role.”
Unlike her mom, Izzy, who is in the midst of applying to college, is not currently interested in becoming an attorney. “I am fascinated by astronomy,” she tells me, her eyes widening. “I recently did an internship at The Museum of Natural History.” Yet, just like her mom, she plans to transform this passion into helping other girls. “I want to use my interest in astronomy to further STEM education for girls. In fact, I am currently working on my first astronomy startup called Reach Up,” she tells me. “I want to inspire children about space and am already planning to host a workshop at my former elementary school in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on STEM Day at the end of January next year. My interest in helping girls in STEM is because of my mom.”
Lenora’s lasting impression on women and girls has gone far beyond her immediate family, as evidenced in the accolades and tributes published and posted everywhere, from social media to the mainstream media. In The New York Times, a tribute appeared a few days after her passing featuring a photo of Lenora seated at her desk at the ACLU. On the outside of the front door hangs a large yellow poster with the words: BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS. FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE. Inside her office, on a bookshelf, stands another sign: LOVE TRUMPS HATE, just below a framed photo of her husband and daughter hugging. Below The New York Times photo is a quote from a colleague, referring to Lenora: “From custodians to nail salon workers to women in combat roles, she understood that the women’s movement needed to be broader than the focus on white-collar professional women.”
The ACLU has officially honored Lenora by naming its law library after her. On the outside wall, a square brass plaque hangs below a black-and-white head shot of Lenora, smiling brightly. It reads: “A courageous leader for women’s rights, advocate for social justice, champion of human rights, and dedicated colleague, friend, and mentor. We salute her strength, wisdom, and optimism, against all odds.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg sent the following personal message to her family: “I was so pleased and proud of the great work Lenora did at the helm of the Women’s Rights Project. Her wise head and steady hand guided the project just as I hoped it would. Her bravery these past years was inspirational. May all to whom she was dear carry on in life in good health, just as she would have willed.”
After I got home from my interview with Izzy, I logged onto Lenora’s Facebook page and read a post that says: “Remembering Lenora Lapidus. We hope people who love Lenora will find comfort in visiting her profile to remember and celebrate her life.” There’s a recent photo of Izzy, her boyfriend, and her father. The caption reads: “This is the birthday weekend of Lenora Lapidus. Months ago, she purchased tickets for To Kill a Mockingbird, which she was eager to see. And so we went. And she would have loved it. Izzy’s boyfriend, Nico, went with us in her place.”
Yes, I nodded in agreement, she would have loved it.