February 8, 2016 • 52 mins
Pauli Murray is greatest intersectional trailblazer - and saint - you've never heard of. Cristen and Caroline marvel at the life, love and genius of this queer, African-American civil rights lawyer decades ahead of her time who legally shaped the civil rights and feminist movements and earned an historic Episcopal priesthood.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you from how stupp
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Christen and I'm Caroline. And Caroline, I'm so excited to
talk about the woman we're going to talk about today.
(00:23):
Me too. She has been on my mind all week,
ever since we started reading about her. I can't get
her out of my head. That just made me start
thinking of that Kylie Minogue song. But yes, you're right,
I know I can't stop thinking about her either. And
Polly Murray, who is this incredible trail blazer. But what's
(00:45):
so fascinating and heartbreaking and impressive all at the same
time about her story is that she managed to accomplish
so much in in a single lifetime and push against
standard and norms of her day. But she did it
all from this almost personal place, this drive that comes
(01:07):
from how she was raised, the environment she grew up in,
and the discrimination that she herself faced. Yeah, and I
first ran across her name, probably a few years ago now,
where she was simply cited as the first African American
episcopal priest. And when I saw the photo in the caption,
(01:29):
and I thought, oh, that seems really neat okay, and
then sort of put her out of my mind, And
then much more recently ran across an article talking about
this entire life that she had before she entered the
episcopal priesthood. And while her story doesn't begin in nineteen one,
I feel like that's a good place for us to
(01:50):
sort of kick off our conversation about her and her
life and her significance because she has a very close,
uh legal street bond to one of our faith's Ruth
bader Ginsburg. Yeah, and this is an excellent example of
a woman paying tribute and giving credit to one of
(02:12):
her predecessors, not just taking this woman's ideas and using
them as her own, but really giving credit where credits due.
So well in the story also highlights to the disparity
between and Polly Murray's forgotten legacy and the an understandable
notoriety of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, partially due to her, you know,
(02:35):
being a Supreme Court justice. But in nineteen seventy one,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues on behalf of the A c.
L U, a landmark equal protection case Read v. Read.
And the quick background of this case was that, uh,
this couple that really wasn't together anymore. I think they
(02:56):
were estranged. Their adopted son died, and the father, according
to an Idaho state statute maintaining that males must be
preferred to females as administrators of the states, was automatically
granted their deceased son's estate. But Mrs Reed in this case,
(03:19):
UM wanted rights to the estate, and so they brought
this equal protection case UM that ended up going all
the way to the Supreme Court. And it was the
very first time that the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause
had been used to argue gender discrimination as unconstitutional as
(03:41):
opposed to racial discrimination. And so this whole case at
a legal precedent against gender discrimination purely out of administrative convenience.
So in this Idaho case, just being like, you know what,
We're just going to give it to the dudes. They
can have the rights, and we just don't even have
to worry about this right. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who
(04:02):
at the time was an a c l U volunteer attorney,
in her legal brief, named two co authors who actually
didn't play a direct role in the case, and those
were Judge Dorothy Kenyon and the topic of today's episode,
and Polly Murray, who's Jane Crow, and the law legal
theory in the nineteen sixties pioneered this whole idea of
(04:25):
the equal Protection Clause applying to sex discrimination in the
same way as raised discrimination. And so Murray's entire motivation
for Jane Crow, which will get into more, is the
idea that it would not only protect black women hence
(04:45):
the Jane Crow that is, the you know, feminized version
of Jim Crow, but lift everybody up by bridging the
gap between civil rights and the women's movement. And if
that sounds a lot like intersectionality, it is, I mean
in so many ways, and Polly Murray is the godmother
(05:05):
of intersectionality. And also if this sounds a lot like
Ruth Bader Ginsburg paying symbolic homage to amazing women, which
other guys who had relied on that legal theory of
Murray's as well in the past did not do, um,
it totally is. And it just makes me love Notorious
RBG even more. Yeah, well, so we need to now
(05:28):
dive into Polly's story. Yes, her name is Anne Paulina Murray,
but she opted together by the name Polly, So let's
dive into her complex and multifaceted past. So to kick
things off, why don't we reference her own description of herself,
which kind of gets at the internal struggles that drove
(05:51):
her public work. So, for instance, in a nineteen sixty
seven letter to the National Organization of Women, she wrote,
I hold the staff of multiple minorities. I can't allow
myself to be fragmented into negro at one time, woman
at another, or worker at another. I must find a
unifying principle in all of these movements to which I
(06:15):
can adhere. So from that we can hear that struggle
that she really wrestled with her entire life between all
of these identities and intersections that she embodied. She's African American,
she's a woman, she's a gender questioning person who is
(06:36):
attracted to women. Um she has experiences in poverty and
income instability. Um so. And she even in her younger years,
she gave names to her various identities of sorts. Yeah,
she had the crusader, the imp, and the dude, not
to mention the priest, which is an identity that came later.
(06:59):
But I mean, also, this is a woman who's an
incredible legal scholar. She's a feminist, a poet, a workers
rights activist, which her political leanings and her work for
labor rights actually tripped her up politically later in her
life a little bit. And of course, you know the
whole priest thing. She became an episcopal saint in she's
(07:20):
a saint. She's a saint. The more I've found out
about her, the more astonished and kind of upset I
got that I was only just now learning about her, right,
And I mean that's in a lot of the that
sentiment is in a lot of the articles that you
will read about Polly these days, because there is this
(07:41):
attitude of like, where have you been my whole life?
And she's always been there. She always was there, but
her legacy has for so long just been buried and
kind of forgotten. And so it's it's now that we're
starting to see more attention paid to just how important
she is to this country legal history. Well, and I
(08:01):
think that we are starting to recognize her more because
our society has finally caught up to up to her exactly. Yeah,
I mean, but in the meantime, while she was alive,
she was trailblazing left and right, I mean, stood aside,
she was the first woman of color to serve as
California's Deputy Attorney General. She was the first African American
(08:26):
to earn a doctorate from Yale, and the first black
female episcopal priest. So, I mean, we just talked about
how she's been sort of sidelined from history, and that
question of why comes up a lot in any kind
of scholarly writing about her, and clearly, as we'll explain more,
(08:49):
there is the issue of society just you know, being
too slow. I mean, she was a woman in so
many ways ahead of her time, but it was also
because she wasn't satisfied with only fighting for civil rights
or women's rights or labor rights. She wanted to bridge
all of the gaps. Yeah, well, she wanted to bridge
all of the gaps because they were all aspects of her.
(09:11):
I mean, she, like Kristen has said, really struggled early
on with bits and pieces of her identity which society
was telling her either weren't right or they were at
odds with each other. You know, she wrote in her autobiography,
in a world of black white opposites, I had no
place being neither very dark nor very fair. I was
(09:33):
a nobody without identity, so let's look at her childhood.
She was born in nineteen ten in Baltimore as Anna Paulina.
She was the fourth of six children to mother Agnes
Fitzgerald and father William Murray, but she was orphaned very early.
Her mom died when she was four, and at twelve,
her father was actually murdered by a guard at the
(09:55):
Crownsville State Hospital where he was a patient undergoing treatment
from major depression. Not after her mother died when she
was four, she was sent from Baltimore to Durham, North Carolina,
where she was raised largely by her maternal grandparents, who
encouraged her to be as educated and as exemplary as
(10:17):
possible for both racial and familial uplift. I mean, this
is a family of middle class African Americans living in
the Jim Crow South um, so that's where the idea
and the need for that racial uplift comes from. And
in terms of familial uplift, her maternal grandmother, who was
(10:41):
helping raise her Cornelia, was born a slave, and Cornelia's
mother was also a slave who was raped by her
white slave owner. So her grandmother was actually raised by
both her paternal aunt and owner right, and so that
(11:02):
side of the family tree is something that Polly really
struggles with in her autobiography, where she talks a lot
about the genealogical process of going back through a family
history and how it puts so much of herself and
her family into the context of the time. She really
had to come face to face with those ugly facts
that she talks about how a lot of African American
(11:23):
families at the time weren't willing or ready or very
eager to sort of dive back into that's that's an
open wound, it's a lot of pain. And so she
talks about how she had to come face to face
to that with that because just as she had been
so proud and ready to accept the branch of the
family tree that we're freedman her one of her grandfather's,
for instance, was emancipated and then fought for the union. Yeah,
(11:48):
and she had a really strong attachment to her grandparents um,
but tragically, again it was like she was orphaned a
second time because both of her grandparents by the time
she was thirteen, and she kind of considered that the
end of her childhood. I mean, Polly grew up very fast.
(12:08):
It seems like, well, she went to live with her aunt,
who was her namesake, and this is the aunt who
she credits so much. Yes, she found so much inspiration
in her all of her grandparents and great grandparents, but
it was her aunt who she says, really encouraged her
to be herself and be sort of fulfill her destiny
(12:29):
as the amazing child that she was. Yeah, And the
first step along the way to fulfilling her destiny and
she really did have a sense of destiny, was attending
Hunter College. So she heads up to New York in
nine and she graduates in nineteen thirty three, and college
is incredibly difficult for her financially. I mean, she's struggling
(12:53):
to make ends meet to the point that she suffers
malnutrition and like the illness that she and during college
because she's so poor and can't feed herself very well.
I mean, it kind of haunts her for the rest
of her life. It leaves her rather frail, although you
would not know it by the legacy that she leaves
behind um. But after graduation, she finally finds some teaching
(13:16):
work with the Works Progress Administration and as an activist
for the Workers Defense League. But it's this whole time
that she's also questioning both her gender identity and her
sexual orientation. She really struggled with feeling like she was
a man trapped in a woman's body her words, but
(13:38):
also struggling with this attraction to feminine women. She wrote
to her doctors saying, I've got to find a solution,
like I don't know why I feel this attraction, because
you've also got to keep in mind at the time
that being gay was considered a psychiatric disorder. Yeah, and
(13:59):
in a no to her doctor that she wrote in seven,
she said, why do I desire monogamous married life as
a completion? Because she's you know, she's struggling with her
same sex attraction to women, but at the same time,
because of that desire to succeed professionally but also have
(14:22):
the quote unquote normal family life was something that was
also very much ingrained in her and very important to her.
Clearly a point of personal conflict for her, and I
think it's important as um. There was one academic we're
reading who pointed out that while today she might have
(14:44):
identified as transgender or a lesbian, she never labeled herself
as such back then. I mean, well, for one, reason
the term transgender didn't even exist in the nineteen thirties. UM.
But she she knew that something was up and she
really wanted a biological explanation for it. UM. In her
(15:05):
twenties and thirties, she was really enamored with new research
on hormones and glands and part of why she was
so compelled. UM and and even at one point requested
an exploratory surgery to see if she had a male
genitalia like secreted inside of her. As she put it,
(15:27):
was because of the specter of mental illness within her family.
I mean you have like you mentioned, Caroline, at the time,
homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder and that was terrifying
for her, considering how her dad was murdered when he
was in a psychiatric hospital, and there had been other
mental health issues in her family. Yeah, and so she
(15:49):
did seek both psychiatric and hormonal treatment, but doctors refused
to give her male hormones, simply telling her to conform
to female expectations. U. UM, that doesn't mean she didn't experiment.
She there's lots of pictures of her, and she talks
about how she explored gender identity and presentation particularly in
(16:10):
her younger years in her twenties and thirties, by wearing
men's clothing. And this is around the time when she
also opts to start going by the name Polly instead
of Anne. Yeah. And if we look back at her
one autobiographical photo album, The Life and Times of an
American called Polly Murray, Um, the image of the dude
(16:33):
is clearly the uh, the identity within her that's questioning
gender and what it means and how it applies to her.
And she in one of the photos she has sort
of she has men's clothes on and a men's style,
hey do um. But you can see as she goes
(16:57):
to law school and her legal career picks up in
public profile increases, you see her dressed in more traditionally
feminine ways. Yeah. I think there there's one picture that
we saw of her, was it from law school or after?
Where it's one of those like very old school, you know,
from the side kind of pictures where she's looking off
(17:17):
into the distance and the caption on the back of
the photo was first and last up swept hair do
So I mean, I you know, she kind of like
those doctors when she was in her twenties and thirties, said,
you know, they told her to conform to female expectations.
I think she did feel like she had to for
a lot of her early public presentation and persona. You know,
(17:40):
you you see her exclusively in dresses in those early years,
especially like in pictures where she's with Betty for Dan
in a picture with the early founding staff of Now
and in law school, she's wearing all of those dresses
and those hair dues. But as you get old, as
she gets older, I should say, uh, you start to
(18:01):
see her, Oh yeah, this is the woman who said
she prefers pants to dresses. Like, you start to see
hers almost just sort of start to look more like herself. Well,
and there was one anecdote from when she was in
the priesthood of her being delighted that she would sometimes
get mistaken for a guy, partly because she had short,
(18:23):
cropped hair and glasses and she even had rocked a
little lady mustache in her old age, and obviously, like
priestly clothes are gender ambiguous, and being the first female
priests would kind of just expect it to be a guy.
And she was like, oh, I loved it. Yeah, Well,
because yeah. I mean, like you said, transgender wasn't a
(18:44):
term in use yet, but I'm sure it must have
felt great for someone to look at you and identify
you as the way that you and I know, not
that I want to put words in anyone's mouth, but
the way that you have felt inside. Yeah, I'm but
I I well. And I also think it's interesting that
part of her concern over how she felt was not
(19:08):
just her attraction to women and her discomfort in uh
with feminine gendered clothing, but also she felt like her
ambition and drive was also highly masculine, in a sign
that something wasn't entirely right and part of why she
(19:30):
wanted to fight for women's rights because she was like, oh,
I can't this womanhood is is holding me back. Like
I know I'm a woman, but I don't feel like
I I should be because of all of this stuff
that I want to accomplish. Yeah, so many layers to
gender identity. Who's surprised, No, No one well. And she
carried on though open romantic relationships though with a number
(19:54):
of women um and in her later life she forged
a seventeen year relationship with a woman named Irene Barlow
whom she met at a law firm in nineteen fifty
six and it lasted until Barlow's death, and they're buried
under the same headstone in New York. Yeah, yeah, I
think she because I think when Barlow died at the time, UM,
(20:18):
Polly was teaching at brand Ice and she ended up
leaving her position because she was so heartbroken that she
felt like I can't I can't go on. But then
in her posthumously published autobiography Song and a Weary Throat,
there's no mention whatsoever of same sex relationships. So clearly
(20:41):
there are lots of intersections happening within this one person
and in the next phase of her life and career.
Because we're going to get into this is when we
see all of her brain power then being applied to
all of her identities and struggles and how she applied
(21:04):
that to empowering marginalized groups. And we're going to get
into that when we come right back from a quick break.
(21:24):
So there's one big thing that Pauly Murray understood ahead
of her time was now discrimination cuts across identities, um
and and we might take that so for granted today,
but that was a revolutionary concept, not so long ago
um and, speaking to The Washington Post in nineteen seven,
(21:48):
Pouli said, this society is not hospitable to persons of color,
women or left handed people. Ain't that the truth? Congress, Well, listen,
as a lefty, I agree, And well, I do appreciate
her humor. That should not indicate that she was anything
other than deadly serious about the discrimination that she and
(22:08):
others around her were facing. Uh, In, let's let's just
go through basically the history of what she overcame that
ended up contributing to the person that she Well, I
want to say the person that she became, but I mean,
she already was this person, she was this fighter. So
we've got to give this backstory though, so you know
exactly what she went through. She was denied graduate school
(22:32):
admission at u NC Chapel Hill because of her race,
and she knew this was wrong. She knew this was ridiculous.
She knew she was up against a discriminatory machine. So
she launched a letter writing campaign that attracted the attention
and the friendship of one Eleanor Roosevelt, and she actually,
(22:53):
through correspondence with Eleanor, became a personal advisor to her
on civil and human rights issues. Well, the UNC president
at the time knew Murray was qualified enough to gain entrance,
and he even consulted the U. S. Senate on this.
I mean, and this is incredible to me. Already at
(23:13):
this point in her life, she's like, oh, like sounding
the alarm all the way up to the White House. UM.
And later in life though, when UNC Chapel Hill tries
to grant her an honorary degree, Murray says, oh, no,
things stuck to her guns, that woman did. But the
(23:36):
thing is like, that's y eight. I feel like this
sounds like, oh, yeah, of course, something like that must
have happened in the sixties, people pushing back against UH
segregation and racism and discrimination. This is this woman's ahead
of her time. She's also ahead of her time because
in nineteen forty, fifteen years before Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama,
(23:56):
Polly and her lady friend Adeline mcbreen were arrest did
in Virginia for refusing to move to the back of
a Greyhound bus. And so what possibly contributed to this
contentious UH conflict scenario was the fact that she was
actually dressed in men's clothes at the time and Uh,
(24:17):
that could have contributed to antagonizing the police toward her. Yeah,
there was a headline though from the time reporting on
the incident it was Jim crow bus dispute leads to
girls arrest, and the news article describes her as a
honey tongued legal mind. Don't mess with her, I mean,
(24:38):
even then, honeytongue legal mind. In the same year, her
honey tongue legal mind was hired by the Workers Defense
League to pardon a black sharecropper who was convicted of murder,
and she returns to Virginia to raise money and meets
prominent civil rights lawyers, which inspires her to start Howard
(25:00):
Law School with the aspiration of becoming an inn double
a CP lawyer. So she starts law school in n one,
but law school going to Howard, where race is no
longer the discriminatory issue sex discrimination comes to the forefront. Yeah,
it's during this time that she coins that term Jane
(25:22):
Crow to describe her experience of the double race and
sex based discrimination, and one source we read described it
as a theory born from her own struggles with categories
that seem to do violence to Murray's own sense of self.
Sometimes black and white, but far more often men and women.
And she's still active in civil rights protests. It's during
(25:46):
these years at Howard that she also participates in silent
demonstrations and sit ins at a Washington, d c. Cafeteria. Again,
keep in mind, as woman's ahead of her time. It's
the forties. I feel like school children today tend to
think of the civil rights movement as like a sixties thing. Yeah,
And and her graduating thesis from Howard was titled to
(26:07):
the civil Rights cases and PLUSY be overruled. And she's
referring to plus C v. Ferguson the case which upheld
separate but equal, and she's arguing obviously that plus C
should be overturned. This is ten years before Brown versus
the Board of Education case would overturn that separate but
(26:30):
equal clause. But when Polly first suggests this, all the
guys in her class laughed at her. She described it
as hoots of derisive laughter. But Polly would get the
last laugh sort of when Brown v. Board of Education
took place because n Double a CP Chief Counsel third
(26:51):
Good Marshal, used Murray's thesis as a strategic guide to
argue the case But the thing is all of this
was unbeknownst to Murray for years because he never gave
her credit for it. M Like, come on, man, come on,
they're good. We could all stand to learn a little
something from RBG. I know Ruth Bader Ginsburg hashtag shine
(27:14):
theory knows how to attribute. So uh. Polly graduates as
the valedictorian of her Howard University class, naturally, which typically
would have parlayed into a scholarship to get a Masters
in law at Harvard. However, she was not a man. Yeah,
so Harvard Admissions wrote back to Polly saying, quote, your
(27:40):
picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that
you were not of the sex entitled to be admitted
to Harvard Law School. Come on a drag. And and
here's the whole Jane Crow thing too coming into play,
because she writes about how her male civil rights comrade
(28:00):
really sympathized with her race based U n C rejection
years earlier, but when it came to her being rejected
by Harvard, they were simply amused at the idea that
she wanted to go there anyway. So there was none
of that support, that community support rallying around her for
for this particular rejection, it was more of like a oh,
you silly woman. Well, that silly woman decided to take
(28:22):
herself to get her Master's of Law degree at UC
Berkeley instead, and she graduated in and then became the
state's first black Deputy Attorney general. A few years later,
she pens the State's Laws on Race and Colors, which
(28:43):
was a compilation of all race related state level laws.
And this might sound like an insignificant detail. Why are
you telling us about this directory that this woman wrote, essentially, Well,
because yet again she is writing what would essentially become
no own as the Bible of civil rights law. Yeah, exactly.
(29:05):
She had compiled it at the request of the Methodist
Churches Women's Division, which I love. I'm like, who, but
uh so, working very closely with women from a church,
and it just became this critical piece of writing for
a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, and just again
(29:26):
and again and again. She's laying all of this legal foundation,
doing all of this leg work for these you know,
landmark cases and desegregation that will happen many years later. Well, yeah,
I mean she but all of this is driven by
her her personal convictions. I mean, she writes about how
(29:49):
segregation places a badge of inferiority on black children, and
and so it was it was looking into her past,
seeing her own and experiences with discrimination, and and looking
at the community around her that drove her to try
to make this world a better place well, and also
to going back to her family tree, that duality of
(30:12):
blackness and also the violent whiteness that was in there
with um, you know, the rape of her great grandmother Um.
And she spends a lot of time after nineteen fifty one,
she spends four years actually going back to North Carolina
and researching all about her family, and she ends up
(30:36):
publishing sort of like a familial autobiography called Proud Shoes,
The Story of an American Family. And Caroline, I gotta
say this reminded me a lot of you, because genealogy
is a hobby of yours. Oh my god, I know
I've lost so much sleep since the holidays because I've
been on a total family research kick. But did you
(30:56):
feel at least a little bonda to Well? I did.
I did, because um, just her passion for it and
and seeing her give voice to a lot of the
same things that I feel in terms of the importance
of kind of figuring out where you come from, because
it's no small, it's no small and significant thing to
figure out who your people were. She writes, the conviction
(31:19):
grew in me that one of the best ways to
incorporate social and political history into one's experience is to
embark on a search into one's family history. These ancient
documents spoke to me of a common humanity and narrowed
the distances between races, classes, and political positions. And I mean,
this is a woman who had to come to terms
with her multi racial, as she put it, past and origin,
(31:42):
someone who had to embrace both the amazing freedmen in
her tree, but also the slave ancestors who she writes about,
who didn't have They did have a complicated relationship, obviously
with the white people who owned them, But she writes
about having to come to ter terms with the complexities
of realizing that her great grandmother didn't hate these people.
(32:05):
She was quite friendly and intimate with the white women
of that family. So, as you might imagine, it's that
dual heritage that had a huge effect on her and
gave her a strong sense of personal identity. She writes
about it as the tangled roots from which I sprang,
and said she felt it was part of her destiny
(32:26):
to counteract the effects of stereotypes that black people had
played no significant role in US history. And that's what's
so addictive about family research and genealogy. It's it's digging
into the past and realizing that whether you're at the
top of the socioeconomic heap or at the bottom, all
(32:46):
of these people played such an important role in the
foundation of this country. And so that really played a
role in helping her define who she was. Yeah, And
the more she learned about herself often where she came from,
and the more deeply embedded she became in the civil
rights movement, motivated by those tangled roots that she wrote about.
(33:12):
It also fueled her feminism because as we move into
the sixties and seventies, particularly when the black power movement arises,
she becomes really uncomfortable with the power structures that she
sees emerging in it. And for instance, I'm jumping ahead
(33:32):
a little bit, but just to give you a sense
of where we're going. In the nineteen seventy essay, she wrote,
the main thrust of black militancy is a bit of
black males to share power with white males in a
continuing patriarchal society in which both black and white females
are relegated to a secondary status. Yeah, and this is
(33:54):
this is where it's important to remember her push for
um both protect action for both sex and racial discrimination,
because her attitude was that if you protect for both,
then you uplift everyone. Like we mentioned earlier, Yeah, so
if we go back to nineteen sixty one, she's a
(34:16):
big deal. JFK appoints her to the President's Committee on
the Status of Women as well as the Commission on
Civil and Political Rights. And the more immersed she gets
in the civil rights movement, the more she starts to
see and call out sexism within the movement because of
(34:37):
its avoidance of appointing women to visible leadership roles and
tacitly endorsing gender segregation by, for instance, appearing at the
National Press Club, which enraged her because at the time,
the National Press Club excluded women. So she's like, what
are you doing, you'r you can't stay in this one
space that doesn't allow these people in while you're advocating
(34:59):
for were the rights of more people. Yeah, and it's
interesting because you've also got to keep in mind that
there were a lot of civil rights leaders who saw
women's rights as a completely separate issue, which echoes back
to our episodes that we've done on suffrage and black
women in the abolition and suffrage movements, because it was
(35:20):
sort of the other side of the coin back then,
all of these women pushing for suffrage and women's rights
were like black issues are totally separate things, stopped distracting
from the cause. Yeah, I mean, and in a way
like her biography does echo a lot of the women
that we talked about. Um I T. B. Wells comes
to mind of someone straddling both suffrage and abolition and
(35:42):
often being caught at those intersections. Um So, N four
is a pivotal year, not only for Polly but also
for the US because this is when the Civil Rights
Act is enacted, and this is the year her that
she co authors her landmark paper, Jane Crow and the
(36:05):
Law Sex Discrimination, entitled seven, published in the George Washington
Law Review. And this was a really radical idea, this
whole Jane Crow of crystallizing that double discrimination of being
not only African American but also female because as Harvard
(36:28):
Law Professor Kenneth W. Mac points out, this is the
early nineteen sixties. You still have laws on the books
excluding women from certain jobs like like bartending for instance. Um,
you have all male juries going on. Um, and we
even have in nineteen sixty one scoutis Justice John Marshall
(36:50):
Harlan writing, woman is still regarded as the center of
home and family. That's where she belongs. I added that
last bit of that's where she belonged. Well, yeah, it's
that idea of benevolent sexism, that women must be protected
from certain dangerous or unsavory situations, whether it's being a
(37:12):
bartender or being a juror Yeah. And so she publishes
this paper in the same year. I mean, she's so busy.
I want to know it's also her secret to productivity.
That's another episode, I guess, um. But the same year
she individually lobbies congressmen and even Lady brig Johnson to
(37:32):
include sex the word sex in the Civil Rights Act
to make sure that it not only protects against racial
discrimination but also gender based discrimination. And she was able
to convince congressmen to include it because she was the
(37:53):
first one to argue not that it would benefit solely
white women, or that it would pass ssibly um negatively
impact black men. But she raised the issue of its
impact on black women. I mean, that's another thing. An
undercurrent to all of the stuff that's going on is
(38:14):
the complete invisibility of black women in our society for
so long. Yeah, well, she writes, I mean, speaking about herself.
She read about being a minority of a minority, of
being a woman who was also black, and the hardships
that come along with that. Yeah. And so she was
able to make the convincing argument that you must include
(38:37):
that sex clause because if you don't, you will leave
out this entire population of black women and only increase
the social burden that they're bearing. And meanwhile, the next year,
she becomes the first African American to earn a JSD
(38:58):
from Yale, and her dissertation is Roots of the Racial
Crisis Prologue to Policy. And I note all these things
that she's writing, because again, how is she doing all
of this? How does she? How does she do it? Caroline?
I have no I have no idea. And and she
wanted to add to it because she also wanted to
get a law school teaching job after she graduated. But
(39:20):
no one would hire her, and there have been questions
about whether that distancing from her as successful as she was,
as prominent as she was at the time, that her
outward queerness possibly um alienated her from certain employment. Interesting. Well, okay,
so we mentioned the whole jury thing earlier about benevolent
(39:43):
sexism and women at the time being exempt from jury
service unless they volunteered. Well, that whole idea comes up
again in nineteen sixty six when, along with the a
c LU legal team, Paully co writes the brief in
the case Why v. Cook, which struck down the constitutionality
(40:04):
of all white, all male juries. This gets rid of
all of those quote unquote protections for women. She had
wanted it though, to reach the Supreme Court and serve
as women's brown versus Board of Education. And speaking of women,
the same year she becomes a founding member of the
(40:24):
National Organization for Women. She had suggested, actually to Betty
for Dan that there needed to be some sort of
n double a c P for women. Um. And I mean,
by this point it makes total sense that she's so
engaged with the feminist movement because of all the groundwork
that had been laid going back to her sexist treatment
(40:47):
at Howard being on the President's Commission on the Status
of Women. Researching this and also, of course it's embedded
in her Jane Crow theory and her personal repulsion at
the anti feminism of some civil rights leaders as well
as UH leaders of the Black power movement. But I
(41:09):
mean she didn't, she didn't entirely find a home, not
surprisingly in in second way feminism, which was largely led
by middle and upper class white women. Yeah, I mean
she said that she did feel more comfortable within feminism,
but she quickly took issue with now's sidelining of civil
rights leaders. So it's that back and forth of like,
(41:31):
over here they don't want this aspect of me, and
over here they don't want this other aspect of me.
So she ends up leaving, joining the a c l U,
and from there is instrumental in a c l U
adopting women's rights as a key priority. And from there
she finally gets the teaching job that she had so
long been wanting. She becomes a tenured professor at brandeis
(41:54):
UM and she ends up developing some of the first
black women's studies courses as an American Studies professor. Yeah,
I mean she's not a two dimensional person by any means.
I mean her one of her original interests on her
way to grad school with sociology, but she you know,
didn't go to you and c took the law route thankfully. Um.
(42:16):
But I mean, this is a woman with so many
different interests. Like, you know, I'm reading all of this
stuff about her and then it's like, oh yeah, And
I mean she started all of these black women studies
classes and You're like, how how did who has the time?
This woman? Like she's this is the most driven woman
I think I've ever read about. Oh and not to
mention Caroline, she was publishing poetry too all the while
(42:39):
because she I think her father wrote poetry and she
always felt that was a connection to him, you know,
because she lost him when she was twelve. I mean,
although she was obviously separated from him before that. But
if we jump forward, she's sixty two. She's done so
much you think that Polly would like kick up her
(43:01):
feet and just chill out for the rest of her life. No, no, no, no,
she has one more first to accomplish. At sixty two,
she enters episcopal seminary. Despite the church not yet ordaining women.
Apparently in nineteen seventy four seven women had been sort
of like casually or day and they're like, we're like
(43:24):
kind of priests, but it's not really official. But Polly
Murray was like, no, no, no, this is nonsense. The
sexism is ridiculous, and I love this faith. I'm going
to seminary. And in nineteen seventy seven she became the
first black female episcopal priest. And fascinating detail, she leaves
(43:46):
her first Eucharist in the same North Carolina church where
her grandmother, Cornelia, had been baptized one d and twenty
three years earlier as a slave. I mean full circle.
Polly took it full circle. It almost Her bio almost
reads as if she had some kind of blueprint she
was following, because it's like, how else could you accomplish
(44:08):
so much in so many different corners of our society? Well, yeah,
and I mean she also writes in terms of entering
the seminary, she writes about how Irene Barlow's death sort
of sparked something in her that was undeniable. It was
this she had always sort of had a connection with Christianity,
(44:29):
but something in her was driven to dedicate her life
to it instead of just you know, belonging to a
church or going to a church. She just felt it
in her being that she had to do this, pursue
this path, and it was she writes about how it
was fulfilling a different part of her. Obviously, all of
her legal work, her women's studies work, all of that
(44:53):
had fulfilled very specific and large parts of her and
serve the community. But it time to serve at this age.
It was time to serve a different part of herself
and a different portion of the community. Well, and I
love how yet again, her priesthood is an example of
that personal drive being the compulsion to have that outwardly
(45:16):
manifested into something to enrich the world outside her. Because um,
it was also with Irene Barlow that she um became
more immersed in the church. They would go to church
together and it was you know, a significant part of
their relationship. And so I like thinking of her going
to seminary as um, I don't know, it is almost
(45:40):
an homage to Irene and that love that they had,
which I couldn't find out much about, especially because it's
not really documented in her personal papers or her autobiographies. Um,
there's there's not much out there about Irene. So after
such a rich and accomplished and sometimes highly conflict life,
(46:01):
she dies and her autobiography, Song and a Weary Throat
comes out two years later. And it's not until two
thousand twelve that the General Convention of the Episcopal Church
makes her a saint. I we want a fitting end
to this saint hood. Yeah, you know, I'm picturing because
there's this great picture of her where she's close up
(46:24):
and she's wearing her collar and she's smiling into the
camera where her glasses on, and I just imagine a
little halo going above her head like ding. I mean,
the things that this woman contributed to our world and
our society are incredible. She broke so many barriers and
(46:45):
and she meant to. I mean, this is a woman
who meant to break these freaking barriers. Like she knew
what she was up against, she knew what she was doing,
and the very life, her very existence was against the
norm and breaking barriers. And I mean, you know, talk
about a a heroine for for for all of us. Yeah,
(47:08):
because I mean that was her goal to embody intersectionality,
even though that word had not been coined yet by
yet another female legal scholar down the road and bridging
gaps and uplifting marginalized people because of all of the
different layers of identities and experiences that she had, And
(47:30):
you're so right about the intentionality of all of it.
Even when she applied to grad school at U and see,
she knew she wasn't going to get in. She knew
that they had a policy um barring people of color
from admissions, but she didn't care, you know, she wanted
to make a point. Well, I just I am so
(47:51):
fascinated to look at modern uh feminism and politics in
light of Polly Murray's life because you know, I don't
know how many times we can say that she was
ahead of her time, because we need so many more
minds like hers that worked to incorporate all of these
different layers of yes, gender and sexuality but also race
(48:15):
and uh socioeconomics. I mean, this woman tried to incorporate
and did incorporate all of us into her life's work. Well,
and it makes me so curious to know what she
would say about intersectionality today if she was sitting here
with us, and what she would undoubtedly be seeing as
(48:36):
the next step she would because you know, of course
she would be if she were alive today, she would
already be like twelve steps ahead of us. So I
almost wish that she were still around to tell us
what to do next. But listeners, I hope that Paully
Murray's legacy has resonated as much with you as it
has with us. Caroline, I've been telling so many people
(48:56):
about her by the way, um, and I'm curious to
know from from folks whether they had heard of her before.
Mom Stuff at house stuffworks dot Com is where you
can send us your letters, and if there are other
unsung trailblazers that we should look into, please let us know.
You can also tweet us at Mom's stuff podcasts or
(49:19):
messages on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages
to share with you right now. Why have a letter
here from Elizabeth, She says, I just listened to the
episode on feminist marriages, and like everyone their mom, their dog,
and they're downstairs, neighbor, I have a couple since I
want to throw in about last names. I've heard a
(49:42):
lot of women talk about how it's a feminist wind
to keep their own last name after getting married. Some
women get pretty smug about this, which is obnoxious to
say the least. But what nobody seems to mention about
this is a hymn. A woman's maiden barf last name
is uh, her dad's name. More likely than not, a
woman who is us born to an English speaking family
(50:03):
and plenty of other backgrounds have their dad's name. Dads
are almost always men, and fatherhood is a concept and
social familial structure that is at the very root of patriarchy,
quite literally, if we look at the root of the
word patriarchy. So I'm not married and probably will never
make that choice for myself, but it drives me nuts
to hear the fact that an unmarried woman's last name
is probably her dad's last name, who's also a man
(50:24):
who is or was also a perceived authority figure. I
say all this to say women are kind of screwed
on this front, so we should just do whatever we
want with our last names and not feel compelled one
way or another by patriarchy or feminism to change or
keep it. In the seventies and earlier, it was definitely
super subversive and radical, but these days I think people
need to chill out a little before they start asking
for medals for keeping their dad's name instead of taking
(50:46):
their male spouses. Anyways, have been am currently and will
remain a huge fan of the cast to keep it up. Well,
Thank you, Elizabeth, loved your letter. I've got a letter
here from Carrie also about our Feminist Marriage podcast, and
she writes, I've been married to a wonderful feminist dude
for eight years now and it's been wonderful. Congratulations, Scary.
(51:08):
We took each other's names because we viewed marriage as
emerging of our two lives. As a consequence, we are
the only Holly Hurts in the world, and that's pretty cool.
I enjoyed Meg Keane's view of marriage, especially what she
said about household duties being a negotiation. I completely agree
with that. Although our system is a little less formal.
(51:28):
We both take on chores we have time for or
we're better at, so I cook and he cleans the kitchen.
But when it comes to things neither of us wants
to do, like changing a dirty diaper, we go toe
to toe in a rousing game of rock paper scissors.
It's the perfect way to get things done without either
of us feeling like we're doing more than the other.
(51:48):
But Carrie, what if one of you is just like,
really really good at rock paper scissors? Just wondering. She
goes on to say, though marriage takes work, but I
imagine it's a hell of a lot easier when you
have a partner that respects you and gets it. We're
just doing this thing and clinging on to each other
for dear life. So thank you, Carrie, and um, I'm
(52:09):
wishing you the best of luck with some rock paper
scissors victories and friends. Keep your letters coming, Moms. Sabit
housetot works dot com is where you can send them
and for links to all of our social media as
well as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts with
our sources. So you can learn more about Holly Murray,
head on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot
(52:31):
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told you from how stupp
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Christen and I'm Caroline. And Caroline, I'm so excited to
talk about the woman we're going to talk about today.
(00:23):
Me too. She has been on my mind all week,
ever since we started reading about her. I can't get
her out of my head. That just made me start
thinking of that Kylie Minogue song. But yes, you're right,
I know I can't stop thinking about her either. And
Polly Murray, who is this incredible trail blazer. But what's
(00:45):
so fascinating and heartbreaking and impressive all at the same
time about her story is that she managed to accomplish
so much in in a single lifetime and push against
standard and norms of her day. But she did it
all from this almost personal place, this drive that comes
(01:07):
from how she was raised, the environment she grew up in,
and the discrimination that she herself faced. Yeah, and I
first ran across her name, probably a few years ago now,
where she was simply cited as the first African American
episcopal priest. And when I saw the photo in the caption,
(01:29):
and I thought, oh, that seems really neat okay, and
then sort of put her out of my mind, And
then much more recently ran across an article talking about
this entire life that she had before she entered the
episcopal priesthood. And while her story doesn't begin in nineteen one,
I feel like that's a good place for us to
(01:50):
sort of kick off our conversation about her and her
life and her significance because she has a very close,
uh legal street bond to one of our faith's Ruth
bader Ginsburg. Yeah, and this is an excellent example of
a woman paying tribute and giving credit to one of
(02:12):
her predecessors, not just taking this woman's ideas and using
them as her own, but really giving credit where credits due.
So well in the story also highlights to the disparity
between and Polly Murray's forgotten legacy and the an understandable
notoriety of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, partially due to her, you know,
(02:35):
being a Supreme Court justice. But in nineteen seventy one,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg argues on behalf of the A c.
L U, a landmark equal protection case Read v. Read.
And the quick background of this case was that, uh,
this couple that really wasn't together anymore. I think they
(02:56):
were estranged. Their adopted son died, and the father, according
to an Idaho state statute maintaining that males must be
preferred to females as administrators of the states, was automatically
granted their deceased son's estate. But Mrs Reed in this case,
(03:19):
UM wanted rights to the estate, and so they brought
this equal protection case UM that ended up going all
the way to the Supreme Court. And it was the
very first time that the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection clause
had been used to argue gender discrimination as unconstitutional as
(03:41):
opposed to racial discrimination. And so this whole case at
a legal precedent against gender discrimination purely out of administrative convenience.
So in this Idaho case, just being like, you know what,
We're just going to give it to the dudes. They
can have the rights, and we just don't even have
to worry about this right. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who
(04:02):
at the time was an a c l U volunteer attorney,
in her legal brief, named two co authors who actually
didn't play a direct role in the case, and those
were Judge Dorothy Kenyon and the topic of today's episode,
and Polly Murray, who's Jane Crow, and the law legal
theory in the nineteen sixties pioneered this whole idea of
(04:25):
the equal Protection Clause applying to sex discrimination in the
same way as raised discrimination. And so Murray's entire motivation
for Jane Crow, which will get into more, is the
idea that it would not only protect black women hence
(04:45):
the Jane Crow that is, the you know, feminized version
of Jim Crow, but lift everybody up by bridging the
gap between civil rights and the women's movement. And if
that sounds a lot like intersectionality, it is, I mean
in so many ways, and Polly Murray is the godmother
(05:05):
of intersectionality. And also if this sounds a lot like
Ruth Bader Ginsburg paying symbolic homage to amazing women, which
other guys who had relied on that legal theory of
Murray's as well in the past did not do, um,
it totally is. And it just makes me love Notorious
RBG even more. Yeah, well, so we need to now
(05:28):
dive into Polly's story. Yes, her name is Anne Paulina Murray,
but she opted together by the name Polly, So let's
dive into her complex and multifaceted past. So to kick
things off, why don't we reference her own description of herself,
which kind of gets at the internal struggles that drove
(05:51):
her public work. So, for instance, in a nineteen sixty
seven letter to the National Organization of Women, she wrote,
I hold the staff of multiple minorities. I can't allow
myself to be fragmented into negro at one time, woman
at another, or worker at another. I must find a
unifying principle in all of these movements to which I
(06:15):
can adhere. So from that we can hear that struggle
that she really wrestled with her entire life between all
of these identities and intersections that she embodied. She's African American,
she's a woman, she's a gender questioning person who is
(06:36):
attracted to women. Um she has experiences in poverty and
income instability. Um so. And she even in her younger years,
she gave names to her various identities of sorts. Yeah,
she had the crusader, the imp, and the dude, not
to mention the priest, which is an identity that came later.
(06:59):
But I mean, also, this is a woman who's an
incredible legal scholar. She's a feminist, a poet, a workers
rights activist, which her political leanings and her work for
labor rights actually tripped her up politically later in her
life a little bit. And of course, you know the
whole priest thing. She became an episcopal saint in she's
(07:20):
a saint. She's a saint. The more I've found out
about her, the more astonished and kind of upset I
got that I was only just now learning about her, right,
And I mean that's in a lot of the that
sentiment is in a lot of the articles that you
will read about Polly these days, because there is this
(07:41):
attitude of like, where have you been my whole life?
And she's always been there. She always was there, but
her legacy has for so long just been buried and
kind of forgotten. And so it's it's now that we're
starting to see more attention paid to just how important
she is to this country legal history. Well, and I
(08:01):
think that we are starting to recognize her more because
our society has finally caught up to up to her exactly. Yeah,
I mean, but in the meantime, while she was alive,
she was trailblazing left and right, I mean, stood aside,
she was the first woman of color to serve as
California's Deputy Attorney General. She was the first African American
(08:26):
to earn a doctorate from Yale, and the first black
female episcopal priest. So, I mean, we just talked about
how she's been sort of sidelined from history, and that
question of why comes up a lot in any kind
of scholarly writing about her, and clearly, as we'll explain more,
(08:49):
there is the issue of society just you know, being
too slow. I mean, she was a woman in so
many ways ahead of her time, but it was also
because she wasn't satisfied with only fighting for civil rights
or women's rights or labor rights. She wanted to bridge
all of the gaps. Yeah, well, she wanted to bridge
all of the gaps because they were all aspects of her.
(09:11):
I mean, she, like Kristen has said, really struggled early
on with bits and pieces of her identity which society
was telling her either weren't right or they were at
odds with each other. You know, she wrote in her autobiography,
in a world of black white opposites, I had no
place being neither very dark nor very fair. I was
(09:33):
a nobody without identity, so let's look at her childhood.
She was born in nineteen ten in Baltimore as Anna Paulina.
She was the fourth of six children to mother Agnes
Fitzgerald and father William Murray, but she was orphaned very early.
Her mom died when she was four, and at twelve,
her father was actually murdered by a guard at the
(09:55):
Crownsville State Hospital where he was a patient undergoing treatment
from major depression. Not after her mother died when she
was four, she was sent from Baltimore to Durham, North Carolina,
where she was raised largely by her maternal grandparents, who
encouraged her to be as educated and as exemplary as
(10:17):
possible for both racial and familial uplift. I mean, this
is a family of middle class African Americans living in
the Jim Crow South um, so that's where the idea
and the need for that racial uplift comes from. And
in terms of familial uplift, her maternal grandmother, who was
(10:41):
helping raise her Cornelia, was born a slave, and Cornelia's
mother was also a slave who was raped by her
white slave owner. So her grandmother was actually raised by
both her paternal aunt and owner right, and so that
(11:02):
side of the family tree is something that Polly really
struggles with in her autobiography, where she talks a lot
about the genealogical process of going back through a family
history and how it puts so much of herself and
her family into the context of the time. She really
had to come face to face with those ugly facts
that she talks about how a lot of African American
(11:23):
families at the time weren't willing or ready or very
eager to sort of dive back into that's that's an
open wound, it's a lot of pain. And so she
talks about how she had to come face to face
to that with that because just as she had been
so proud and ready to accept the branch of the
family tree that we're freedman her one of her grandfather's,
for instance, was emancipated and then fought for the union. Yeah,
(11:48):
and she had a really strong attachment to her grandparents um,
but tragically, again it was like she was orphaned a
second time because both of her grandparents by the time
she was thirteen, and she kind of considered that the
end of her childhood. I mean, Polly grew up very fast.
(12:08):
It seems like, well, she went to live with her aunt,
who was her namesake, and this is the aunt who
she credits so much. Yes, she found so much inspiration
in her all of her grandparents and great grandparents, but
it was her aunt who she says, really encouraged her
to be herself and be sort of fulfill her destiny
(12:29):
as the amazing child that she was. Yeah, And the
first step along the way to fulfilling her destiny and
she really did have a sense of destiny, was attending
Hunter College. So she heads up to New York in
nine and she graduates in nineteen thirty three, and college
is incredibly difficult for her financially. I mean, she's struggling
(12:53):
to make ends meet to the point that she suffers
malnutrition and like the illness that she and during college
because she's so poor and can't feed herself very well.
I mean, it kind of haunts her for the rest
of her life. It leaves her rather frail, although you
would not know it by the legacy that she leaves
behind um. But after graduation, she finally finds some teaching
(13:16):
work with the Works Progress Administration and as an activist
for the Workers Defense League. But it's this whole time
that she's also questioning both her gender identity and her
sexual orientation. She really struggled with feeling like she was
a man trapped in a woman's body her words, but
(13:38):
also struggling with this attraction to feminine women. She wrote
to her doctors saying, I've got to find a solution,
like I don't know why I feel this attraction, because
you've also got to keep in mind at the time
that being gay was considered a psychiatric disorder. Yeah, and
(13:59):
in a no to her doctor that she wrote in seven,
she said, why do I desire monogamous married life as
a completion? Because she's you know, she's struggling with her
same sex attraction to women, but at the same time,
because of that desire to succeed professionally but also have
(14:22):
the quote unquote normal family life was something that was
also very much ingrained in her and very important to her.
Clearly a point of personal conflict for her, and I
think it's important as um. There was one academic we're
reading who pointed out that while today she might have
(14:44):
identified as transgender or a lesbian, she never labeled herself
as such back then. I mean, well, for one, reason
the term transgender didn't even exist in the nineteen thirties. UM.
But she she knew that something was up and she
really wanted a biological explanation for it. UM. In her
(15:05):
twenties and thirties, she was really enamored with new research
on hormones and glands and part of why she was
so compelled. UM and and even at one point requested
an exploratory surgery to see if she had a male
genitalia like secreted inside of her. As she put it,
(15:27):
was because of the specter of mental illness within her family.
I mean you have like you mentioned, Caroline, at the time,
homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder and that was terrifying
for her, considering how her dad was murdered when he
was in a psychiatric hospital, and there had been other
mental health issues in her family. Yeah, and so she
(15:49):
did seek both psychiatric and hormonal treatment, but doctors refused
to give her male hormones, simply telling her to conform
to female expectations. U. UM, that doesn't mean she didn't experiment.
She there's lots of pictures of her, and she talks
about how she explored gender identity and presentation particularly in
(16:10):
her younger years in her twenties and thirties, by wearing
men's clothing. And this is around the time when she
also opts to start going by the name Polly instead
of Anne. Yeah. And if we look back at her
one autobiographical photo album, The Life and Times of an
American called Polly Murray, Um, the image of the dude
(16:33):
is clearly the uh, the identity within her that's questioning
gender and what it means and how it applies to her.
And she in one of the photos she has sort
of she has men's clothes on and a men's style,
hey do um. But you can see as she goes
(16:57):
to law school and her legal career picks up in
public profile increases, you see her dressed in more traditionally
feminine ways. Yeah. I think there there's one picture that
we saw of her, was it from law school or after?
Where it's one of those like very old school, you know,
from the side kind of pictures where she's looking off
(17:17):
into the distance and the caption on the back of
the photo was first and last up swept hair do
So I mean, I you know, she kind of like
those doctors when she was in her twenties and thirties, said,
you know, they told her to conform to female expectations.
I think she did feel like she had to for
a lot of her early public presentation and persona. You know,
(17:40):
you you see her exclusively in dresses in those early years,
especially like in pictures where she's with Betty for Dan
in a picture with the early founding staff of Now
and in law school, she's wearing all of those dresses
and those hair dues. But as you get old, as
she gets older, I should say, uh, you start to
(18:01):
see her, Oh yeah, this is the woman who said
she prefers pants to dresses. Like, you start to see
hers almost just sort of start to look more like herself. Well,
and there was one anecdote from when she was in
the priesthood of her being delighted that she would sometimes
get mistaken for a guy, partly because she had short,
(18:23):
cropped hair and glasses and she even had rocked a
little lady mustache in her old age, and obviously, like
priestly clothes are gender ambiguous, and being the first female
priests would kind of just expect it to be a guy.
And she was like, oh, I loved it. Yeah, Well,
because yeah. I mean, like you said, transgender wasn't a
(18:44):
term in use yet, but I'm sure it must have
felt great for someone to look at you and identify
you as the way that you and I know, not
that I want to put words in anyone's mouth, but
the way that you have felt inside. Yeah, I'm but
I I well. And I also think it's interesting that
part of her concern over how she felt was not
(19:08):
just her attraction to women and her discomfort in uh
with feminine gendered clothing, but also she felt like her
ambition and drive was also highly masculine, in a sign
that something wasn't entirely right and part of why she
(19:30):
wanted to fight for women's rights because she was like, oh,
I can't this womanhood is is holding me back. Like
I know I'm a woman, but I don't feel like
I I should be because of all of this stuff
that I want to accomplish. Yeah, so many layers to
gender identity. Who's surprised, No, No one well. And she
carried on though open romantic relationships though with a number
(19:54):
of women um and in her later life she forged
a seventeen year relationship with a woman named Irene Barlow
whom she met at a law firm in nineteen fifty
six and it lasted until Barlow's death, and they're buried
under the same headstone in New York. Yeah, yeah, I
think she because I think when Barlow died at the time, UM,
(20:18):
Polly was teaching at brand Ice and she ended up
leaving her position because she was so heartbroken that she
felt like I can't I can't go on. But then
in her posthumously published autobiography Song and a Weary Throat,
there's no mention whatsoever of same sex relationships. So clearly
(20:41):
there are lots of intersections happening within this one person
and in the next phase of her life and career.
Because we're going to get into this is when we
see all of her brain power then being applied to
all of her identities and struggles and how she applied
(21:04):
that to empowering marginalized groups. And we're going to get
into that when we come right back from a quick break.
(21:24):
So there's one big thing that Pauly Murray understood ahead
of her time was now discrimination cuts across identities, um
and and we might take that so for granted today,
but that was a revolutionary concept, not so long ago
um and, speaking to The Washington Post in nineteen seven,
(21:48):
Pouli said, this society is not hospitable to persons of color,
women or left handed people. Ain't that the truth? Congress, Well, listen,
as a lefty, I agree, And well, I do appreciate
her humor. That should not indicate that she was anything
other than deadly serious about the discrimination that she and
(22:08):
others around her were facing. Uh, In, let's let's just
go through basically the history of what she overcame that
ended up contributing to the person that she Well, I
want to say the person that she became, but I mean,
she already was this person, she was this fighter. So
we've got to give this backstory though, so you know
exactly what she went through. She was denied graduate school
(22:32):
admission at u NC Chapel Hill because of her race,
and she knew this was wrong. She knew this was ridiculous.
She knew she was up against a discriminatory machine. So
she launched a letter writing campaign that attracted the attention
and the friendship of one Eleanor Roosevelt, and she actually,
(22:53):
through correspondence with Eleanor, became a personal advisor to her
on civil and human rights issues. Well, the UNC president
at the time knew Murray was qualified enough to gain entrance,
and he even consulted the U. S. Senate on this.
I mean, and this is incredible to me. Already at
(23:13):
this point in her life, she's like, oh, like sounding
the alarm all the way up to the White House. UM.
And later in life though, when UNC Chapel Hill tries
to grant her an honorary degree, Murray says, oh, no,
things stuck to her guns, that woman did. But the
(23:36):
thing is like, that's y eight. I feel like this
sounds like, oh, yeah, of course, something like that must
have happened in the sixties, people pushing back against UH
segregation and racism and discrimination. This is this woman's ahead
of her time. She's also ahead of her time because
in nineteen forty, fifteen years before Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama,
(23:56):
Polly and her lady friend Adeline mcbreen were arrest did
in Virginia for refusing to move to the back of
a Greyhound bus. And so what possibly contributed to this
contentious UH conflict scenario was the fact that she was
actually dressed in men's clothes at the time and Uh,
(24:17):
that could have contributed to antagonizing the police toward her. Yeah,
there was a headline though from the time reporting on
the incident it was Jim crow bus dispute leads to
girls arrest, and the news article describes her as a
honey tongued legal mind. Don't mess with her, I mean,
(24:38):
even then, honeytongue legal mind. In the same year, her
honey tongue legal mind was hired by the Workers Defense
League to pardon a black sharecropper who was convicted of murder,
and she returns to Virginia to raise money and meets
prominent civil rights lawyers, which inspires her to start Howard
(25:00):
Law School with the aspiration of becoming an inn double
a CP lawyer. So she starts law school in n one,
but law school going to Howard, where race is no
longer the discriminatory issue sex discrimination comes to the forefront. Yeah,
it's during this time that she coins that term Jane
(25:22):
Crow to describe her experience of the double race and
sex based discrimination, and one source we read described it
as a theory born from her own struggles with categories
that seem to do violence to Murray's own sense of self.
Sometimes black and white, but far more often men and women.
And she's still active in civil rights protests. It's during
(25:46):
these years at Howard that she also participates in silent
demonstrations and sit ins at a Washington, d c. Cafeteria. Again,
keep in mind, as woman's ahead of her time. It's
the forties. I feel like school children today tend to
think of the civil rights movement as like a sixties thing. Yeah,
And and her graduating thesis from Howard was titled to
(26:07):
the civil Rights cases and PLUSY be overruled. And she's
referring to plus C v. Ferguson the case which upheld
separate but equal, and she's arguing obviously that plus C
should be overturned. This is ten years before Brown versus
the Board of Education case would overturn that separate but
(26:30):
equal clause. But when Polly first suggests this, all the
guys in her class laughed at her. She described it
as hoots of derisive laughter. But Polly would get the
last laugh sort of when Brown v. Board of Education
took place because n Double a CP Chief Counsel third
(26:51):
Good Marshal, used Murray's thesis as a strategic guide to
argue the case But the thing is all of this
was unbeknownst to Murray for years because he never gave
her credit for it. M Like, come on, man, come on,
they're good. We could all stand to learn a little
something from RBG. I know Ruth Bader Ginsburg hashtag shine
(27:14):
theory knows how to attribute. So uh. Polly graduates as
the valedictorian of her Howard University class, naturally, which typically
would have parlayed into a scholarship to get a Masters
in law at Harvard. However, she was not a man. Yeah,
so Harvard Admissions wrote back to Polly saying, quote, your
(27:40):
picture and the salutation on your college transcript indicate that
you were not of the sex entitled to be admitted
to Harvard Law School. Come on a drag. And and
here's the whole Jane Crow thing too coming into play,
because she writes about how her male civil rights comrade
(28:00):
really sympathized with her race based U n C rejection
years earlier, but when it came to her being rejected
by Harvard, they were simply amused at the idea that
she wanted to go there anyway. So there was none
of that support, that community support rallying around her for
for this particular rejection, it was more of like a oh,
you silly woman. Well, that silly woman decided to take
(28:22):
herself to get her Master's of Law degree at UC
Berkeley instead, and she graduated in and then became the
state's first black Deputy Attorney general. A few years later,
she pens the State's Laws on Race and Colors, which
(28:43):
was a compilation of all race related state level laws.
And this might sound like an insignificant detail. Why are
you telling us about this directory that this woman wrote, essentially, Well,
because yet again she is writing what would essentially become
no own as the Bible of civil rights law. Yeah, exactly.
(29:05):
She had compiled it at the request of the Methodist
Churches Women's Division, which I love. I'm like, who, but
uh so, working very closely with women from a church,
and it just became this critical piece of writing for
a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, and just again
(29:26):
and again and again. She's laying all of this legal foundation,
doing all of this leg work for these you know,
landmark cases and desegregation that will happen many years later. Well, yeah,
I mean she but all of this is driven by
her her personal convictions. I mean, she writes about how
(29:49):
segregation places a badge of inferiority on black children, and
and so it was it was looking into her past,
seeing her own and experiences with discrimination, and and looking
at the community around her that drove her to try
to make this world a better place well, and also
to going back to her family tree, that duality of
(30:12):
blackness and also the violent whiteness that was in there
with um, you know, the rape of her great grandmother Um.
And she spends a lot of time after nineteen fifty one,
she spends four years actually going back to North Carolina
and researching all about her family, and she ends up
(30:36):
publishing sort of like a familial autobiography called Proud Shoes,
The Story of an American Family. And Caroline, I gotta
say this reminded me a lot of you, because genealogy
is a hobby of yours. Oh my god, I know
I've lost so much sleep since the holidays because I've
been on a total family research kick. But did you
(30:56):
feel at least a little bonda to Well? I did.
I did, because um, just her passion for it and
and seeing her give voice to a lot of the
same things that I feel in terms of the importance
of kind of figuring out where you come from, because
it's no small, it's no small and significant thing to
figure out who your people were. She writes, the conviction
(31:19):
grew in me that one of the best ways to
incorporate social and political history into one's experience is to
embark on a search into one's family history. These ancient
documents spoke to me of a common humanity and narrowed
the distances between races, classes, and political positions. And I mean,
this is a woman who had to come to terms
with her multi racial, as she put it, past and origin,
(31:42):
someone who had to embrace both the amazing freedmen in
her tree, but also the slave ancestors who she writes about,
who didn't have They did have a complicated relationship, obviously
with the white people who owned them, But she writes
about having to come to ter terms with the complexities
of realizing that her great grandmother didn't hate these people.
(32:05):
She was quite friendly and intimate with the white women
of that family. So, as you might imagine, it's that
dual heritage that had a huge effect on her and
gave her a strong sense of personal identity. She writes
about it as the tangled roots from which I sprang,
and said she felt it was part of her destiny
(32:26):
to counteract the effects of stereotypes that black people had
played no significant role in US history. And that's what's
so addictive about family research and genealogy. It's it's digging
into the past and realizing that whether you're at the
top of the socioeconomic heap or at the bottom, all
(32:46):
of these people played such an important role in the
foundation of this country. And so that really played a
role in helping her define who she was. Yeah, And
the more she learned about herself often where she came from,
and the more deeply embedded she became in the civil
rights movement, motivated by those tangled roots that she wrote about.
(33:12):
It also fueled her feminism because as we move into
the sixties and seventies, particularly when the black power movement arises,
she becomes really uncomfortable with the power structures that she
sees emerging in it. And for instance, I'm jumping ahead
(33:32):
a little bit, but just to give you a sense
of where we're going. In the nineteen seventy essay, she wrote,
the main thrust of black militancy is a bit of
black males to share power with white males in a
continuing patriarchal society in which both black and white females
are relegated to a secondary status. Yeah, and this is
(33:54):
this is where it's important to remember her push for
um both protect action for both sex and racial discrimination,
because her attitude was that if you protect for both,
then you uplift everyone. Like we mentioned earlier, Yeah, so
if we go back to nineteen sixty one, she's a
(34:16):
big deal. JFK appoints her to the President's Committee on
the Status of Women as well as the Commission on
Civil and Political Rights. And the more immersed she gets
in the civil rights movement, the more she starts to
see and call out sexism within the movement because of
(34:37):
its avoidance of appointing women to visible leadership roles and
tacitly endorsing gender segregation by, for instance, appearing at the
National Press Club, which enraged her because at the time,
the National Press Club excluded women. So she's like, what
are you doing, you'r you can't stay in this one
space that doesn't allow these people in while you're advocating
(34:59):
for were the rights of more people. Yeah, and it's
interesting because you've also got to keep in mind that
there were a lot of civil rights leaders who saw
women's rights as a completely separate issue, which echoes back
to our episodes that we've done on suffrage and black
women in the abolition and suffrage movements, because it was
(35:20):
sort of the other side of the coin back then,
all of these women pushing for suffrage and women's rights
were like black issues are totally separate things, stopped distracting
from the cause. Yeah, I mean, and in a way
like her biography does echo a lot of the women
that we talked about. Um I T. B. Wells comes
to mind of someone straddling both suffrage and abolition and
(35:42):
often being caught at those intersections. Um So, N four
is a pivotal year, not only for Polly but also
for the US because this is when the Civil Rights
Act is enacted, and this is the year her that
she co authors her landmark paper, Jane Crow and the
(36:05):
Law Sex Discrimination, entitled seven, published in the George Washington
Law Review. And this was a really radical idea, this
whole Jane Crow of crystallizing that double discrimination of being
not only African American but also female because as Harvard
(36:28):
Law Professor Kenneth W. Mac points out, this is the
early nineteen sixties. You still have laws on the books
excluding women from certain jobs like like bartending for instance. Um,
you have all male juries going on. Um, and we
even have in nineteen sixty one scoutis Justice John Marshall
(36:50):
Harlan writing, woman is still regarded as the center of
home and family. That's where she belongs. I added that
last bit of that's where she belonged. Well, yeah, it's
that idea of benevolent sexism, that women must be protected
from certain dangerous or unsavory situations, whether it's being a
(37:12):
bartender or being a juror Yeah. And so she publishes
this paper in the same year. I mean, she's so busy.
I want to know it's also her secret to productivity.
That's another episode, I guess, um. But the same year
she individually lobbies congressmen and even Lady brig Johnson to
(37:32):
include sex the word sex in the Civil Rights Act
to make sure that it not only protects against racial
discrimination but also gender based discrimination. And she was able
to convince congressmen to include it because she was the
(37:53):
first one to argue not that it would benefit solely
white women, or that it would pass ssibly um negatively
impact black men. But she raised the issue of its
impact on black women. I mean, that's another thing. An
undercurrent to all of the stuff that's going on is
(38:14):
the complete invisibility of black women in our society for
so long. Yeah, well, she writes, I mean, speaking about herself.
She read about being a minority of a minority, of
being a woman who was also black, and the hardships
that come along with that. Yeah. And so she was
able to make the convincing argument that you must include
(38:37):
that sex clause because if you don't, you will leave
out this entire population of black women and only increase
the social burden that they're bearing. And meanwhile, the next year,
she becomes the first African American to earn a JSD
(38:58):
from Yale, and her dissertation is Roots of the Racial
Crisis Prologue to Policy. And I note all these things
that she's writing, because again, how is she doing all
of this? How does she? How does she do it? Caroline?
I have no I have no idea. And and she
wanted to add to it because she also wanted to
get a law school teaching job after she graduated. But
(39:20):
no one would hire her, and there have been questions
about whether that distancing from her as successful as she was,
as prominent as she was at the time, that her
outward queerness possibly um alienated her from certain employment. Interesting. Well, okay,
so we mentioned the whole jury thing earlier about benevolent
(39:43):
sexism and women at the time being exempt from jury
service unless they volunteered. Well, that whole idea comes up
again in nineteen sixty six when, along with the a
c LU legal team, Paully co writes the brief in
the case Why v. Cook, which struck down the constitutionality
(40:04):
of all white, all male juries. This gets rid of
all of those quote unquote protections for women. She had
wanted it though, to reach the Supreme Court and serve
as women's brown versus Board of Education. And speaking of women,
the same year she becomes a founding member of the
(40:24):
National Organization for Women. She had suggested, actually to Betty
for Dan that there needed to be some sort of
n double a c P for women. Um. And I mean,
by this point it makes total sense that she's so
engaged with the feminist movement because of all the groundwork
that had been laid going back to her sexist treatment
(40:47):
at Howard being on the President's Commission on the Status
of Women. Researching this and also, of course it's embedded
in her Jane Crow theory and her personal repulsion at
the anti feminism of some civil rights leaders as well
as UH leaders of the Black power movement. But I
(41:09):
mean she didn't, she didn't entirely find a home, not
surprisingly in in second way feminism, which was largely led
by middle and upper class white women. Yeah, I mean
she said that she did feel more comfortable within feminism,
but she quickly took issue with now's sidelining of civil
rights leaders. So it's that back and forth of like,
(41:31):
over here they don't want this aspect of me, and
over here they don't want this other aspect of me.
So she ends up leaving, joining the a c l U,
and from there is instrumental in a c l U
adopting women's rights as a key priority. And from there
she finally gets the teaching job that she had so
long been wanting. She becomes a tenured professor at brandeis
(41:54):
UM and she ends up developing some of the first
black women's studies courses as an American Studies professor. Yeah,
I mean she's not a two dimensional person by any means.
I mean her one of her original interests on her
way to grad school with sociology, but she you know,
didn't go to you and c took the law route thankfully. Um.
(42:16):
But I mean, this is a woman with so many
different interests. Like, you know, I'm reading all of this
stuff about her and then it's like, oh yeah, And
I mean she started all of these black women studies
classes and You're like, how how did who has the time?
This woman? Like she's this is the most driven woman
I think I've ever read about. Oh and not to
mention Caroline, she was publishing poetry too all the while
(42:39):
because she I think her father wrote poetry and she
always felt that was a connection to him, you know,
because she lost him when she was twelve. I mean,
although she was obviously separated from him before that. But
if we jump forward, she's sixty two. She's done so
much you think that Polly would like kick up her
(43:01):
feet and just chill out for the rest of her life. No, no, no, no,
she has one more first to accomplish. At sixty two,
she enters episcopal seminary. Despite the church not yet ordaining women.
Apparently in nineteen seventy four seven women had been sort
of like casually or day and they're like, we're like
(43:24):
kind of priests, but it's not really official. But Polly
Murray was like, no, no, no, this is nonsense. The
sexism is ridiculous, and I love this faith. I'm going
to seminary. And in nineteen seventy seven she became the
first black female episcopal priest. And fascinating detail, she leaves
(43:46):
her first Eucharist in the same North Carolina church where
her grandmother, Cornelia, had been baptized one d and twenty
three years earlier as a slave. I mean full circle.
Polly took it full circle. It almost Her bio almost
reads as if she had some kind of blueprint she
was following, because it's like, how else could you accomplish
(44:08):
so much in so many different corners of our society? Well, yeah,
and I mean she also writes in terms of entering
the seminary, she writes about how Irene Barlow's death sort
of sparked something in her that was undeniable. It was
this she had always sort of had a connection with Christianity,
(44:29):
but something in her was driven to dedicate her life
to it instead of just you know, belonging to a
church or going to a church. She just felt it
in her being that she had to do this, pursue
this path, and it was she writes about how it
was fulfilling a different part of her. Obviously, all of
her legal work, her women's studies work, all of that
(44:53):
had fulfilled very specific and large parts of her and
serve the community. But it time to serve at this age.
It was time to serve a different part of herself
and a different portion of the community. Well, and I
love how yet again, her priesthood is an example of
that personal drive being the compulsion to have that outwardly
(45:16):
manifested into something to enrich the world outside her. Because um,
it was also with Irene Barlow that she um became
more immersed in the church. They would go to church
together and it was you know, a significant part of
their relationship. And so I like thinking of her going
to seminary as um, I don't know, it is almost
(45:40):
an homage to Irene and that love that they had,
which I couldn't find out much about, especially because it's
not really documented in her personal papers or her autobiographies. Um,
there's there's not much out there about Irene. So after
such a rich and accomplished and sometimes highly conflict life,
(46:01):
she dies and her autobiography, Song and a Weary Throat
comes out two years later. And it's not until two
thousand twelve that the General Convention of the Episcopal Church
makes her a saint. I we want a fitting end
to this saint hood. Yeah, you know, I'm picturing because
there's this great picture of her where she's close up
(46:24):
and she's wearing her collar and she's smiling into the
camera where her glasses on, and I just imagine a
little halo going above her head like ding. I mean,
the things that this woman contributed to our world and
our society are incredible. She broke so many barriers and
(46:45):
and she meant to. I mean, this is a woman
who meant to break these freaking barriers. Like she knew
what she was up against, she knew what she was doing,
and the very life, her very existence was against the
norm and breaking barriers. And I mean, you know, talk
about a a heroine for for for all of us. Yeah,
(47:08):
because I mean that was her goal to embody intersectionality,
even though that word had not been coined yet by
yet another female legal scholar down the road and bridging
gaps and uplifting marginalized people because of all of the
different layers of identities and experiences that she had, And
(47:30):
you're so right about the intentionality of all of it.
Even when she applied to grad school at U and see,
she knew she wasn't going to get in. She knew
that they had a policy um barring people of color
from admissions, but she didn't care, you know, she wanted
to make a point. Well, I just I am so
(47:51):
fascinated to look at modern uh feminism and politics in
light of Polly Murray's life because you know, I don't
know how many times we can say that she was
ahead of her time, because we need so many more
minds like hers that worked to incorporate all of these
different layers of yes, gender and sexuality but also race
(48:15):
and uh socioeconomics. I mean, this woman tried to incorporate
and did incorporate all of us into her life's work. Well,
and it makes me so curious to know what she
would say about intersectionality today if she was sitting here
with us, and what she would undoubtedly be seeing as
(48:36):
the next step she would because you know, of course
she would be if she were alive today, she would
already be like twelve steps ahead of us. So I
almost wish that she were still around to tell us
what to do next. But listeners, I hope that Paully
Murray's legacy has resonated as much with you as it
has with us. Caroline, I've been telling so many people
(48:56):
about her by the way, um, and I'm curious to
know from from folks whether they had heard of her before.
Mom Stuff at house stuffworks dot Com is where you
can send us your letters, and if there are other
unsung trailblazers that we should look into, please let us know.
You can also tweet us at Mom's stuff podcasts or
(49:19):
messages on Facebook. And we've got a couple of messages
to share with you right now. Why have a letter
here from Elizabeth, She says, I just listened to the
episode on feminist marriages, and like everyone their mom, their dog,
and they're downstairs, neighbor, I have a couple since I
want to throw in about last names. I've heard a
(49:42):
lot of women talk about how it's a feminist wind
to keep their own last name after getting married. Some
women get pretty smug about this, which is obnoxious to
say the least. But what nobody seems to mention about
this is a hymn. A woman's maiden barf last name
is uh, her dad's name. More likely than not, a
woman who is us born to an English speaking family
(50:03):
and plenty of other backgrounds have their dad's name. Dads
are almost always men, and fatherhood is a concept and
social familial structure that is at the very root of patriarchy,
quite literally, if we look at the root of the
word patriarchy. So I'm not married and probably will never
make that choice for myself, but it drives me nuts
to hear the fact that an unmarried woman's last name
is probably her dad's last name, who's also a man
(50:24):
who is or was also a perceived authority figure. I
say all this to say women are kind of screwed
on this front, so we should just do whatever we
want with our last names and not feel compelled one
way or another by patriarchy or feminism to change or
keep it. In the seventies and earlier, it was definitely
super subversive and radical, but these days I think people
need to chill out a little before they start asking
for medals for keeping their dad's name instead of taking
(50:46):
their male spouses. Anyways, have been am currently and will
remain a huge fan of the cast to keep it up. Well,
Thank you, Elizabeth, loved your letter. I've got a letter
here from Carrie also about our Feminist Marriage podcast, and
she writes, I've been married to a wonderful feminist dude
for eight years now and it's been wonderful. Congratulations, Scary.
(51:08):
We took each other's names because we viewed marriage as
emerging of our two lives. As a consequence, we are
the only Holly Hurts in the world, and that's pretty cool.
I enjoyed Meg Keane's view of marriage, especially what she
said about household duties being a negotiation. I completely agree
with that. Although our system is a little less formal.
(51:28):
We both take on chores we have time for or
we're better at, so I cook and he cleans the kitchen.
But when it comes to things neither of us wants
to do, like changing a dirty diaper, we go toe
to toe in a rousing game of rock paper scissors.
It's the perfect way to get things done without either
of us feeling like we're doing more than the other.
(51:48):
But Carrie, what if one of you is just like,
really really good at rock paper scissors? Just wondering. She
goes on to say, though marriage takes work, but I
imagine it's a hell of a lot easier when you
have a partner that respects you and gets it. We're
just doing this thing and clinging on to each other
for dear life. So thank you, Carrie, and um, I'm
(52:09):
wishing you the best of luck with some rock paper
scissors victories and friends. Keep your letters coming, Moms. Sabit
housetot works dot com is where you can send them
and for links to all of our social media as
well as all of our blogs, videos and podcasts with
our sources. So you can learn more about Holly Murray,
head on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot
(52:31):
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com
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