The extraordinary courage of an ordinary woman: Lorena Weeks broke barriers for working women
She’d been told that men are the breadwinners, so “women just don’t need this type of job”
Lorena Weeks worked nearly all her life. When she was a child in Georgia, her father was killed in a sawmill accident, and her mother — 29 years old, with four children — struggled to make ends meet. She entered the workforce, and Lorena did, too. “I went to work at the five-and-ten-cent store when I was nine years old,” she later recalled. “I could barely see over the counter because I was small in stature. I worked for one dollar a day.”
When Weeks was 18, her mother died, too, leaving her to raise her younger siblings alone. That was when she went to work for the Southern Bell telephone company in Wadley, Georgia in the late 1940s. Eventually she would sue the company for discriminating against her based on her gender — a landmark 1966 case that would open up economic opportunities for women all across the nation.
At first, it was just a job. She married Billy Weeks, a part-time electrician and rural mailman who just happened to have the same last name as her. Billy and Lorena weren’t rich, but they had ambitions — they scrimped and saved to buy a vacant plot of land and planned to build a house on it one day. They had three children in quick succession. Lorena dreamed of raising them in the countryside, but it didn’t happen quite like that. “When my little girl was old enough to call me on the telephone, I went back to work,” she recalled. “We needed the money.”
At Southern Bell, writes Gail Collins in her book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to Present, “Lorena was always on the lookout for a chance to make overtime or move up to a better-paying job.” Sure enough, a more lucrative position was advertised when she was in a pinch. She’d been working at Southern Bell for nearly two decades by that point, since she was a teenager, and knew the ins and outs of the operation. “The work involved making sure routing equipment in the central office was functioning properly,” writes Collins, “and Weeks felt confident she could do the job as well as anyone else.”
But her application for switchman was denied. “They said they appreciated that I wanted to advance within the company, but it’s not a job awarded to women,” Weeks recalled. Her union head explained the company’s reasoning further, telling her that “the man is the breadwinner of the family and women just don’t need this type of job.”
Weeks did need this type of job, and what’s more, she felt she deserved it. In the union head’s office, she spied a large sign telling employees that if they felt discriminated against, they should contact the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which had been set up to combat racial discrimination as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Weeks was white, but she figured the EEOC might want to hear about gender discrimination, so she wrote a letter. Someone from Atlanta was sent to investigate.
The company refused to cooperate, and the investigation went nowhere. Southern Bell cited a Georgia rule saying that women weren’t legally allowed to work jobs that required them to lift more than 30 pounds. It was preposterous — women in Georgia frequently worked jobs requiring them to lift more than 30 pounds — Weeks herself carted around a 34-pound typewriter every day in her current position with Southern Bell. What’s more, Weeks had to lift the typewriter by hand, while the equipment a switchman had to handle was pushed around on a dolly. Weeks felt it was a clear-cut case of gender discrimination and decided to file a lawsuit.
Her husband, Billy, was none too pleased. “He called me Butch,” Lorena recalled, “and he said, ‘Butch, you’re not going to accomplish anything, and we’ll just lose friends.’ Billy just loved people … So I just kept quiet. I didn’t come home and talk about it at all. My children knew very little about it. I didn’t want to upset them. This was a thing unheard-of.” If Weeks planned to take her bosses to task, she would have to do it by herself. She even stopped going to church, despite being a devout Christian, because she’d heard preachers rail against women taking men’s jobs. “I felt like I was so alone,” she said.
Weeks lost her case in the district court, on account of Georgia’s 30-pound rule. The story could’ve ended there, but Weeks was incensed. After the court ruled against her, she began to stage a one-woman protest: instead of hauling out her 34-pound typewriter, she left it under her desk and wrote out her reports by hand. When her supervisor complained, she responded, “If you will reach under the desk and lift it out for me and put it up here where I can type, I’ll type all day long. But I don’t intend to break a Georgia rule.” As a consequence, she was suspended from work.
“It hurt me so much I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled. “So I went home and cried all weekend.” But her self-pity didn’t last long — soon she was on the phone with Marguerite Rawalt, of the National Organization of Women (NOW), who was offering Weeks free legal representation in her appeal. The only thing NOW wanted in exchange was a promise that Weeks would stick with the legal battle, no matter how long it took or how hard it was. Weeks readily agreed. “I was meant to do this,” she told Rawalt.
Weeks was assigned a volunteer lawyer, Sylvia Roberts, who lived in Louisiana. Roberts zeroed in on a strategy for the appeal: they would take Southern Bell to task for misapplying a statute of the Civil Rights Act that said an employer could restrict a job listing to just male or female applicants “only if there was some reasonable qualification that only one sex could fulfill,” Collins explains. Roberts felt this statute was strictly applicable only to “sperm donors and wet nurses.” In any case, it definitely didn’t apply to lifting 30 pounds — the average three-year-old weighs more than that.
In the courtroom, Roberts, who was a petite woman, lifted various heavy objects in a display of typical female strength. “Perhaps moved by the sight of Roberts hoisting a workbench,” writes Collins, “the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court ruling and decided in favor of Lorena Weeks.” In its opinion, the court chided the “romantic paternalism” of Southern Bell’s insistence that women didn’t need and couldn’t perform jobs that brought home the bacon.
It took two more years, during which the Weeks family suffered enormous economic distress, before Southern Bell finally did right by Lorena. In the end, the company coughed up $31,000 in back pay and let her take the test for the switchman’s job. She passed with flying colors, and the job was hers.
Lorena and Billy were finally able to build their house. And they weren’t the only ones who came out on top — NOW used the precedent to fight many more cases against gender discrimination in employment. To this day, the Weeks ruling is still being cited to win gender discrimination lawsuits and pass fair-pay legislation, like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. NOW pushed hard for the Ledbetter Act, and celebrated its victory, but added that the fight continues:
Women workers certainly deserve better than the 77 cents that they earn to a man’s dollar. They deserve the right to go to court when they discover they’ve been paid unfairly. They deserve a Congress and a President who will stand up for them, and a workplace that values their work equally. Every employer should do the right — and smart — thing and value their women workers.
