Oral History with Carin Clauss

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

MAZZIE: I'm Lisa Mazzie and I am here with Carin Clauss, professor emeritus, at University of Wisconsin Madison Law School. We're going to talk today about her history. I'm glad that you were able to come. Let's start with the beginning. Where were you born and where did you grow up? You were talking about Tennessee earlier.

CLAUSS: Yeah, I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1939. It was [00:00:30] still a very undeveloped part of Tennessee, Appalachia. My father, who had emigrated from Germany in 1930, had gone to Tennessee to be the architect for TVA in 1934 and had married my mother before going to Tennessee. That's where I grew up.

It was actually [00:01:00] a wonderful place to grow up, because everybody that 00:01:00we knew were TVA people, so there were WPA artists, photographers, of course David Lilienthal, his top legal aides who argued the constitutionality of TVA, which was considered creeping socialism.

In terms [00:01:30] of childhood exposure, it's all kinds of exciting people. My parents built what was considered the first modern development of international houses up this mountain in Tennessee and everyone who lived there in their modern houses were TVA personnel.

MAZZIE: What made them modern houses for the ...

CLAUSS: My father had been a [00:02:00] protégé of Mies van der Rohe, who was 00:02:00a very prominent German architect. He was the project architect at the Barcelona World Fair, which is considered the first real international style of architecture. When he finished that project for Mies, he boarded a boat and came to the United States.

[00:02:30] My mother, who was born in Minnesota, her father had sent her to Europe after graduation to do the cultural tour and to fulfill her dream, which was to work for Le Corbusier, the French architect. She worked in Paris. Then, when the Depression got too severe that even Le Corbusier ran out of work, she returned to the United States [00:03:00] and met my father in New York, where 00:03:00they both went to work.

MAZZIE: Okay. Tell me about your parents. Did they have careers? Your father was an architect, but-

CLAUSS: My father was an architect. He came from a military family in Germany, so his father and older brother, who would've been the military, it was always the oldest son, were killed [00:03:30] in World War I. He then took care of the family. He graduated from architectural school in 1926.

He had planned to work with his uncle, who was an architect, most of my grandmother's family were architects or artists, but his uncle died shortly before he finished architectural school. He worked for Mies [00:04:00] van der 00:04:00Rohe and then hated Germany, hated the militaristic part of Germany. He was a socialist. He had heard of this Roosevelt guy, who was governor, and he decided to go to New York.

MAZZIE: New York, okay. Great. Your mother was there?

CLAUSS: My mother had, by then, moved to New York. That's where they met, in New York.

MAZZIE: Was she involved in architecture as well?

CLAUSS: Oh, yeah. She was an architect. She had gotten her architectural [00:04:30] degree from the University of Minnesota. In those days, women got a special architectural degree of interior architecture. To qualify as an architect, she took engineering, as well as interior design, which was their architectural degree for women. She went to work with a Chicago firm, but [00:05:00] they did traditional architecture. She was very excited about this 00:05:00new modern architecture in Europe. He was the one who advised her, "You should go to Europe and work with Le Corbusier," so that became her goal.

Le Corbusier hadn't really hired too many women. I'm not sure he had hired any women, so she sat outside his office for six months, doing watercolors, [00:05:30] until he finally got so disgusted that he hired her. She just loved her experience in Paris, but when money ran out, you come home, right?

MAZZIE: Right. That was Paris in the '20s, which was quite a time?

CLAUSS: That was Paris in the '20s. Actually, when I went to Paris as a young college graduate, I went to see Le Corbusier. Apparently, I looked exactly like my mother, because he said, [00:06:00] "Oh, Mae West!" Of course, her name was 00:06:00Jane, not Mae, but anyway.

MAZZIE: Right. Wow. That was amazing.

CLAUSS: Anyway, they went to Tennessee and practiced architecture. We grew up on this mountain. The photographer had three kids, and two were much older, and then there was one my youngest brother's age. At the bottom [00:06:30] of the hill lived a hillbilly that we called "Old Charlie." My younger brother and I just loved Old Charlie. He had hogs. We liked to go down and watch the feeding of the hogs.

His oldest daughter would take us to church, because my parents were well-known atheists. The hillbillies were worried about these three little [00:07:00] kids. My older brother had no interest, but Carl and I, we were just fascinated. We 00:07:00went to Baptist church every Sunday with Polly. Old Charlie would make us whistles and teach us how to whittle. We had a good life on our mountain.

MAZZIE: That's wonderful.

CLAUSS: Yeah.

MAZZIE: You had two brothers, it sounds like?

CLAUSS: Yeah, an older and younger.

MAZZIE: Then, one was younger?

CLAUSS: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MAZZIE: Were you the oldest or were you-

CLAUSS: No, I was in the middle.

MAZZIE: In the middle, okay. They're both still alive today?

CLAUSS: They're both still alive. [00:07:30] My older brother was a lawyer and my younger brother was an engineer businessman.

MAZZIE: No architects?

CLAUSS: No architects, although my father's family, true to form, they still have architects. His niece was an architect, many of his cousins once removed are architects, so that Clauss history [00:08:00] of architecture stayed. We 00:08:00were given drafting tools at age five. My father looked at my design of a house and said, "Do something else."

Peter, my older brother, would've been a good architect. He built his own house at 15, while my father was in Europe. It was very well-publicized, but [00:08:30] he wanted to make money. In those days, architects didn't make money, so he chose law. Carl and I just didn't have any talent, so it wasn't an issue.

MAZZIE: Yeah, so you had to do something else.

CLAUSS: We had to do something else, yeah.

MAZZIE: Okay. It sounds like you learned a lot of interesting things from the hillbilly.

CLAUSS: Absolutely. Of course, in our early school [00:09:00] years, you had 00:09:00rationing because of the war, so we couldn't go into Knoxville for school. There wasn't enough gas. The guys on the hill would carpool to get to work, but the kids weren't going to be transported to public school.

We went to the country schoolhouse, which was a couple miles away, that we would walk to. It was a three-room schoolhouse. It went up to the eighth grade. [00:09:30] You had two or three grades per class. It had no indoor plumbing, but my father realized we would not be happy with that, so they put in a beautiful bathroom in this little country schoolhouse.

We were very loved by the principal and the teachers. We had to win every cakewalk, which was a southern thing you did, sort of like "Stop the Music." [00:10:00] The principal was a big guy, Mr. [King 00:10:04], and any hillbilly 00:10:00kid that tried to win, he would just take them outside and beat them up, "These little kids, they have to win."

MAZZIE: Oh, my. Okay. How long did you go to that school?

CLAUSS: My older brother went through the fifth grade and I went into the third grade and my younger brother, the second grade. I thought [00:10:30] we had a wonderful education. Not only was the south, of course, fully segregated and racist, but there was no separation of church and state in those days. We learned to read from the Bible, but only the New Testament, of course.

When you completed reading one chapter, then you got a paper copy of that chapter. [00:11:00] At the end of the New Testament, you got a copy of the 00:11:00Bible. It was one of those inexpensive paper copies, but I still have it, as a matter of fact. I thought our reading skills were far superior to those of our friends in Philadelphia, when we moved to Philadelphia.

MAZZIE: Wow, because there are some big words in there.

CLAUSS: There are some big words in the Bible and, of course, the southern tradition of storytelling, [00:11:30] so the idea of telling a story or writing a story. Penmanship was very important in the southern schools and, frankly, manners. It may be superficial, but you always stood when you were addressed. I thought we were well-prepared for subsequent life.

Moreover, [00:12:00] we of course all were taught to read before we went to 00:12:00school. We might be the only family that had books. We liked to teach the other kids how to read. There's nothing like teaching to learn something better than you would otherwise know it. I thought we got an [00:12:30] excellent education. We had very dedicated teachers. They didn't have college degrees, but they had gone to what they call "normal school."

MAZZIE: The normal schools, right. Great. Then, your family moved to Philadelphia. It sounds like you were in third grade. Then, you went to public schools there?

CLAUSS: Then we went to public schools there, mm-hmm (affirmative).

MAZZIE: Then, how was that? It's obviously different than the southern school.

CLAUSS: Yeah, it was different. When we first moved, my father, [00:13:00] they 00:13:00wanted to move in part because they were sort of appalled at the education in the south. My mother was one of 16 children. My grandfather was head of the history department at the University of Minnesota. His first wife had eight and then his second wife, she died, that was my mother's mother, [00:13:30] had eight. It was two families.

My mother's mother had also taught history at the University of Minnesota. Let's see, I think she graduated in 1897. It could've been earlier than that, but roughly [00:14:00] then. At that time, she had the highest average ever earned 00:14:00at the University of Minnesota. She was captain of the Minnesota debate team.

I have this clipping, where her team argued against the Wisconsin debate team and won. This was big news in Minnesota, because one, the first woman captain of the debate team, and secondly, they beat [00:14:30] Wisconsin. It was on popular vote on the president, kind of an interesting issue for today. They weren't too pleased with the education system in the south, so my father took a job with a Philadelphia firm.

The architectural schools in those days had a two-year position for a creative [00:15:00] teacher. They had asked my father to be that at Yale for two years. 00:15:00Since he was going to be teaching in New Haven and working in Philadelphia, we moved to Philadelphia.

MAZZIE: Okay. When you were in school then, it sounds like you knew and your family knew right away you weren't going to be an architect.

CLAUSS: Right. That was determined early.

MAZZIE: Right. Did you always know that you would go on to college, you just weren't sure what or did you know?

CLAUSS: Oh, there was no question that we would go on to college. [00:15:30] My mother's, only 14 of them survived to adulthood, but they all went to college. Two of her sisters were doctors, three were professors, an architect. Everyone had a profession. My grandfather required them to state their professional objective by age 12. They all read Greek [00:16:00] and Latin, so there was no 00:16:00question that you would go to school and be a professional.

MAZZIE: Did you have to state your professional objective at 12?

CLAUSS: The only disappointment was that my father really hoped I would be a doctor, but I was pretty sure I wouldn't do that. My own ambition was to be a foreign journalist, which one of my uncles had been. They'd also been lawyers, too, but this [00:16:30] one that I particularly admired was a journalist.

Then, I realized you didn't go into newspaper work and just become the foreign correspondent for a big country and then that would be pretty boring. I didn't switch to law school until after my last year of college. I had a Ford grant. I had a scholarship to go to Russia. [00:17:00] I had minored in Russian studies 00:17:00and economics was my major, but I realized I didn't want to do that.

MAZZIE: How and when did you realize that?

CLAUSS: I sort of thought it was just the wrong career choice. I didn't quite know what you did with economics in Russian. I thought I was the kind of person who needed a project and you would do the project and then be done and go on to the next project.

[00:17:30] I thought law would be ideal, because little did I know, you would have a case and you would handle the case and that would be the end of it. Of course, the first case I had went back to court 18 times and it was never the end of it, but I didn't know that back then. I just thought that was something nice about law.

In June, after graduation, I was working in New York [00:18:00] for the summer. 00:18:00I went to see the dean at Columbia Law School. I said, "I have this fellowship. I think I could get it transferred to law school if you would take me." He said, "Oh, did you take the LSAT?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "What was your score?" I told him. He said, "Oh, yeah. We'll take you."

I figured they were happy to get a woman. They could now say they had one more woman. I then went to see [00:18:30] the people that I had the fellowship from. They said as long as I would study international law, of course that would be compatible with the terms of the fellowship, so they switched it over. I then took courses in international law and international political science in order to satisfy that requirement.

MAZZIE: Right. Okay, let's back up a little bit and then we'll get back up to law school. When you were in high school, is [00:19:00] there any special memory 00:19:00from that time that you want to share, anything in particular, anything that stood out?

CLAUSS: I noticed it, from your questions, you wondered who the most influential people were. When we moved to Philadelphia, my father reestablished contact with an old friend of his from Germany, who had been the mayor of Munich before the rise of Nazism, [00:19:30] a socialist, so he had to flee. He was separated from his family. They had gotten part-way out of Germany, but not fully. He was in the United States, his family couldn't join him until 1946.

He had one daughter [00:20:00] that had been born before the war, who was about 00:20:00eight years older than me. He and his wife were great influences in my life. He taught me two very important things, one, we always had dinner with the adults. We were the only kids on the mountain, except maybe Billy Glenn had three older kids. [00:20:30] My parents just didn't think you separated kids and adults. They always had this very stimulating conversation going on and we participated. It didn't occur to us we didn't have important opinions.

I'll never forget, in 1948, the Democratic convention was coming to Philadelphia. We were at the dinner table and we're having a discussion. I make some pronouncement and Johannes says, [00:21:00] "What's your factual support 00:21:00for that?" I was just mortified. I felt like I didn't have any factual support for it. I had read it in the newspaper, it must be true, right?

That taught me a lesson that I hope I always taught my students, that I always wanted to know why I had an opinion or why you have an opinion. You ought to be able to document it and to be critical, analyze [00:21:30] it. That was a very important lesson. The second important lesson, my parents mostly palled around with artists once we moved to Philadelphia, and my interest was politics, thanks largely to Johannes, who had been one of Truman's speech writers. He was a prominent person in the Democratic party in Philadelphia, which was part of the Democratic [00:22:00] machine then in those days.

They were having a dinner party for the young mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey. We were invited to the dinner party after Humphrey's big speech at the convention against segregation, and Humphrey did the dishes. He asked me to dry the dishes. I dried the dishes [00:22:30] for him, after which, of course, I was totally smitten by politics. That's what I did. That's my biggest memory.

In my fifth and sixth grade, we had history projects. I had my World News, which was a newspaper I put out every week with my little portable typewriter with a mimeograph machine. [00:23:00] The idea, because my grandfather had written many 00:23:00books on history, so I've read them all, was to coordinate what was happening in Egypt that was also happening in Babylon or was happening in Africa. You had to bring it all together.

MAZZIE: Right, so you were synthesizing, even then?

CLAUSS: Synthesizing, right, bringing together art and politics.

MAZZIE: Right, and that goes with the idea of being a journalist.

CLAUSS: Right. Oh, yes. I was definitely going to be a journalist. [00:23:30] Then, in high school, I think junior high actually, in those days, I had this eighth grade history teacher that I absolutely adored. His name was Carl Kane. I have a feeling, because he disappeared and I've in later years wondered whatever happened to him, I'm sure he didn't sign the oath that you had to take in those days [00:24:00] and was probably fired.

I've Googled and tried to figure it out and never been able to. Anyway, he had us take the preamble to the Declaration of Independence to our neighbors, to see if we could get them to sign it as a petition without identifying where it was from. In 1950, believe me, nobody would sign.

MAZZIE: Really? This was in Philadelphia?

CLAUSS: Yeah, this was the McCarthy era. By this [00:24:30] time, we were living in Swarthmore, but people were so fearful. My mother taught at Beaver College. She refused to sign the oath, but they didn't make her. My father was no longer teaching, so it wasn't an issue.

He really instilled in me my activism. In high school, I was editor of the school newspaper. [00:25:00] I would take it to be printed at this local 00:25:00printer, which was the head of the union shop for Delaware County. I got really involved with the committee on political education, COPE, which was one of the AFL activities.

I would spend my weekends stuffing envelopes, talking to the union guys. [00:25:30] I would write columns on what was happening in the labor movement. The newspaper guild was very powerful in Pennsylvania. One of the top leaders had been blinded with acid that had been thrown at him, so I would have these columns on union activities.

Then, they had this United Nations. High school students from [00:26:00] around the country, you would go represent a country. I was representing Togoland. I 00:26:00had a big resolution to become independent from Britain. We went to New York, they put us all up in a hotel, a kid from every state or maybe two kids from every state, because we represented all the countries of the United Nations. I really [00:26:30] was political by that time.

MAZZIE: Right. If you hung around with the guys in the union shop in that time, in the early '50s it sounds like, what did they think about a young girl hanging out with the ... You're in a male space, doing stuff.

CLAUSS: My parents believed that the only thing you did with your kids [00:27:00] was to make them self-reliant. As little kids, we did everything on 00:27:00our own, just the three of us. It's sort of a famous family story, when we first moved to Philadelphia, my father had a good artist friend in New York City, so they switched houses. The artist friend lived over at the Fulton Fish Market.

I always [00:27:30] get up at 4:00 in the morning, I always have, and my younger brother always did whatever I told him. I was 10, I woke up at 4:00, everyone was asleep. I told Carl, "Get up. I'm going to show you New York City from the subway system." We rode all around the subway, got back at 7:00. I'd left a little note that we had taken the subways. That just seemed normal to my parents. When you were eight, you got to take [00:28:00] the train in to the big 00:28:00city. When you were 12, you got to spend four days in New York by yourself. You just had to be independent.

A few years ago, I went to my 56th high school reunion. That's an unusual one to go to, but we graduated in '56. It was the first time I'd been back to my high school. They had nominated me to be on the [00:28:30] wall of honor so there was this induction ceremony, so I went back. When you get a chance to go to your 50th or 60th, do it. Cliques don't matter anymore. They're just so happy to see that you're still alive and you're happy to see they're still alive. You have a great time.

This one gal brings her husband over to meet me. He's at the veterinary school in Cornell. [00:29:00] She said that I was so important to her, because we had a 00:29:00class bully. I didn't know we had a class bully, but we had a class bully, she said. He'd picked on her, but he never dared pick on me or my best friend, Dean, who was a polio survivor and crippled, but very self-confident.

She would always sit between [00:29:30] us, she told her husband, so the bully wouldn't bother her. I don't remember that at all, because I don't ever remember anyone treating me badly. If you ask me about the union shop, I felt totally accepted, because thanks to Johannes, I was used to talking to adults. I was probably more comfortable talking to adults and I always [00:30:00] could document my viewpoint.

MAZZIE: Right. They respected you, it sounds like. Okay.

CLAUSS: I don't think they thought of me as a little kid.

MAZZIE: Okay, wow. That's great.

CLAUSS: Of course, I was my full height, which in those days was 5'8". Of course, I've shrunk a great deal.

MAZZIE: That's tall for a woman.

CLAUSS: That was tall and I was 5'8" by the time I was 10, so I think I looked older than I was. I don't remember anyone [00:30:30] ever ...

MAZZIE: Saying anything?

CLAUSS: Yeah, mm-hmm (affirmative).

MAZZIE: Okay. You graduated high school in 1956 and you said you went on to college and you studied economics and minored in Russian. Where did you go to college and what made you choose there?

CLAUSS: I went to Vassar. I applied to Vassar, Swarthmore, which was right across the street. I loved going to Swarthmore, because [00:31:00] you do your 00:31:00research there. I always thought that that way I'd pass for a college student, but I didn't want to go to Swarthmore, because it was right across the street from where I lived, and Radcliffe. My big criteria was who would give me a full scholarship. Radcliffe gave me no scholarship. Swarthmore gave me a scholarship and Vassar [00:31:30] gave me a full scholarship, so I chose Vassar.

MAZZIE: Okay, there you go.

CLAUSS: Right, good reason.

MAZZIE: Right, so the economics, but then you decided you weren't sure what to do with them?

CLAUSS: Yeah. I think I went into economics because one of my early heroes was my aunt Ruth, who was the oldest of my mother's first family, her half-sister. She had headed up the orphanage [00:32:00] for the international Red Cross after 00:32:00World War I. She had been a very close friend of Mrs. Roosevelt. She was in Japan at the Declaration of Human Rights Conference.

She died when I was in 11th grade, but she greatly influenced me. I knew one of her close friends was Mabel Newcomer, who was an economics professor at Vassar. [00:32:30] That was one of my reasons for selecting Vassar and for going into economics, because that's what Mabel Newcomer taught.

Then, I did research projects for her and for Emily Clark Brown, who was the comparative economics teacher who specialized in Russian, but didn't speak Russian, so I translated the newspapers for her. Her specialty was labor, [00:33:00] so she was studying Russian labor economics. That was one of my interests.

MAZZIE: It was, at that time then, communist Russian?

CLAUSS: Oh, yes.

MAZZIE: Yeah, okay. There was this labor influence even back then coming through?

CLAUSS: Oh, sure.

MAZZIE: Okay. Then, you talked about why you decided to go to law school and then how you ended up at Columbia. If I recall from taking your class and from reading, you were one of six women in Columbia and you [00:33:30] entered in the fall of 1960?

CLAUSS: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

MAZZIE: There were 320 students at Columbia, you were one of six women. Can you talk about that time and what it was like being only one of six of 320 [crosstalk 00:33:47]?

CLAUSS: Yeah. Students have always often asked me about that, because it seems so odd to be one of six in a class of 320. Of course, [00:34:00] there weren't 00:34:00many women lawyers then either. I think, at that time, women lawyers probably made up about 4% of the profession. Women judges, much fewer, certainly less than 1%, women faculty, almost none. I'm not sure there were-

MAZZIE: Probably none [crosstalk 00:34:21].

CLAUSS: I think the famous Carl [inaudible 00:34:27], I'm blanking on it.

MAZZIE: [Soya 00:34:30] [00:34:30] ?

CLAUSS: Yeah, Sonia Mentacroft.

MAZZIE: Yes.

CLAUSS: I think she was teaching then, but there were very few. We did have a woman for legal writing. She had just graduated a couple years, she was getting a master's. Otherwise, there were no women faculty at Columbia. You have to look at it from the perspective of the faculty [00:35:00] and from the perspective of 00:35:00the students.

From the perspective of the students, they loved us. In the first place, it was nice to have six women. Now, three of the women were old. There was Kay McDonald, who was the wife of the senior partner at one of the big New York law firms. There was somebody Gray, was it Marion, who was a legislator from the [00:35:30] state of Vermont. They were both in their 50s, I think, certainly their late 40s. Of course, since I was young, I'm maybe making them older than they were. Certainly, their children were grown, so whatever age that would make them.

Then, there was another older woman and then there were Barbara, and May, and Merrill. We were the three young [00:36:00] ones and there are 320 guys. They 00:36:00just loved us. What I was telling you before was that, when books would go on reserve, they would be, I'm afraid ... Columbia is a New York City school, there was New York behavior.

If people could get hold of the reserve books, if the guys could, [00:36:30] and keep them from their colleagues, that would be a good move, because like Trump, you always win at any cost, but they didn't mind us having the books. We should, after all, have the books, because we each had a study group. It was okay for the women to have the books, because they weren't going to go to Wall Street anyway.

MAZZIE: You were saying earlier that it was almost easier to be a token, because you weren't seen as a threat to the rest of them?

CLAUSS: Yeah, we weren't a threat. [00:37:00] In fact, that was true.

MAZZIE: You weren't a threat, right.

CLAUSS: If you look at it from the views of the professors and the law firms, we were there for intellectual interest. We certainly weren't there to practice law. We just had a different status. In terms of, "Did you have a good time in law school? Did you have lots of buddies? Did you have lots of friendships, good study groups?" Yes.

MAZZIE: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Did you have a mixed study group [00:37:30] or was it just the women together?

CLAUSS: There were so few of us, but-

MAZZIE: All the women studied together?

CLAUSS: No, we all studied separately. We each had our own little group of men that we studied with. There was one black, Frank Thomas, who later became president of the Ford Foundation. Maybe he had a study group. He wasn't in our study group or my study group. I don't know whose study group he was in. Obviously, if he became president of Ford, he was very, [00:38:00] very talented. He was also a star of the Columbia basketball team. I think at the 00:38:00time I went to Columbia, we'd lost 45 straight football games, but we had a good basketball team.

MAZZIE: That made up for that.

CLAUSS: That would get him into law school, yeah. From the professor's point of view, a lot of the professors did not respect women. Now, there are exceptions. I was a research assistant [00:38:30] to Herb Wechsler. I was a great admirer of ... I put down his name, so I wouldn't forget. That's the trouble with age. The famous antitrust teacher at Columbia, whose name I'm temporarily blanking on, but his was probably the best class [00:39:00] I had.

Then, Mike Sovern, who taught labor law and Allan Farnsworth, who taught contract law. They were very supportive. In fact, it was really in Farnsworth's class that I realized I could analyze legal problems. He had a seminar that he taught with the head of one of the big law firms. [00:39:30] He would bring us a problem and we would have to write a legal memo for a partner and it would be then critiqued by the law firm.

MAZZIE: It was actual real problems?

CLAUSS: It was real life problem solving and something that I totally think is the way law school should be taught. He also taught a course in urban planning. We were given a real case, which was the development of the Brockway Beach, [00:40:00] Rockaway, whatever it was called. He took all the liberals and made 00:40:00us represent the developer. There, I think, were 10 in the class. Five of us represented the developers and then the five conservatives had to represent the community that wanted to stop the development.

MAZZIE: A nice switch for you guys.

CLAUSS: A switch and then you realized how committed you would become to your legal argument, [00:40:30] which again, I thought was a great teaching technique. Some of the law professors, we had this professor of legal history, and he definitely thought women shouldn't be in class. He would only call on women on the day of the right of the Vestal Virgin.

Then, the women, we were divided [00:41:00] alphabetically. In my section, I 00:41:00think we had four of the women. We would go to the front of the room and then he would say, "Okay, guys, are there any of these women who should be disqualified from testifying today?" He just went on like that, so there was that to deal with.

MAZZIE: Yes. How did the men in the classroom respond to that? You sounded like they were-

CLAUSS: I think they probably [00:41:30] didn't like it, but law school in those days was very different from the law school you went to. We wore professional clothes, women, stockings, heels. Men had to have, not only jackets and white shirts, but ties. We had classes all day Saturday, as well as five days a week. When you recited, you stood.

I can remember, in [00:42:00] those days, Professor Weinstein, now Judge 00:42:00Weinstein, who taught Civ Pro II, he would say, "Mr. Cohen, what's under your jacket? Is that a t-shirt with your tie over it? Leave the room. You're excused for the day. You're not dressed."

People didn't challenge professors, but I doubt that [00:42:30] they liked it. I think actually if you'd ask them did they hope we would all get good jobs, they hoped we would all get good jobs. I kept up with many of them after law school. I would say they thought we belong there, but not all the teachers. I think it was age, because Farnsworth and Sovern, [00:43:00] in those days ...

MAZZIE: They were the young guys.

CLAUSS: .... they were the young guys. They probably were in their third year of teaching or their fourth year of teaching. It was the old guys who, "Who are these women?"

MAZZIE: Right. You seem to have to had this interest in labor law. You were saying earlier you took some international law kinds of classes to fulfill the fellowship.

CLAUSS: Yeah, I liked it, because I was always a [00:43:30] policy wonk, but I definitely focused on labor law is what I wanted to do.

MAZZIE: Okay, so that's what you focused on there and you knew that. Now, in law school, did you see yourself then knowing what you might do after law school?

CLAUSS: Now I remember the name of my antitrust teacher, Milton Handler. He was one of our great professors at Columbia. [00:44:00] I just loved the antitrust 00:44:00law. Both antitrust law and labor law have a lot of economics. I wanted to be a litigator, like Professor Handler. I wanted to litigate antitrust cases, so I naturally applied to the Wall Street firms that did litigation, the big ones, and was shocked that they didn't offer me a job.

I [00:44:30] really had my heart set on litigation and it just didn't seem that there was a litigating job for women. Then, I remembered, in Tennessee, because we lived on this little mountain with all these people from TVA, one friend I had kept up with were the Seymours. Their daughter was a year younger than me [00:45:00] and she lived in New York and was going to school there when I was in 00:45:00law school. The Seymours had moved from Tennessee to Washington, DC to do government jobs and then to New York.

Her mother died when I was a freshman first year of law school. Naturally, I went to the service. [00:45:30] There was this woman, Bessie Margolin, whom I vaguely remembered as a lawyer from the TVA days. It turned out she was head of litigation at the Department of Labor and was the top of the civil service. She said, "If you ever want a job litigating, come see me."

When Wall Street seemed a little closed, I went down to Washington. [00:46:00] She said, "Oh, if you want to do antitrust, see my good friend, the Secretary of 00:46:00Treasury. See my good friend at the Federal ..." so I saw all these people. She said, "I want to have my people interview you."

When I heard what they were doing, I did go meet Leon Higginbotham, who was head of the Federal Trade Commission. I liked him a lot, but I really thought, "Wow, this is exciting," getting involved with this [00:46:30] new Equal Pay Act. The labor department, in those days, was very prominent in terms of economic policy. She was very prestigious. She had just gotten the President's Federal Woman's Award. I took that job.

MAZZIE: Okay, I want to back up just a little bit. Okay, we're in the early '60s and you graduated in 1963. I recall you telling us in employment law class how the dean called [00:47:00] all you women into his office. Remind me what happened.

CLAUSS: The Equal Pay Act seems, I suppose, old fashioned to people today, "What was this all about?"

MAZZIE: That was 1963.

CLAUSS: This was 1963 when it was passed. When I was at Vassar, there were just two careers, really, for women. There was teaching or library. [00:47:30] If you wanted to go into teaching, you went from Vassar to Harvard to get your master's in education. If you wanted to do library, you went to Columbia and went to the library school to get a master's or you did what many did, you went to Katie Gibbs and learned how to type and take shorthand. I already knew how to do that, because in high school I had gone to the local business college to learn [00:48:00] shorthand and typing.

MAZZIE: Which would be good reporter skills for those.

CLAUSS: Which would be good reporter skills. Then, with the Katie Gibbs business school degree behind you, you could then go to one of the big publishing houses or one of the big fashion houses and you could work your way up. Nobody went to law school or med school or anything like that.

[00:48:30] Women's career options were very limited. Career ladders were very short, because even if you were unusual and had a law degree, there were women with law degrees, or like my mother, an architectural degree, once you had children, you left the labor market. You might get a job once your children went to school, but you wouldn't get a job at the same place. You would have to start your career all [00:49:00] over again.

Women earned less than men. Union contracts would have machine assembler, a female rate, male rate. They were all set based on the basic labor rate. The basic labor rate, let's say for men it was a dollar, then for women, it would be 67 cents. If you had one skill above that, you'd increase [00:49:30] it, but women were always at a lower rate.

Since women only competed with women, because one of the personnel rules was you didn't have men and women working in the same job, women judged their success by how they did relative to other women. If you were making more money than a woman teacher, you were doing really well. There was no way Wall Street firms were going to [00:50:00] pay women the going rate for lawyers that year, which as I 00:50:00remember, I think it was $7,200. It could've been less, but somewhere in there.

The deans for Harvard, Yale, and Columbia had gotten together to figure out what their few woman students should ask for if they made the decision to actually try to get a job on Wall Street. [00:50:30] Then, each of the deans at their