On April 26, 2007, I had the pleasure of speaking with chapter member Vanessa Merton, who recently renewed her NOW membership at the Lifetime Member Level. Here are highlights from that conversation:

Damplo: Ms. Merton, thank you for your generous renewal of your membership at the Lifetime level. How long have you been a member of NOW?

Merton: I think about 40 years, almost as far as I can remember, the very beginning of NOW and Ms. Magazine have blended in my mind. I was a charter subscriber of Ms. and a very early member of NOW.

Damplo: What brought you to NOW?

Merton: I was either in college or just beginning law school and began to encounter the frustrations and difficulties of being a woman starting my professional life and also at some point wanting to have a family. I was also well aware of the difficulties that my mother had faced as a social worker, who had found it exceedingly difficult to balance her social work career and having three kids. Even my older sister, who is 10 years older than me, had struggles. Coming to NOW was a very personal experience. It wasn't abstract at all. It was wanting to find ways to change. It just seemed that it shouldn't be so difficult.

Damplo: What does your NOW membership mean to you?

Merton: It's one of the ways in which I like to think I am helping to advance this great, slow, lumbering beast of society toward equality for people. It's something that I do for my daughter, and my nieces who are in their 30s, and who are struggling with the same challenges of balancing their responsibilities as parents and balancing their responsibilities and interests as working people. I see the stresses under which men are still laboring. I have a son as well. He is still required or expected to conform in certain ways that are not necessarily healthy or conducive to a productive, happy life. We have to keep working to eradicate these artificial barriers.

Damplo: Tell us about your professional life.

Merton: My professional life is very busy. I have 2 identities within the same job. I am a teacher and a lawyer. I supervise and direct the immigration justice clinic, which is part of an umbrella legal services office, John Jay Legal Services at Pace Law School, and I'm also a law professor and expected to and want to engage in all the usual professorial work writing articles, testifying about laws and regulations, and participating in public lectures and debates.

I just started doing the immigration work about 3 years ago. Before that I had practiced in a myriad of areas ranging from criminal defense work in New York City to occupational safety and health and worker's compensation, employment rights in general, civil rights of prisoners, and civil rights of women. I did about 6 years of domestic violence work and the prosecution of domestic violence through a clinic here that was affiliated with the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

Of all the areas that I have practiced in I have to say that immigration law is perhaps the most demanding and difficult but also enormously interesting intellectually, stimulating, and gratifying work. There is a tremendous unmet need for ethical, competent professionals in this field.

Damplo: What advice do you have for women to advance in their careers?

Merton: Tough question . . . I try to impress on my graduating students . . . working as a lawyer is just too difficult to do unless you're really happy and enjoy what you do. Maybe you're not enjoying every minute, but you need to feel overall satisfaction. If that's not the case, it's never too soon to make a change. This applies across the board with other professions. You have to look for immediate gratification and happiness coming out of the work itself. Most work, not just lawyer's work, is too hard. Related to that you have to be willing to go back to being a baby in whatever field you're working in.

I'll give you an example. I had been doing criminal defense work for about 12 years. Most criminal lawyers never go on to do civil work. I was teaching at NYU Law School. I was returning from a leave of absence. I had been working in a think tank here in Westchester called the Hastings Center Institute for Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences - a wonderful experience. Two weeks before returning to teaching, the Dean called me. Someone had left, and the Dean asked if I would take over the employment law clinic. I'm very glad that I did that. I went on to practice on the civil side for about 16 years. Ultimately I got back to domestic violence and prosecution and now I'm in immigration, which is a hybrid. When I switched to civil law, I was like an infant in the practice again. I had to pick up this thing called "the CPLR" and I told my students, "here is something called the Civil Practice Law and Rules . . . you and I are going to discover this together." Very few lawyers are willing to put themselves back in the position of being ignorant and asking a lot of questions and making mistakes, which is an inevitable part of professional practice or for any kind of work. If you're willing to do that, you open up your work life to many more experiences. You don't get stuck in a rut.

Damplo: What activities do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

Merton: (laughing) Sorry I have to laugh -- what do I do in my spare time -- I can't wait to show this to my husband and children; well in addition to being a Girl Scout leader, my first love is travel. I love to read about places to go. I love to go there. And then after I go there, I send postcards and letters to everyone telling them all about it. Nothing makes me feel better able to come back to work than seeing a different part of the world, seeing a different society. One of the things that I do wherever I go - and boy have my kids complained about this over the years - being dragged into courts -- I like to observe court. Usually I meet a lawyer, a judge. People send me things. That's another way to get perspective on what you do. I would encourage people to travel and check out the way their work is done wherever they go. It is very edifying.

Damplo: How will feminism impact the 21st century?

Merton: [Sigh] we have to hope that it will. The primary impact that I hope for is outside the United States. While there are still terrible inequalities within the United States, the fundamental lack of recognition of women as independent human beings entitled to their own lives is a much more serious problem in many other cultures and societies. I think the eradication of practices such as female genital mutilation, which is something that I've studied and written about, and also practices of dowry-related homicides and all forms of domestic violence, trafficking, sex slavery -- all of these very, very widespread ways in which women and primarily female children although some are male children certainly -- are degraded and destroyed has to be the primary focus of feminism. I think there is a risk for feminism in this country to become what I will call based on a real work experience, the "integrate the Harvard Club squash courts at all costs" strategy.

Let me explain. In my second summer of law school, I worked at the ACLU Women's Rights Project. My job was intake, screening letters for cases for the Project, which was maybe two or three years old at the time. I got one that I thought was a real live wire. It was from a man writing after 37 years of working on the railroad doing hard, physical work. At that time he knew under the Railroad Retirement Act that women could retire at age 60, and men could retire at age 65. He wanted to find out if that could be redressed. I thought, wow, this is a slam dunk - well, at that time it really wasn't a slam dunk -- but it was right after the Supreme Court decision overturning the law about women not being able to be executors of wills. There had just started to be these cases in which facially different statutes were being held unconstitutional. I thought this would be a perfect case. But the then head of the unit gently informed me that we had a higher priority, and that the focus for that summer was going to be integrating the Harvard Club squash courts. I think feminism has to be careful not to fall into that type of misplaced priorities, at a time when women are still being forced to have their bodies cut against their will. I think we as American women have to be mindful that with whatever problems we still encounter, it's not the same universe. It's not the same league as what women in other parts of the world have to deal with.

Damplo: In closing any thoughts you'd like to add?

Merton: At times, especially now in the wake of the recent horrific decision of the Supreme Court upholding the ban on certain late-term pregnancy procedures it's pretty easy to feel discouraged. When I joined NOW as a very young woman in my teens I guess I thought everything would be taken care of by now. I never thought this is something that I would be doing until now, for heaven's sake. In that sense it's a little discouraging. On the other hand, speaking specifically of an issue like domestic violence and rape, when I think about the state of the law and more than the state of the law, the state of the practice in those areas, when I was a law student and a young lawyer, as a criminal defense lawyer I wouldn't even bother to interview a defendant charged with beating up his wife because I knew that the case would be dismissed as soon as I stood in front of the court and would say, "marital dispute, your Honor." At that time the word domestic violence did not exist in my brain. There I was a feminist, a NOW member - I didn't even really register that as a problem. Everyone knows that domestic violence and the treatment of rape and the ability to prove rape have changed so dramatically. It's really only been 35-40 years, which is a long time in one sense, but for such a dramatic change and the changes in society that go along with those changes in the law, that's really not too bad. Let us hope that looking forward the law and society will continue to change in the direction of greater safety, equality and freedom for women and men, at least as fast and as fully as it has for us in the past 40 years.

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