Transcripts For CSPAN2 Interview On Fair Labor Lawyer 20170212

Airs every saturday at 10 00 p. M. And sunday at 9 00 p. M. Eastern. You can watch all previous programs on our website. You are the author of the fair labor lawyers. Tell me about miss margolin. Betty was born in the jewish orphanage in new orleans that shaped her life profoundly. I like to say that before there was an the tour bs are gigabyte there was this. The fair labor standards act in the equal pay act. She champion those allies in her 30 years as an associate solicitor at the Labor Department. And she was a mentor to me. What were some other significant cases that she was involved in as well as the fair labor act. All of her time for the Labor Department was spent on the fair labors standards act. It was the whole body of work that caused the chief justice to say that she had put the flesh on the bare bones of the fair labor standards act and without her work the bare bones wouldve been wholly inadequate. Her most significant case standing alone was the first case argued under the equal pay act. It was established the role. That still exist today. That jobs need only be substantially equal and not identical to warrant equal pay. In your research did you go into her personal life at all. It was a really big decision for me to do that. She was so jealously guarded about her personal life but i was encouraged to tell the life of a pioneering trailblazing lawyer woman i needed to do so. And when i did i found perhaps not surprisingly she have affairs with people who would not interfere with her career and it will lead to her being the subject of fbi and congressional investigation. You could see her passion may have cost her a federal judge ship. I think its important for people to know today the choices that in ambitious career woman of the 1930s have to make and the choices she made to pursue her career. Do you think that because of the climate is a little bit difficult with the man in history. Its a really good question. I will put it this way. Betsy was deceased when i started this research. It freed me to dig deeper than i could have if she were alive. The thing that makes it harder to do research about a woman is that there were so few pieces of documentation she has never been asked to do an oral history although all of her counterparts had been well documented. She never kept a journal or a diary perhaps for fear that it could be used against her. I think that is a particular challenge for the people writing about women. How are you able to do your research with such little available. Not only was her nephew very generous in allowing me free use of her papers to the extent they existed but i say that i found essentially her needles famous peoples haystack. Because she kept set elite company. I could find in the miscellaneous correspondence file a lot to put pieces together. Fortunately she kept one very important bundle of letters and photographs many of which have the return addresses ripped off but i compared handwriting to figure out who she was writing to and who was ready to her. They mentioned that there was that. In the jewish orphans home in 1946. I too was an orphan and became a ward of the same agency that had cared for her when i graduated from the same high school that she went to 50 years later my High School Guidance Council Introduced us. I got to know her through my