The ascent of the first female appointed to the Supreme Court, loosely based on Justices RBG and Sandra Day O’Connor, The Majority, a novel narrated by 84 year old fictional character Sylvia Olim Bernstein, portrays a woman who changed constitutional history. Known by the moniker SOB, the aggressive, fictional legislator and feminist represents the many factual lawmakers on a fierce quest to protect women’s rights and gender equality under the United States Constitution.
In 1949, growing up in Brooklyn, twelve year-old Sylvia Olim lost her mother. When Sylvia asked to take part in the mourner’s prayer, the Rabbi interpreted the Jewish law claiming “women don’t count in a minyan.” Frustrated and helpless to change the austere laws in her synagogue Sylvia recalled her mother’s oft repeated mantra, ”first learn the system and then change it from the inside out.”
Sylvia shared her bedroom with 20-year-old cousin, Miriam, a remnant of Sylvia’s family murdered in the Shoah. Miriam experienced the restrictive power of rigid laws under the Nazis and encouraged Sylvia to enter Harvard Law School. Shaped by her mother’s words and those of cousin Miriam, Sylvia accepted a full scholarship to Harvard. One of nine women in a class of five hundred, Sylvia concentrated on constitutional issues. A top student, Sylvia mirrored her academic ability with roommate Linda the first black woman to be admitted to Harvard Law. They became best buds.
After marriage to Joe Bernstein, a research assistant and student at Harvard, Sylvia was set for a promising career and a great marriage. When she becomes pregnant in her second year of studies she was unable to take her final exam. Her professor (later her nemesis) informs Sylvia, under the existing law she must redo her entire second year – that is, if she is even allowed to be readmitted. Sylvia once again battles exacting laws and graduates, ranking first in her class.
In 1973, working her way up the corporate ladder, Sylvia becomes involved in a case of a woman fired from her job because she was pregnant. At that time there were no laws in America protecting the rights of pregnant women in the workplace, nor guarantees of their job security after the birth. Sylvia dissented from the Supreme Court decision that clearly treated women differently from any person with a “disability”. But was pregnancy a disability? Was Motherhood?
Author Elizabeth L. Silver balances law and family drama to clarify the rocky road that led to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA)of 1978. It changed how women were hired, paid, promoted, fired as well as the benefits to which they were entitled. Though The Majority is designated fiction, the subject relating to women’s rights continues to be oh so real.