2006 was an exciting year for the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. We advanced our core areas of focus and continued to play a unique role in the women’s movement by bringing together four often-unrelated sectors of social justice advocacy -- employment, violence against women, criminal justice and education. Through a dynamic program of litigation, public education, community outreach, and legislative advocacy, the Women’s Rights Project has achieved systemic legal reforms and influenced public opinion so as to attain equality for women and girls. We also continue to incorporate novel international human rights strategies into our litigation and advocacy.

Our employment work focused on removing the barriers -- both legal barriers and a lack of enforcement of established legal protections -- that often leave women economically vulnerable and bar them from enjoying the various benefits of economic security. We advocated on behalf of low wage immigrant women working in retail stores, hotels, restaurants, and private homes to challenge the pervasiveness of labor and sexual exploitation experienced by women who work in these crucial, yet often undervalued, sectors of the service industry. In 2006 the Women’s Rights Project achieved several exciting victories. We favorably settled cases on behalf of Asian, Latina, and African immigrant women seeking redress from sexual harassment, poor working conditions, wage violations, and labor trafficking. In one case brought on behalf of three Latina women who were employed in a discount retail store in upper Manhattan, a federal jury found that their employer had sexually harassed and assaulted them and awarded the women $455,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. WRP also used international human rights mechanisms to seek redress for immigrant laborers in the US. We filed a novel petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking that the Commission find the United States in violation of its affirmative obligations under the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man for its failure to protect millions of undocumented laborers from discrimination in the workplace and exploitative work conditions. We also continued to defend the rights of women who work in traditionally male occupations. In a suit on behalf of women in law enforcement, a federal jury in Long Island, New York found that the County of Suffolk Police Department’s policy of barring pregnant officers from short-term limited duty assignments during their pregnancies discriminated against women officers at the department.

In 2006 the Women’s Rights Project also expanded our violence again women program. We pursued our ground-breaking petition filed with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Jessica Gonzales -- a woman whose three daughters were murdered by her estranged husband after the police failed to arrest him for violating her order of protection. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that Ms. Gonzales did not have a constitutional right to police enforcement of her protective order, the petition asks the Commission to find that the police failure to enforce the protective order and the US courts’ failure to provide a remedy constitute violations of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.

The Women’s Rights Project also continued to expand our criminal justice program. Building on our work around women and the drug war and our publication of Caught in the Net: The Impact of Drug Policies on Women and Families,we collaborated with the New York Civil Liberties Union and V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls founded by playwright Eve Ensler, to produce a performance entitled “Any One of Us: Words From Prison” which was held at Lincoln Center in New York this summer. The sold-out performance by well-known actors used staged readings of writings by women in prison to expose the various ways that violence impacts the lives of women in prison, before, during, and after incarceration. This fall the ACLU and Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled Custody and Control: Conditions of Confinement In New York’s Juvenile Prisons for Girls, which demonstrates the gross overuse of physical force, the prevalence of sexual abuse, and the dearth of educational and healthcare services available to girls in two facilities operated by the Office of Children and Family Services.

In 2006 the Women’s Rights Project saw a new outgrowth of its longstanding commitment to equality in educational opportunity. In October, the Department of Education released new regulations under Title IX making it easier for public schools to provide sex-segregated classes. In anticipation of and response to these new regulations more public schools are segregating boys and girls into separate classes. This trend in educational theory is often predicated on retrograde gender stereotypes and junk-scientific theory that presupposes that all girls learn differently from all boys and consequently should be taught differently. This summer we brought and won a challenge against a high school in Louisiana that planned to separate all classes by gender when the school year commenced in the fall. We will continue our advocacy to ensure the constitutional guarantee of equal opportunity in public education for boys and girls.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg founded the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in 1972 and until 1980, when Ginsburg was appointed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, she guided the project with her unflinching vision for women’s full equality and equal participation in society. It is with one foot firmly rooted in the monumental achievements of Ginsburg and her staff, and one foot resting on our current victories that we look to the future, toward a world where girls and women can live their lives with agency, autonomy, and dignity. We are encouraged by the historic election of a woman to the post of Speaker of the House and hopeful that similar advances for women will follow. There are many challenges ahead of us, but with the strength of our sisters in the struggle, we will continue to explore novel ways to use litigation, legislative advocacy, human rights strategies, and public education to advance women’s equality. Our work is made possible by our courageous clients and the unyielding dedication of our supporters, our partners in other women’s and civil rights organizations, cooperating law firms, and colleagues in the ACLU National Office, the National Legislative Office, and the state ACLU affiliates. We sincerely thank all of you, and look forward to the many developments and challenges in the year to come.

Lenora M. Lapidus, Director