Nadine Taub

Nadine Taub (January 21, 1943 – June 16, 2020) was an American lawyer who laid the essential groundwork for women's rights in the workplace, including defending and winning the first sexual harassment case in the US in 1977. Taub played a pivotal, but largely unrecognized, role in the development of sexual harassment law in the United States. As part of a group of young female lawyers in the 1970s, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Stearns and others, Taub made legal history by winning cases which argued that the Constitution protected women's rights.

Early life and education Taub was born on January 21, 1943, in Princeton, New Jersey. Her father, Abraham Haskell Taub, a math professor, was teaching at Princeton when she was born. Her mother, Cecilia (Vaslow) Taub was a homemaker.

Taub attended Swarthmore College, receiving a B.A. in economics in 1964. She then got her law degree from Yale Law School, graduating with the class of 1968.

In 2017, Rutgers honored Taub by creating a scholar's position in her name.

In her defense of the plaintiffs, Taub argued that these three hospitals provided the "only adequate health and maternity care in the area. She also held that, by refusing to permit abortions, they were depriving the plaintiffs and other women, as well as doctors willing to perform the operation, of their constitutional rights to terminate a pregnancy."

The suit was brought by the Community Legal Action Workshop of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey and the Women's Litigation Clinic on behalf of the woman who suffered the police abuse.

Taub took on the case in 1974, even before the actual term "sexual harassment" was used (it was later coined in 1975 during the first sexual harassment speak out in Ithaca, New York, titled "Speak Out on Sexual Harassment of Women at Work"). The case helped create a foundation for the concept that sexism experienced by women in the workplace is harassment and that women can be legally protected from being victims to it.

The case was about Adrienne Tomkins, a stenographer whose boss gave her an ultimatum: have sex with him or lose her job. He made many threats against her and physically assaulted her. In order to defend her client, Taub argued that "sexual coercion in the workplace is a form of sex discrimination."

Califano v. Goldfarb

Taub worked alongside the future Justice Ruth Bater Ginsberg in taking Califano v. Goldfarb all the way to the Supreme Court and winning in 1977. It ruled that a provision of the Social Security Act, which differentiated between widows and widowers on the basis of gender, was unconstitutional. The ruling amended the Social Security Act in order to eliminate the burden of proof for widowers and allow female wage earners equal protection.

Writing Taub co-authored many books and publications about women's rights and gender discrimination. Her books and legal arguments still used today as teaching materials in law schools across the US.

Select bibliography

Co-authored with Anne Marie Boylan. Co-authored with Wendy W. Willians. Co-authored with Sherrill Cohen. Co-authored with J. Ralph Lindgren. Co-authored with Barbara Babcock, Deborah L. Rhode, Anne E. Freedman, Susan Ross, Wendy W. Williams, and Rhonda Copelon.

Personal life Taub was married to Swedish mathematician, Olof B. Widlund.

Death After a decades long struggle with Langerhans cell histiocytosis, Taub died on June 16, 2020, in her home in Manhattan at 77 years old.

Legacy Along with many other feminist lawyers in the 1970s and 80s, Taub made legal history many times over. Nancy Stearn, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who was instrumental in the fight to legalize abortion, remembered the working alongside Taub:"There weren't many of us, and the field of women's rights law was only just developing [...] We all knew each other. We were among the young feminist progressive lawyers of our day, and it was a wonderful thing to have sisters doing what we were doing and believing what we believed." Many of the legal protections for women in the US today are based on the foundation created in part by Taub.