Remembering Lilly Ledbetter: A Life of Grit and Persistence

One morning last May, I woke up to a barrage of well wishes. It was my birthday. The messages were all lovely, but one stood apart from the pack. 

“Greetings Josie,” it began. I glanced down to the end. It was signed, Phillip from Palm Beach, Fla. 

He was writing to let me know that he’d bought a copy of my book—Women Money Power, a narrative history of women’s economic empowerment—for his mother as an early Mother’s Day gift. “She loved it,” he informed me.

Hearing from any reader who loves my book thrills me, but this was different. Phillip’s mother was Lilly Ledbetter, one of America’s most ardent equal pay advocates—the namesake of a historic piece of legislation aimed at protecting workers from pay discrimination, signed into law in 2009 by Barack Obama. 

Over the years—both in my journalism work and as a book author—I’d put in half a dozen requests to interview Lilly. None had been successful. But now I was learning that she, a personal hero of mine, had not only read my book—“cover to cover,” in Phillip’s words—but also loved it.

A few days later, Lilly herself got in touch over email. She praised my writing and the way I’d covered her complex and drawn-out pay discrimination case. “Only a few [books] I have read cover [the] case as completely as you did with mine, which is very important,” she wrote. And then, a request: “My book is not signed, so I will look forward to receiving a signed copy.”

Of course, I obliged immediately, penning a long hand-written note on the inside cover. “Your courage and selflessness—your endurance and, of course, your grit—make you a hero upon whose shoulders we all stand,” I wrote. 

On Saturday evening, Oct. 12, 2024, Lilly passed away peacefully, surrounded by those who knew her best and loved her most, including her son Phillip. She was 86. She lived ferociously and fearlessly—a fighter until the very end. 

When I heard the news, I was crushed: The world had lost a trailblazer, someone who was truly selfless in her pursuit of justice. But I am also filled with hope that her passing will reignite the Lilly Ledbetter story. In my view, it is a story worth telling and re-telling. 

‘A Missionary in a Strange Land’

Most stories about Lilly begin with the stirring account of that day in March 1998 when she turned up to her shift as a supervisor at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant in Gadsden, Ala., to find a note in her mailbox.

On a torn piece of paper, an anonymous author had scribbled four names in black ink: Lilly’s, followed by the names of three of her male co-workers. All four had the same seniority at the plant—their job titles were close to identical. 

Next to Lilly’s name the author had written a number: $3,727. Even in her state of confusion, Lilly immediately recognized it as her monthly salary, accurate down to the dollar. The numbers listed next to the other names ranged from $4,286 to $5,236. The implication was clear: She wasn’t just being paid less than her male colleagues, her salary was significantly smaller, a difference that would have amounted to a life-changing sum over the course of an entire career, had she been paid it. 

It was the first step in what would be Lilly’s more than decade-long legal journey that would include the filing, then fighting, of her lawsuit in courts across the country; that would bring her all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; make her the foundation for a piece of legislation in her name; and, naturally, place her in the annals of U.S. history. 

But Lilly’s story, the origins of her discontent and the genesis of her courage to fight big business, started long before all that.

Making Ends Meet

Lilly was born Lilly McDaniel in the spring of 1938 in the rural community of Possum Trot, barely a dot in the state of Alabama.

The house where Lilly spent her youth didn’t have running water. Her father worked night shifts at a nearby U.S. Army depot, fixing the engines of tanks damaged in the Korean War and, later, of tanks returning from Vietnam and the Middle East. 

Almost as far back as she can remember, she later wrote, Lilly spent the days when she wasn’t at school helping her mother. They would pick beans, okra, and cotton until their limbs and joints screamed. They would hull peas, skin tomatoes, and blanch and can vegetables. In summer, the mother and daughter would scour the surrounding woods for huckleberries and blackberries, then make them into jam to last through to the following spring. It was a work ethic she developed as a child that would stick with her for life. 

While Lilly never went hungry, she grew up understanding that the prospect of doing without was never far off. Family income was volatile, and the broader U.S. economy was fragile. The McDaniels family wasn’t poor, per se, but it certainly wasn’t wealthy. Early on, Lilly developed an understanding that economic independence meant opportunity; it meant freedom. 

After graduating from high school, Lilly got a job working at General Electric, welding filaments for television sets and radios, but she was laid off when the company, facing economic headwinds, was forced to make cuts. Shortly thereafter she and her husband Charles found out that they were expecting a baby. Her daughter Vickie and son Phillip were born in quick succession, keeping her out of the paid labor force while Charles worked.

But in the late 1960s, as the Ledbetter family struggled to make ends meet, Lilly went back to work, holding down a slew of jobs until, in 1979, she happened upon a magazine article about Goodyear, the tire and rubber factory in Gadsden, not far from where she’d grown up.

New technology, the feature explained, was transforming the company’s production methods, and its management philosophy was morphing too. Teamwork was the new buzzword, and in a display of particularly adventurous experimentation, executives were for the first time actively seeking to recruit women. Lilly applied and got the job. 

‘Goodyear’s Mistake’

Lilly was an industrious worker and proud of her new role, but in an almost entirely male-dominated company, rife with misogyny and sexism, she suffered.

Men she worked with provoked and insulted her. On one occasion, Lilly wrote in her 2012 memoir, Grace and Grit, one co-worker touched her breast. 

Another colleague referred to her as “Goodyear’s mistake;” while another joked to her face about raping her, she recalled. And the abuse only got worse when, as a result of her stellar performance record, she was promoted to supervisor. At that point, according to her memoir, one man announced: “I already take orders from a bitch at home, and I’m not taking orders from a bitch at work.”

One shift foreman, Lilly wrote, referred to her and a Black man who was working on the same team as two “losers” who were likely to “ruin” his performance record. The foreman vowed to get rid of them. 

“As far as he and some of the others were concerned,” Lilly wrote, “I might as well have been a missionary in a strange land, trying to convert them to a new religion.”

During a performance evaluation in 1981, one of her supervisors suggested she sleep with him to get a more favorable review, she wrote. She walked out of the meeting and a few months later was demoted.

That incident did, in fact, inspire Lilly to file an official complaint with the The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with dealing with cases of workforce abuse and discrimination, but ultimately she decided not to pursue a legal case. Doing so, she knew, would inevitably become a scenario of her word against his. In any case, all she really wanted was her job back as a supervisor and the ability to work without being harassed. Not long after, she was reinstated as a supervisor, but in terms of her colleagues' behavior, nothing changed. 

Timed Out

After the incident with the note in the mailbox, Lilly filed her second complaint with the EEOC and this time she did follow up with a formal lawsuit claiming pay discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

A jury initially sided with her, awarding her compensation and punitive damages worth more than $3 million, but Lilly never saw any of that: Goodyear appealed the decision based on the argument that her claim had come too late; that it was invalid because of the statute of limitations. A circuit court of appeals agreed, and when the case ended up in the Supreme Court—a last ditch attempt by Lilly’s legal team to win—that court sided with Goodyear too. 

In a 5-4 decision—the Supreme Court said that employers cannot be sued under Title VII if the claims are based on decisions made by the employer more than 180 days prior, but Lilly’s case hinged on salary data that dated back decades. In effect, they told her, her case had timed out. 

At that point, others might have capitulated. Not Lilly. She went on to lobby for equal pay with the help of a multitude of organizations which resolutely joined her cause: the National Women’s Law Center, the American Association of University Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL–CIO, the National Employment Lawyers Association, and the National Council of Jewish Women. For a time, she was spending at least two weeks a month in Washington D.C., meeting congressional staff and telling her story to anyone who would listen. She was tireless in her fight for equal pay between genders. 

On January 29, 2009, just nine days after he took office, President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act into law, essentially nullifying Ledbetter v. Goodyear. The law, among other things, dramatically extends the time frame during which an employee can file a discrimination claim. 

Under the new law, employees could now file a claim within 180 days of the last paycheck they received that was discriminatory. Under the original Supreme Court ruling employees could only do so up to 180 days after the initial act of discrimination, which for Lilly would have been way back in the 1970s, when her salary was first set. It was Lilly’s resilience and passion, as well as the force and influence of the organizations that threw their support behind her, that won Obama’s support.

“Lilly Ledbetter did not set out to be a trailblazer or a household name,” Obama said in his address after signing the legislation. “She was just a good hard worker who did her job—and did it well—for nearly two decades before discovering that, for years, she was paid less than her male colleagues for the very same work.”

The bill, he said, was intended to send a clear message; a message “that making our economy work means making sure it works for everybody.” Describing Lilly’s motivation, Obama said that “[Lilly] knew it was too late for her—that this bill wouldn’t undo the years of injustice she faced or restore the earnings she was denied,” but “this grandmother from Alabama kept on fighting, because she was thinking about the next generation.”           

A Tireless Fight 

During Lilly’s lobbying and constant re-telling of her story—a battle that laid the foundation for a war she fought on behalf of everyone—Lilly suffered huge personal losses. In December 2008, not long after that blistering Supreme Court defeat, Charles Ledbetter—her constant companion and a stalwart champion of all that Lilly stood and fought for—passed away. It was one week shy of the couple’s 53rd wedding anniversary. 

For all the heartbreak, though, Lilly harbored a steely resolve to keep going. She understood that the stakes were too high to give up, and in doing so, she demonstrated—including to generations to come—what the power of persistence can yield. 

So where does that leave us now, today?

At a time when women are still written out of history—assuming they’re even written into it in the first place—our job can be to ensure that Lilly’s name is not obscured by the passage of time; that it is more than a perfunctory entry in a history book.

More than that, we can use Lilly’s name as a reminder to hold power to account; to create a workforce in which everyone gets a fair shake, regardless of age, religion, national origin, race, sex, or disability. 

In 2011, Lilly was honored by the National Women’s Hall of Fame. At the time she said of her continuous advocacy that when she dies, she wants her pastor to be able to say at her funeral that she “made a difference.” 

It’s pretty clear, she did.

Thank you, Lilly Ledbetter. Your persistence is our inspiration.

Josie Cox is a journalist, author, broadcaster and public speaker. Her book, “WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality,” was released earlier this year. Parts of this essay have been excerpted from the book.