Elizabeth Warren Is Right. In The 1970s, Pregnant Teachers Didn't Keep Their Jobs.
Back then, teaching was the national model for discriminating against pregnant workers and getting away with it.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign is on the offensive against a report that questions a compelling piece of her origin story: her account of being pushed out of her first teaching job because she was six months pregnant.
Although the reports don't contain evidence that Warren is lying, they show there is no written evidence she was fired from her elementary school job and they open the door to the possibility that she voluntarily resigned to raise a family.
What's missing, though, is a crucial fact about the time period when Warren says she was shown the door: In 1971, teaching wasn't just another profession where women experienced pregnancy discrimination. It was the national model for how employers could systematically discriminate against pregnant workers and get away with it.
School districts around the country followed plain-as-day policies that terminated pregnant teachers or forced them to take unpaid leave, usually around the fifth month of pregnancy when they were obviously pregnant. A National Education Association survey in 1970 found that a majority of school districts had such a policy, and that most of those policies came with no guarantee that a teacher would get her job back after giving birth.
That placed school teachers on the front lines of the fraught legal and cultural battles for better protections for working women, writes legal historian Deborah Dinner. National women's groups took up the treatment of pregnant teachers as an organizing cause. Women's legal advocates recruited teachers as civil rights test cases. The Supreme Court's first pregnancy discrimination case, argued in 1973, pitted three pregnant teachers against a "five month" policy. That case, and the questions it left unanswered, became the basis for the landmark Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.
In other words, when a pregnant Warren left her teaching job, pregnancy discrimination against teachers was rampant, controversial and inextricable from the much larger battle on the overall status of working women. The question isn't why her school board would lie about forcing her out " it's why wouldn't it?
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