Lilly Ledbetter, whose name was attached to the Fair Pay Act in former President Obama's first act in 2009, has died at the age of 86, reports the New York Times. The cause of death, on Saturday, was respiratory failure. "Lilly Ledbetter passed away peacefully last night at the age of 86," the family said in a statement, per AL.com. "Our mother lived an extraordinary life." Ledbetter led a decades-long fight for equal pay between men and women that began with the 1998 discovery that Goodyear was paying her some $2,000 a month less than her male counterparts after 19 years at the company. That revelation came via an anonymous note and resulted in her filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that year and suing her employer in 1999.
Ledbetter eventually won that case in 2003, and was awarded $3.8 million in a jury decision that the Times notes was eventually reduced to $360,000. She told NPR in 2009 that she never received a dime. The case hit the Supreme Court in 2007 and was struck down in a 5-4 ruling, with Ruth Bader Ginsberg among the dissenting justices and dinging the court for its "parsimonious reading" of the law that required Ledbetter to file within 180 days.
In signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act two years later, Obama said:
- "Over the course of her career, she lost more than $200,000 in salary, and even more in pension and Social Security benefits. Lilly could have accepted her lot and moved on. But instead, she decided that there was a principle at stake, something worth fighting for. So she set out on a journey that would ... take her all the way to the Supreme Court, and lead to this bill which will help others get the justice she was denied."
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