On September 29, 2016, Rewire hosted a virtual book club to discuss Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women’s Lives at Work. Jodi Jacobson, Editor in Chief at Rewire, hosted the event, which featured the book’s author, Gillian Thomas, senior attorney at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, and the experts on Rewire’s legal team, Vice President of Law and the Courts Jessica Mason Pieklo and Senior Legal Analyst Imani Gandy.

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made it illegal to discriminate “because of sex.” That simple phrase didn’t mean much, though, until ordinary women began using the law to get justice on the job—and some of them took their fights all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Because of Sex goes beyond cases that helped shape workplace anti-discrimination policies, focusing on ten key women whose own lives changed the law,” writes Jessica Mason Pieklo, Rewire vice president of law and the courts.

Listen to the discussion below, and follow the online conversation as it happened by searching the hashtag #RewireBookClub on Twitter. And stay tuned to Rewire for future book discussions like these.

More about our host and speakers:

Jodi Jacobson is editor in chief at Rewire and is a longtime leader in the health and development community and an advocate with extensive experience in public health, gender equity, human rights, environment and demographic issues. Previously, Jodi was the director of advocacy at American Jewish World Service and the founder and executive director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE), an organization that monitors and seeks to promote accountability of U.S. international policy to women’s reproductive and sexual health and rights.

Gillian Thomas is a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project. She previously litigated sex discrimination cases at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund). Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, and Slate, and she has been interviewed by NPR and the Wall Street Journal, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.

Jessica Mason Pieklo is Vice President of law and the courts at Rewire. She is a writer and adjunct law professor in Boulder, Colorado. She is the former assistant director of the Health Law Clinic at Hamline Law School in St. Paul, Minnesota, and former litigator.

Imani Gandy is senior legal analyst at Rewire. She is a recovering attorney turned political blogger, journalist, and women’s rights activist. She is the founder of Angry Black Lady Chronicles, winner of the 2010 Black Weblog Award for Blog to Watch, and the 2012 Black Weblog Award for Best Political Blog. She is currently co-host of This Week in Blackness Prime. Her work has been featured at TheGrio.com, AlterNet, and she appears regularly on a variety of progressive radio shows and podcasts. She received her J.D. from University of Virginia School of Law in 2001, where she was a Hardy Cross Dillard scholar and an Editorial Board member of the University of Virginia Law Review.