Not all movies are about romance, some are about historic fights fought by ordinary people who are on a journey to do something extraordinary for others. Akin to this is the story of Lilly Ledbetter, a woman who, in a fight of her own, benefited millions of women. Now, she is being honoured with her own biopic, all set to release in the theatres on May 9th.
Who is Lilly Ledbetter?
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In the biopic ‘Lilly’, Patricia Clarkson stars as Lilly Ledbetter, a Goodyear employee who found out that she was getting paid less than her fellow supervisors, who were men. The film follows her legal battle in the U.S. Supreme Court, which led to the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in Congress in 2009.Lilly was born in Possum Trot, Alabama, in 1938, when there were limited options for a career for women. “She grew up without running water, without electricity, with only a high school education. Her clothes were made out of feed sack material,” said Lanier Scott Islom, who helped her put together her 2012 memoir Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond.Aimed to make things work, Lilly never shied from a job of any kind. She even worked at a chicken processing plant and picked cotton at one point to help her family meet ends. But her hard work over the years paid her with a job as a supervisor at Goodyear’s Gadsden, Alabama, plant in 1979 as a married mother of two children.However, with her professional growth, she encountered many men who were threatened by a powerful and ambitious woman. “One of her supervisors basically said [paraphrasing], ‘If you want to go to the motel down the street with me, I would ensure your promotion.'” shared Isom.“There was one guy who could not stop talking about her underwear and what kind of bra she was wearing, and one man who said [paraphrasing], ‘I don’t like women around here. What if I have to scratch my balls and fart?’” added writer and director of the biopic, Rachel Feldman.
Lilly Ledbetter’s battle for equal pay
Image credits: Getty Images
Nineteen years into her job at Goodyear, Ledbetter found out that a young man she had trained was making more money than her. An anonymous tipster left her a note at work that revealed that she made up to $2,000 a month less than they did.Learning this, she worked with a young lawyer, Jon Goldfarb, to pursue a legal battle in 1999 where she won $3 million from the Northern District Court, which was reduced to $360,000 and later lost when Goodyear appealed. Later, in 2007, she lost her case in the U.S. Supreme Court due to the argument that claims had to be filed within 180 days of discriminatory action.However, lawyer and former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, enlightened Ledbetter, guiding her to take her fight to Congress. Lilly began trips to D.C. to lobby for the bill during a time when her husband was suffering from cancer and even had to get his jaw removed in the process.Her struggle over time led to President Barack Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on January 29, 2009, making it one of the first pieces of legislation he signed as he began his term as president.The act amended the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to allow employees to file pay discrimination claims within 180 days of their last paycheck rather than 180 days after their first discriminatory paycheck.While Lilly Ledbetter died on October 12, 2024, her struggle and fight for all the women out there is shown in the movie ‘Lilly’
