Tomorrow marks the fortieth anniversary of a historic class-action lawsuit’s consent decree spearheaded by an LAPD police sergeant named Fanchon Blake, with little to no help from anyone. Her fight for female equality would help end institutionalized sexual and racial discrimination practices not just in the LAPD but in law enforcement in general.
Tomorrow also marks the pub date of my new book, Busting the Brass Ceiling: How a Heroic Female Cop Changed the Face of Policing (Incubation Press, 2020), which chronicles the circumstances that compelled my co-author Fanchon to sue her beloved police department, and the case that would drag on for seven years before changing the face of policing.
We’ve come a long way when it comes to women’s rights and female equality. According to a July 7, 2020, Pew Research Center survey, 61% of U.S. women now say the term ‘feminist’ describes them well. However, this comes at a time when the current administration has blocked the ERA amendment from being added to the Constitution of the United States, even though the requisite 38 states have ratified the amendment. No wonder a majority of U.S. adults feel that we still have a long way to go on the gender equality front.
Of course, we wouldn’t be where we on the female equality front are now without the courage of women like Fanchon. When she joined the LAPD in 1948, she walked a beat in a skirt, a girdle and heels for her first three years, until the department’s female officers were directed to more “ladylike” roles. Even though her ambition to rise in the ranks would be further curtailed by an increasingly discriminatory agenda, her relentless tenacity finally led to a promotion to sergeant nineteen years later. In 1973, when LAPD policy barred her from rising any further and threatened to eliminate women from the department, she sued, thereby initiating one of the country’s landmark Title VII cases.
She sure didn’t know what she was getting herself into. But “because of the precedent [her case] set in civil rights law, Fanchon’s crusade for women’s rights has impacted—and improved—workplaces across the country,” writes Joseph Wambaugh, the bestselling author of police and crime books who penned Busting the Brass Ceiling’s foreword.
“Fanchon Blake’s story illuminates how ugly and wrong, how corrosive and destructive, is discrimination,” writes Congresswoman Pat Schroeder in the memoir’s afterword. “She shows us how difficult discrimination is to dislodge, yet she inspires us to work diligently to end it.”
Women like Fanchon made possible many of today’s female professional successes. “I can’t imagine a more difficult platform to rise on, or the courage it took to single-handedly push women forward despite harassment and even danger from her own people,” writes Barbara Hinske, an attorney and bestselling author. “Busting the Brass Ceiling is an inspiring story of courage and persistence, peppered with insights about policing that are just as pertinent today as they were in Fanchon’s day. A page-turner, to be sure.”
Busting the Brass Ceiling: How One Heroic Cop Changed the Face of Policing by Fanchon Blake and Linden Gross (Incubation Press, 2020) is available online and in stores. To learn more about the book or to connect with me, please visit https://lindengross.com/writer/book-titles/busting or leave a note right here. I’d sure love to know what you think of the book.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.