After enough time spent listening to family stories, you begin to sort the myths from the moments, the legends from the people who quietly built them. For me, that person was Linda Work—brilliant, determined, and armed with the kind of self-assured voice that refuses to wait for permission.

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She lives a quiet life in Mexico, church bells ringing and stray fireworks cracking in the distance. She is my step-grandma. A former lawyer. A civil rights advocate. And, as I’d always heard whispered growing up—notable.

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At Georgetown Law in the 1960s, women were there, but only barely. She remembers just four women in a group of about 120. Most of her male classmates, in her words, "didn’t seem to have much respect for women." They heard she came from Sarah Lawrence College—a school that famously gave no grades—and assumed she’d coasted through on charm alone.

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Such a great joy, she recalls, in proving them wrong.

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"I wasn’t real brainy," she understates, "but I was in the top 10% of my class." She earned better grades than the boys who assumed she couldn’t. She was invited to join the Georgetown Law Review, a distinction many of her skeptics never received. She didn’t gloat. She didn’t stand on tables. She simply demonstrated—with calm precision—that

their assumptions were more fragile than their egos. "I just quietly showed them I had some brains." That quiet defiance eventually grew louder.

 

Her political awakening began in college, during the early sit-in movements. A friend participated in one of the first Woolworth’s boycotts at Yale. Around the same time, her closest friends were dating Tom Hayden and Chuck McDew, famous student activists deeply involved in social upheaval. She paid attention. Then she joined in.

 

She moved to Chicago after graduating, working for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, who supported her activism rather than suppressing it. They gave her time off to protest. They understood the moment. So she marched through Chicago’s streets demanding equal rights with the same confidence she carried later into courtrooms.

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Before law school, she worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), traveling across the South to investigate workplace discrimination. What shocked her wasn’t the existence of inequality—she expected that—it was the scale of it.

"I remember how disparate wages were for women. I hadn’t really realized."

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Men in management would insist their female workers preferred lower-skill positions. Linda didn’t buy it. She met single mothers supporting kids. Women who needed the same ladders men used effortlessly. One complaint at the Newport News Shipyards lodged in her memory—not because it was unique, but because it was ordinary. A boss baffled by the idea of women wanting more. "Why would she want to raise up in this field? It’s a man’s field." And yet—they were already there. Trapped at the bottom of it. Doing the work. Earning none of the credit.

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Linda’s life has always been about involvement—whether in activism or advocacy or simply showing up where progress demanded a presence. 

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"Get involved. Don’t sit there and bitch about what’s not right."

Then she adds, sharper: "Organize your friends. Organize your neighborhood. Get out there and do something for what you believe in, whatever it is."

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Quiet at first, loud when necessary—Linda spent her career proving worth doesn’t require permission, intelligence doesn’t need to brag, and progress belongs to the people who refuse to be spectators. Even now, decades later, her voice carries—not bitter, not boastful—but active and impatient with simple inertia.

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