gwendolyn hoyt was what we would today call a battered woman. she was abused by her philandering husband and one day he humiliated her to the breaking point. she was beside herself. it was kind of like billy the story of billy, he is unable to speak so he strikes. gwendolyn saw her son's baseball bat in the corner of the room. she took it with all her might and hit him over the head. he fell to the ground. it was the end of his life, the beginning of the prosecution. gwendolyn hoyt's id was it's important for me to have women on the jury because women would understand the rage i felt. hillsborough county floor in those days did not put women on the jury bolster that was supposed to be a favorite to women. the supreme court said in gwendolyn hoyt's case -- we went on the center of home and family life. therefore, they don't need to be on jury. gwendolyn hoyt floor to get the court to understand that citizens have obligations as well as rights, and one obligation is to participate in the administration of justice by serving on juries. the law said

well, the supreme court rejected gwendolyn hoyt's plea in 1961. and what happened in those ten years in between, there was an enormous change in society. women were entering the workforce in increasing numbers. women were living many years longer than the day that the youngest child left the nest. birth control was more freely available. all of those changes in society led the law to catch up and that's what was happening in the 1970s. so i was fantastically lucky to be born when i was and to have the skill of a lawyer. in that rigby relief there are names of two women on the cover. pauline murray and dorothy kenyon. these were women who were saying the same things that we were saying. dorothy kenyon's mission was to put women on juries in every state in the country. and pauline murray was an african-american woman who had herself -- she wrote an article called "jane crow and the law" in which she compared the disadvantages that african-americans faced with the disadvantages that women faced that for women as well as members of minority groups, th