Jan Silvers was forced to resign her teaching job while pregnant with daughter, Shanah (above).
When Jan Silvers became pregnant with her first daughter, she knew that she had to resign from her job as a special education teacher at Glendale Elementary School.
That’s what women did in 1971.
“You know, you accepted a lot. It was normal to lose your rights if you were a woman and you were pregnant,” remembers Silvers, who at the time went by Janet Setzen.
It was the same year that Elizabeth Warren, one of the frontrunners for the Democratic nomination for president, was also forced to resign her teaching job in New Jersey because of a pregnancy.
“When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience millions of women will recognize,” Warren has said on Twitter. “By June I was visibly pregnant — and the principal told me the job I’d already been promised for the next year would go to someone else.”
Warren’s story has drawn backlash from some who claim she has made up the story. But Silvers has no doubt.
“Women haven’t had rights for very long,” she notes dryly.
Silvers initially accepted her fate and resigned from the district.
But eventually, she asked Madison Teachers Inc. to take up her case. According to MTI and Silvers, the case forced every school district in the state to offer maternity leave.
Silvers graduated from UW-Madison in 1968 with a degree in behavioral disabilities, which was a new field at the time. She worked with children who had emotional problems, some of whom were on the autism spectrum.
Her job involved applying for grants, because these types of programs weren’t mandated. But there also weren’t many people trained to do the work.
When she became pregnant in 1971, there was never a possibility that she could keep working. “I was due in November, so I had to resign in June at the end of the school year,” she says. “So I resigned.”
But in the early part of the summer, she helped prepare for her successor. However, the district ended up having a vacancy to fill and asked her to stay on.
When she got her first check that fall, Silvers says it was noticeably smaller than her usual check. The district was paying her as a full-time substitute. But when she took an unpaid day off for a Jewish holiday, she was bumped down to a lower status, drastically cutting her pay.
“I was 25, barefoot and pregnant,” she says. “And I might have been hormonal, but you know what, you can’t pay me less.”
John Matthews, who served as MTI’s executive director from 1968 until his retirement in early 2016, says the district’s policy was typical for that time.
“Probably at that time, 90 percent of the teachers were female,” Matthews says. The policy of forcing pregnant women to resign increased turnover, he says. But, with UW-Madison based here, there was no shortage of young teachers eager to take their place.
Although MTI didn’t represent substitute teachers at the time, it agreed to take Silvers’ case. Attorney Bruce Ehlke represented Silvers — and another woman whose name Ehlke can’t remember — before a state administrative law judge in 1974.
At the time, Silvers was pregnant with her second child. She remains indignant at the arguments the school district’s attorney made during the case. “You would have thought when he said, ‘Look at her, we can’t depend on women in the workplace,’ that I was a rabbit and I had 28 children.”
The judge ruled in her favor, setting a precedent. “This judge said you owe this woman contractual pay for one year, minus what you’ve already paid her, minus six weeks maternity leave,” Silvers recalls. “And the minute he said that, Madison public schools had to start giving maternity leave.”
Matthews says the case had implications around the state. “What came out of that case was, you can work until the doctor says, ‘You are disabled from doing your job because of your pregnancy,’” Matthews says. “And then you go on your sick leave.”
Today, some women work up until they deliver, Matthews says, while others stop about two weeks before their due date. After delivery, both men and women are entitled to family leave, which is unpaid. But the employees’ insurance benefits continue and they can return to their job without losing seniority. The district also offers a year of unpaid childrearing leave.
In 1978, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act which prohibits “sex discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.” Ten years later, Wisconsin approved the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees six weeks of family leave. In 1993, the Congress passed the Family Medical Leave Act, securing up to 12 weeks of leave for the birth of a child.
Silvers had other fights with the Madison school district, culminating in a complaint where she charged the district unlawfully retaliated against her by rejecting later job applications.
The final case dragged on until 1986, when the districted settled for more than $100,000 in back pay. By that time, Silvers had moved on to a career in real estate.
For Silvers, the lesson is the power that unions can have.
“I didn’t go out looking for this. I got pregnant. That’s all that happened,” she says. “But then they didn’t treat me very well and I wasn’t stupid. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you and that’s why you need to be in a union.”
