Ahead of Her Time
1933 BU Law graduate Blanche Crozier wrote a groundbreaking article about sex discrimination in the Boston University Law Review. Decades later, it found a powerful audience: civil rights leader Pauli Murray and future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Photos by Laura Flippen, taken from a scrapbook compiled by Priscilla Garn
Ahead of Her Time
1933 BU Law graduate Blanche Crozier wrote a groundbreaking article about sex discrimination in the Boston University Law Review. Decades later, it found a powerful audience: civil rights leader Pauli Murray and future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In 1935, two years after she graduated cum laude from Boston University School of Law, Blanche Crozier published an article called “Constitutionality of Discrimination Based on Sex” in the Boston University Law Review, where she had served as an editor when she was a student.

“There is no large and general question in law which has been left in a more nebulous state than the question of how or to what extent the Federal Constitution applies to women,” she wrote in the article’s opening lines, adding a bit later that “although to the outlook of 1789 common law was the ideal and basis of liberty, this was an exclusively masculine liberty.”
Crozier went on to argue that the exclusion of women from the Constitution’s protections—excepting the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women’s right to vote in 1920—was as discriminatory as the exclusion of Black people prior to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.
“Race and sex are in every way comparable classes; and if exclusion in one case is a discrimination implying inferiority, it would seem that it must be in the other also,” she wrote.
Although the still unfinished effort to pass and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment was already underway, the argument that the Constitution as it existed in 1935 should apply to women was groundbreaking and one of the first examples of feminist legal scholarship.
“It had been recognized for race that treating people as inferior was a terrible constitutional problem,” says BU Law Professor David J. Seipp, a legal historian. “But, as for why that wasn’t a terrible constitutional problem for sex—no one had been asking that in professional legal circles.”
Yet the piece—one of five Crozier wrote for the BU Law Review in her relatively brief foray into the law—seems to have done nothing to advance Crozier’s stature, career, or even the women’s rights movement she had gone to BU Law to join. Crozier never worked as a lawyer; she didn’t work full time at all after law school until 1944 when she took a job teaching at a school that trained women to be secretaries.[1]
Decades would pass before her ideas would resurface, although, when they did, they found very fruitful ground. In 1965, the civil rights lawyer and activist Pauli Murray, who worked to include the word “sex” in the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, cited Crozier’s 1935 article; in 1979, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then a practicing attorney, followed suit.
Murray and Ginsburg were operating in an era that was much more conducive to women’s equality. They were also already well known in the field and related social justice movements. Murray was a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s who had helped develop the argument that led to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Ginsburg, of course, argued landmark gender discrimination cases before and later sat on the US Supreme Court. By comparison, Crozier was all but invisible during her life and even in death.
In December 1965, Murray wrote admiringly to a fellow women’s rights advocate about the “incisive thinking” in Crozier’s 1935 piece.
“Is she still alive?” Murray asked.
Her correspondent answered that Crozier had died “some years ago.” In fact, Crozier had passed away from congestive heart failure only a few months before. Her name was misspelled on her death certificate.
Path to the Law
By the time Crozier enrolled at BU Law in 1930, she was a published novelist and a mother of two daughters. What she wasn’t, however, was a doctor, which is what she set out to be when she attended Radcliffe College from 1911 to 1915.
The Vermont native, born in 1891 as Maude Benjamin, was a stand-out student in Cambridge, ranking first in her class in each of her four years, receiving several merit and need-based scholarships, and having been elected as a junior to the college’s founding chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor society formed in 1776.[2] She supported herself in college in part by washing dishes.[3]
After her sophomore year, Crozier worked as a researcher at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research on Agar’s Island, which Harvard had cofounded. According to work by Boston College Professor Jenna Tonn, Crozier made progress there toward her goal of becoming a physician, eventually publishing an article based on her investigation into Bermudian sponges in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. She also met her future husband, Harvard PhD student William J. Crozier. His notebooks, which Tonn reviewed, describe their courtship:
“[R]owed home with B… Much fun,” W.J. Crozier wrote at one point, adding at another, “B & I walked back slowly, got lost twice (!)”

A 1913 photo of Blanche Crozier and the research team at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research on Agar’s Island
Crozier seems to have been smitten as well—her Radcliffe senior picture is accompanied by the quote “ambition is no cure for love”[4]—and, on June 25, 1915, two days after she graduated, the couple were married at the home of Radcliffe Dean Bertha M. Boody.[5]
But, if ambition was no cure for love, in Crozier’s case, the emotion was no substitute for professional drive, either. In a submission to Radcliffe’s alumni office in 1928, Crozier wrote, in response to the question of whether a married woman and mother can have a successful career, “I think she must in order to get much satisfaction out of life; and what must be done can be done.”[6]
Two years later, Crozier enrolled at BU Law. According to a recent interview with her grandson, Bill Garn, Crozier went to law school to learn about women’s rights. If so, then she must have learned a great deal: All her articles for the Boston University Law Review dealt with the law’s—and society’s—treatment of women: a 1933 piece (her student note) critiquing a US Supreme Court case that upheld limits on the number of hours women could work, a 1934 piece exploring laws governing women’s nationality, a 1935 piece on marital support, the 1935 article that was later cited by Murray and Ginsburg, and a 1937 piece on the domicile of women and children being dependent on a husband’s location.
It is possible that Crozier was merely aligning herself with a movement that by then had gathered some momentum. But she may also have been personally motivated to explore the subject of equality. Before she enrolled at BU Law, Crozier had already learned about discrimination the hard way.
Career and Personal Setbacks
After their wedding in 1915, Crozier and her husband went back to Bermuda to work, but, according to Tonn’s research, only W.J. Crozier was compensated. He received a $1,000 fellowship. In contrast, when Radcliffe Dean Boody found out that Crozier would not be paid, she rallied the college’s alumni, and several women wrote checks to provide a salary of $300.
Officially, Crozier was the research station’s librarian and recorder, but, in W.J. Crozier’s scientific notes from that period, Tonn says she identified Crozier’s handwriting along with her husband’s.
Despite being sidelined, Crozier didn’t give up on her own dream of a career in the sciences, at least not right away. In addition to publishing her paper on sponges, she took a semester of graduate-level courses in biology at Radcliffe in the fall of 1916. But she couldn’t continue her studies. That October, her mother died in a fire[7] (Crozier’s father had died when she was three[8]). Then, in June of 1917, her first daughter, Priscilla, was born.[9] Over the next several years, the Crozier family moved often as W.J. Crozier accepted teaching positions at the University of Illinois Medical School and the University of Chicago (daughter Ruth was born in that city in 1920), and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 1925, they landed back in Massachusetts when W.J. Crozier joined the Harvard faculty and became a well-known figure in physiology.[10]

Blanche Crozier and her first daughter, Priscilla, in summer 1917

Blanche Crozier and her daughters, Priscilla (right) and Ruth (left) at Nahant Beach, north of Boston
In her personal life, Crozier was facing roadblocks as well. Although she listed her status as “married” on her 1928 alumni submission, at least in her husband’s view, the marriage may already have been over. In a petition for divorce filed with the Middlesex County Probate Court on September 20, 1933—just a few months after Crozier graduated from BU Law—W.J. Crozier wrote that starting on April 17, 1927, Crozier had subjected him to “cruel and abusive treatment.”
According to a front-page Boston Globe article published at the time of the couple’s divorce trial in November of 1933, W.J. Crozier testified that Crozier “nagged him constantly” and had “formed the practice of typing at 5 o’clock in the morning… a practice which made him very nervous and agitated.”
It is unclear what happened on April 17, 1927, but, in March of that year, Crozier received notice from Little, Brown that her novel, Smiley’s Haven, would be published with an advance payment of $250.[11] The novel is about a woman on a tropical island who assumes financial responsibility for her family when her husband proves incapable of doing so. And, of course, in 1933, when W.J. Crozier filed for divorce due in part to Crozier’s typing, some of what she had been typing had been picked up by the BU Law Review: her 1933 student note, “Regulations of Conditions of Employment of Women.”
In that piece, which examined the Supreme Court’s 1908 Muller v. Oregon decision, Crozier sidestepped the question of whether regulating hours or work conditions was legal or socially desirable. Instead, she focused on whether the law should do so specifically for one sex.
There had been women’s rights advocates on both sides of this question from the 1890s through the 1930s, according to Seipp. But Crozier forcefully objected to the successful argument in the case, made by Louis D. Brandeis (who by the time of Crozier’s writing was a sitting US Supreme Court justice): that public policy has an interest in “protecting” women, who are generally responsible for rearing children, from oppressive employers.
“He introduced the potential mothers-of-the-race argument,” she wrote, “an argument which, from the inevitability of its popular appeal, and its imperviousness to embarrassment on grounds of scientific inaccuracy, was nothing less than a stroke of genius. It opens the possibility of any imaginable infringement of personal rights, depending only on a general belief that it would be a good thing.”
Crozier argued that such laws made it more difficult for women to earn a living and provide for themselves or their families. Instead of protecting women, they protected men—from competition in the labor market.
[Crozier] moves beyond the legal system to think, ‘What are the alternatives? How else in the very long history of human beings, have we done things completely differently?’ That’s a move we now call critical theory. There are things we’re told are universal, eternal, natural, and obvious truths. She says, ‘No, they weren’t.’
Finding her Footing
The seven years immediately preceding and following Crozier’s divorce—during which she was a student at BU Law and then a single mother raising two teenage daughters—constitute Crozier’s entire career in the legal realm.
But they were productive years. And while it took Crozier’s words a while to find their mark, they were well positioned. The Boston University Law Review was top ranked in the early 20th century, and two of her Law Review pieces were abstracted in Current Legal Thought. Equal Rights magazine, where Crozier placed two articles in in 1934[12] and 1935,[13] was published by the National Woman’s Party, which was formed in 1916 to advocate for women’s suffrage and later pushed for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Over the years, scholars have cited Crozier’s articles to varying degrees. Notably, Ginsburg revisited Crozier’s work after she was on the Supreme Court, quoting her 1933 student note in a 2009 speech commemorating the centennial anniversary of the Muller decision.
“As feminist lawyer Blanche Crozier quipped in 1933: If night work by women was ‘against nature,’ starvation was even more so,’” Ginsburg wrote.
The justice added that, although she had been taught as a law student to celebrate Muller, in her work on gender discrimination cases, she had come to a different conclusion—the one put forth by Crozier more than 75 years earlier.
“However well intended, such laws could have the perverse effect—they could operate to protect men’s jobs from women’s competition,” Ginsburg wrote.
Above all, what stands out about Crozier’s legal scholarship between 1933 and 1937 is its singularity.
“We can’t find anybody else saying these things at the time,” says Seipp, who has been researching Crozier’s life and work with the help of Tess Oatley (’24). “That’s significant.”
In her writing, Seipp says, Crozier “gets the legal system she’s in very accurately.” But she was also ahead of her time in critiquing that system and comparing it to other social and legal orders around the world, even drawing on anthropology and ethnography about matrilocal societies in the process.
“She moves beyond the legal system to think, ‘What are the alternatives? How else in the very long history of human beings, have we done things completely differently?’” he explains. “That’s a move we now call critical theory. There are things we’re told are universal, eternal, natural, and obvious truths. She says, ‘No, they weren’t.’”
Boston College’s Tonn says what struck her most about Crozier was “the intellectual distance that she traveled: From studying invertebrates in Bermuda to fictionalizing that in a somewhat substantial novel to then trying to understand or problematize not just her role but the role of women in society more broadly.”
“That speaks to her interest in the world,” Tonn says. “She had to have a kind of astonishing force of will.”
In the summer of 1935, Crozier and her daughters Priscilla and Ruth drove across the country in five weeks with their dog, Shyla.
Rallying Women
Crozier tried to recruit other women to the cause of equality. In her first piece for Equal Rights—called “On the Women’s Side”—she suggested women support each other with their purchases and patronage, describing an experience she had in Chicago when she asked a Rush Medical College professor whether he could suggest any women doctors.
“He said stiffly that he did not know of any women he could recommend,” she wrote. “However, he knew a very good man, he said, and wrote out the name and address for me.”
Later, when Crozier went to the recommended doctor, he “turned out to be a youngster without either experience or ability… I could hardly have hit upon anything less distinguished if I had chosen at random from the telephone book.”
Crozier’s second article for Equal Rights seems even more personal, although it is written entirely in the third person. In it, she describes a hypothetical marriage between a man and woman of identical talent and potential.
“Consider two young persons of ability and promise,” she wrote, in the essay, titled “The Woman Pays What.” “Neither they nor their friends would doubt that one of them has about as good a chance as the other to amount to something. But they marry each other. Immediately thereupon—though their discovery of it may be gradual—law and custom wipe out this equality at a blow… Not what she herself can do or be, but what she can help the young man to do or be, has now become the important question for her.”
Crozier went on to argue that, in the case of a separation between the couple, the woman’s situation is even more precarious.
“The wife, although she may be very cultured and well informed, with assets of character and social graces, is not a developed individual in proportion to the years she has lived,” she wrote. “What it is, is an arrested development in herself as an individual.”
Crozier states that a “partial escape” from this fate exists: work.
But, at this point, Crozier still had not worked formally since her time at the Bermuda research station, and she wouldn’t until 1944 when she became a teacher at the Chandler School for Women in Boston, where she remained until 1954 as an instructor of history, economics, and science. From 1954 to 1956, she taught at the Chapel Hill School in Waltham.
In her final year at that institution, the senior class dedicated their yearbook to her.
“As a teacher you have been forthright and stimulating, teaching us to reason and think for ourselves,” the young women wrote in a note accompanied by a photo of Crozier sitting cross-legged at a desk piled with books. “As a guide you have been interested in our class plans and helpful with suggestions when we were in need of assistance. And lastly, as a friend, you have been understanding and forgiving. The role you have played as a teacher, guide and friend will be a lasting influence in our future.”
Crozier’s own future was more finite. On January 9, 1963, her daughter Priscilla (Bill Garn’s mother) filed a petition to place her in a conservatorship, stating that Crozier had become “incapacitated” due to “mental weakness” and “physical incapacity.” Crozier signed the document as well, and, in this last act of her own volition, she apparently followed her long-time convictions. The doctor who affirmed that Crozier was “of sufficient ability to assent” to the conservatorship was well known and respected, having treated the survivors of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Club fire in Boston. Her name was Helen Sinclair Pittman.[14]
Legacy Outside the Law
Crozier was 73 years old when she died on April 22, 1965.[15]

Bill Garn only met her once, on a visit to the nursing home where Crozier was living when he was about eight years old. By then, Crozier couldn’t speak. But she had already made an impression on her grandson.
“She was always sort of a legend to me,” he says. “Studying Greek, going to Radcliffe, writing a book, going to law school.”
Crozier’s influence on her daughters is harder to judge, but, in some ways, Priscilla and Ruth seem to have set out to fulfill the two distinct dreams their mother tried unsuccessfully to combine: love and ambition. Priscilla was a talented painter and raised two children, but she did not work outside the home. She remained married to her anthropologist husband until his death in 2007, and she died a few months later in January 2008.[16]
Ruth Crozier, who died in 2004, never married. She was a scientist. Early in her career, she worked with Gregory Pincus, who helped develop the birth control pill. Later, she moved to the National Institutes of Health where she worked until she retired in 1983. One of her most important efforts there was to oversee a massive, decade-long study of 10,000 men who had undergone vasectomies, which showed conclusively that the procedure had no long-term health risks and helped shift some of the burden of contraception to men.
Bill Garn says his Aunt Ruth told him once that she always had “two battles to fight” in her career. They would have sounded very familiar to her mother.
“One was that she didn’t have a PhD,” he says. “The other was that she was a woman.”
References
1. Crozier, Mrs. Blanche B. (Blanche M. Benjamin) ’15. Records of the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association (Series 2), ca.1894–2004, RG IX, Series 2, Box 70., Box: 70. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. Accessed October 10, 2022.
2. Records of the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association.
3. “Dishwashing for Writers,” Berkshire Evening Eagle, May 22, 1928.
4. Records of the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association.
5. “Radcliffe Girl A Bride,” Boston Globe, June 26, 1915.
6. Records of the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association.
7. Emily M. (Clough) Benjamin, Certificate of Death, State of Vermont, 1916.
8. Buzzell B. Benjamin, Certificate of Death, 1894.
9. Records of the Radcliffe College Alumnae Association.
10. “William John Crozier: 1892–1955,” American Journal of Psychology 69, no. 1 (March 1956).
11. Little, Brown and Company Records, 1810–1996, undated (MS Am 3171). Houghton Library, Harvard University.
12. Equal Rights XX, no. 11–13 (April 14, 21, 28 1934), Folder 28, Box: 2, Folder: 28. Equal Rights Newsletter, MS-144. Valdosta State University Archives and Special Collections.
13. Equal Rights 21, no. 4–5/ 1, no. 5–6 (April 1, 6, 13, 15 1935), Folder 39, Box: 2, Folder: 39. Equal Rights Newsletter, MS-144. Valdosta State University Archives and Special Collections.
14. Middlesex County Probate Court.
15. Cozier [sic], Mrs. Blanche. Ohio Department of Health, Division of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death.
16. “Obituary: Stanley Marion Garn (1922–2007),” American Journal of Physical Anthropology (April 2009).
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