I AM WOMAN
“Yes, I am wise, but it’s wisdom born of pain …”
If someone had asked Darla Garber in 1967 what life would hold for her, the answer would have been fairly simple. All the blonde beauty really wanted out of life at that point was to love and be loved, to move away from home and to have children.
Becoming a feminist icon wouldn’t even have made the list.
But when Darla went to work for Saxon Business Products as a secretary in the summer of 1974, her branch manager pressured her to go out with him. He started showing up at her apartment at odd hours, and continued even after she said he was frightening her and she wasn’t interested in him.
The manager, John Johnson, became furious when she started dating another employee. He threatened to fire her and said she would “go out with him or with no one else.” In December, six months after she began working there, Darla again refused to have sex with Johnson.
He fired her.
Now this may be surprising to a generation of women that has worked in offices where managers and other employees bend over backward to avoid even the appearance of sexual harassment, but in 1974, Johnson’s behavior was not considered to be against the law. Ironically, efforts ten years earlier to scuttle the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 had the unintended consequence of giving women legal recourse.
In 1964, when reactionary Southerners were doing everything they could to block the bill, Rep. Howard Smith, D-Va., had offered an amendment to Title VII that he thought would serve that purpose. The original intent of Title VII was to block employment discrimination against African-Americans, but the 80-year-old Smith amended it to include discrimination on the basis of sex.
A senior Justice Department official who was in the House gallery the day Smith introduced his amendment remembers it as a big joke. “They didn’t think there was any discrimination against women that mattered, said attorney Norbert Schlei. “They were laughing down on the floor as they were talking about it.”
Among the unintended consequences of Smith’s amendment was that it gave Darla and other early plaintiffs an opening to sue for legal recourse. They argued that an employer who fired or punished a woman for refusing his sexual advances was discriminating against her on the basis of sex and violating her civil rights.
That may seem obvious now after three decades of decided law, but it certainly wasn’t in the mid 1970s. Many newspapers around the country said that sexual harassment was nothing more than bad manners, and said the law shouldn’t be involved in matters of personal relationships.
Indeed, in March 1976, a federal district court ruled in Garber v. Saxon Industries, Inc., that sexual harassment was not prohibited under Title VII. But 11 months later, ironically on Valentine’s Day, the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the ruling and said that sexual harassment was a violation of an employee’s civil rights. It was the first federal court case to make that ruling.
Darla Garber had made history.
***
Of course, that was never what she set out to do. Darla’s goals were fairly common among young girls in the ‘60s – to love and be loved, to move away from home, to get married and to have a family.
“That was all I wanted back then,” she said. “I never felt like I ‘fit in’ while I was in high school. I have always suffered from health problems, depression and a good case of low self-esteem. I never really intended to have a career.”
Both during and immediately after high school, Garber worked as a secretary (“The kind of job they now call administrative assistant,” she says), and a year or so after graduation she made a decision. She was working for the federal government at the time, and she came to the conclusion that if she wanted to climb much higher than the bottom of the employment ladder, she needed to get some more education.
She discussed it with her father and he thought it was a great idea. A few weeks later, Garber moved out of her apartment in Arlington, Va., and enrolled at East Tennessee State University.
College started well.
“Initially I was an above average student, got a job in the sports administrative office and made all the cuts on the gymnastic team,” she said. “However, each quarter I made more and more friends and started to party hearty.”
She says even now, one of her biggest faults is that she does everything to excess. She smoked too much, drank too much and loved too much. Her grades started to fall.
Then something happened that Garber says changed her life forever.
“I was raped by a guy I was dating,” she said. “He even brought a friend along to assist and participate.”
In the mid ‘70s, date rape wasn’t even on the legal radar. Courts were still assuming that if a woman wound up in a man’s apartment, she was consenting to whatever the man wanted to do. Garber was devastated by what had happened, and rather than returning home for the summer, she stayed with her grandparents in Knoxville. She planned to work as a fashion coordinator at a department store and attend the University of Tennessee.
But there was a problem. She learned she was pregnant by one of the two young men who had raped her.
“Calling my parents and telling them what had happened was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do,” she said. “They came to Knoxville and went with her to meet with a lawyer and with a prosecuting attorney.”
They got a nasty surprise. One of the two rapists was the son of one of the judges in the local criminal courts, and even though he certainly would have recused himself, it probably would have been difficult to find a judge who didn’t know the defendant.
“I was also told that since I had large breasts and had consumed some alcohol that night, I should not file any actions,” Garber said. “I returned home to Virginia, had an abortion and decided I wanted to work in the legal field and help straighten things out.”
***
Things went well for a while. She found an apartment, got a full-time job and managed to take college classes as well.
But the job was at Saxon, where the aforementioned Johnson took an unhealthy interest in her. Eventually he gave her an ultimatum – sleep with him or accept being fired.
She chose fired, but she sued the company for sexual discrimination.
“Nothing like it had ever been accepted by the courts before,” she said.
Of course lawsuits take years, and people have to find a way to live while they’re waiting for justice. Garber couldn’t get a job anywhere, because when a would-be employer asked her where she had been working, she always told the truth. She said she had been fired and that she was suing her previous employer.
There might be worse things to tell an interviewer, but there aren’t many. Just as lawyers hate to put people who have been part of hung juries on their jury, companies aren’t looking to hire employees who not only know they can sue their bosses but have actually done it.
“No one would hire me,” Garber said. “As a result I lost my apartment, my phone was cut off, I had no groceries. I didn’t even have toilet paper – I had to steal some from a public restroom. It’s hard to go on job interviews when you don’t even have money to pay for parking.”
She finally did get a job with Fairfax County government and later beat out more than 800 other applicants to get a job with the county’s circuit court system. Meanwhile, her lawsuit against Johnson and Saxon Business Products was working its way through the courts.
“It took five long years and I eventually won,” she said. “But it came with a pretty high price. I had to file bankruptcy, and later I was mortified when other sexual discrimination cases would come into our court and my case would be cited as a precedent.”
As Garber worked to get her life back on track, she fell in love with an older man, a bailiff in the courts. They had been together for three years before he told her he was married to a woman who would never agree to a divorce.
“She was Catholic,” Garber said. “She wouldn’t let him have a divorce, but she turned her head to all of his affairs.”
Meanwhile, her own health problems were making her life a lot more complicated.
“My health issues are many, some I have had my whole life, others that came later,” she said. “I have COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), fibromyalgia, hidradenitis suppurativa (numerous cysts), pernicious anemia and chronic fatigue. I have had a stroke and a heart attack.”
Her COPD started after several bouts with pneumonia and was probably exacerbated by the fact that she smoked.
“It did cause me to stop smoking,” Garber said. “I still miss it every day but I’m too afraid to pick up the first cigarette because it would be all over.”
She carries oxygen with her at all times, but the only time she always needs to use it is when she is sleeping. Fibromyalgia attacks the fibrous tissues in her body and causes severe pain. Some days are better than others, yet it is unrelenting in its nature.
“With this comes a whole garbage bag of problems,” Garber said. “Like chronic insomnia, memory loss, also known as brain fog, peripheral neuropathy, hypothyroidism and others.”
Doctors speculate from her medical history that that many of her conditions been with her since she was a teenager. There are very few parts of her body that have not been operated on and none of the procedures were for cosmetic reasons.
At one point, her health was enough of an issue that she had to be treated with chemotherapy, radiation and dialysis at the National Institute of Health. Doctors told her she would never be able to have a child, which pretty much broke her heart.
Despite what the doctors said, she did become pregnant in 1982. She had fallen in love with a married man, a bailiff in the court system, although it was three years before he told her he was married.
“His wife was Catholic and would not agree to a divorce; she just turned her head to all of his affairs,” Garber said. “When I finally did become pregnant by him, he and everyone else wanted me to ‘get rid of it.’ I refused and another life-changing event occurred.”
She gave birth to Starla Nicole Patria Garber-Tucker during a snowstorm in 1983.
“I was the happiest woman on the planet,” Garber said. “She was beautiful and smart and – despite my drinking and smoking all through my pregnancy – she was healthy.”
The happiness was tempered by the fact that her longtime relationship with her baby’s father turned sour soon after.
“Just after our daughter’s first birthday, things changed,” she said. “He became verbally and physically abusive. I could take it, but I swore he would never have the chance to harm our child.”
She packed up and ran away to Tennessee, with her daughter and all their possessions packed into her Mustang. She had $26 to her name and decided that she would stay with her grandparents until she got settled.
Two weeks later, she got a call telling her that her lover had suffered a stroke and was in Bethesda Naval Hospital. Doctors quickly determined that he actually had brain cancer, which may have been the reason his behavior had changed.
Garber returned to Virginia with a U-Haul, and also met with him and some of their mutual friends. She left the next day for Knoxville.
“Two months to the day that I left he died, on my father’s birthday no less and our daughter was not yet 2,” she said. “I didn’t return to Virginia even for his funeral in respect of his other family. “
***
In 2009, the last contact I had with Darla Garber, she said the health issues and medications she had to take had made her memory very sketchy.
“It truly saddened me when I went to our 40th reunion (in 2007).” she said. “It was my first reunion, and I could not remember more than a handful of classmates. I wouldn’t say my life thus far is bad but it has been difficult. My best contribution to this world continues to be my daughter.
“I have never been married . Yet who knows? Maybe I’ll meet my Prince Charming any day now.”
***
The story above was written in 2009.
I have written before about what a disappointment it was to me that the planned book never got finished. My wife developed some health problems that became my top priority for several years, only only about half the intended chapters were finished. My chapter on Darla Garber was maybe the farthest along of all the ones that weren’t completed.
Still, there was no conclusion.
When I attended the 50th reunion in 2017, I joked with several of my classmates from ’67 that they were the winners. We had a state supreme court justice, a founder of a successful cosmetics company and a star of stage and screen.
All important men.
But think about this.
Garber v Saxon Industries was the first case to establish that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination under Title VII. Millions of American women have been protected by the law because of her case.
She never wanted to be a martyr or a crusader. She just wanted to have a happy life.
In the end, I guess she got some of it. When I saw the announcement of her death earlier this week, I saw that her last name was Garber-Spencer, so maybe she found a Prince Charming.
So rest in peace, pretty Darla.
You made a difference in this world.
A big difference.