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Karen DeCrow: In her 76 years, the landscape for women in America underwent vast change.

(Gloria Wright | The Post-Standard)

During the last few months, as Karen DeCrow's cancer steadily progressed, Amy Doherty was among her caregivers. DeCrow and Doherty were close for years. When Doherty gently asked for a chance to help, DeCrow -- against her own independent instincts -- accepted.

"She had such a wonderful, quirky sense of humor," Doherty said. With two other good friends, Minna Buck and Carol Wolkensdorfer, Doherty was there to comfort DeCrow in the final stage of a monumental life built around laughter, knowledge ...

And rebellion.

Even near the end, aware of what was coming, she told Wolkensdorfer:

"I'm not afraid."

DeCrow died Friday, at 76. Across the nation, she is being eulogized as a champion in the American quest for women's rights. She was a pillar of the greater Syracuse chapter of the National Organization for Women -- Georgina Hickey, a historian of the women's movement, says Syracuse had one of the nation's earliest local chapters -- and DeCrow would eventually become president of the national group.

In 2009, after DeCrow was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, she walked through the gallery and studied the names she'd be joining on the wall: Susan B. Anthony. Eleanor Roosevelt. Sandra Day O'Connor.

Imagine, she said: She'd lived to see a world where a little girl could dream of being anything.

Still, DeCrow "never really got the recognition she deserved," said Gail Collins, a columnist for The New York Times. Last year, DeCrow introduced Collins when the columnist came to Syracuse as part of the Rosamond Gifford lecture series. Collins reminded the audience of how the seemingly lightning-fast arrival of so many opportunities makes it easy to forget how women -- only a few decades ago -- were barred from many professions, and even from some public spaces.

Such activists as DeCrow, Collins said, were among "the first people to stand up and say: This isn't right."

Raised in Chicago, DeCrow told The New York Times in 1975 that she dreamed of a career as a journalist abroad - only to learn, quickly, that the field hardly offered an equal chance for women. She settled in Syracuse with her second husband - the marriage ended in divorce - and DeCrow attended law school here, then moved into the work that was her passion until her final illness: She was an activist for gender equality, a woman who loved writing and the law.

She was involved in every major gender issue of her era. She was always ready to debate the lightning rod questions - the morality of abortion rights or the meaning of the Equal Rights Amendment, which never became law. She fought on behalf of Title IX, the groundbreaking legislation that totally changed women's athletics. Like many of her peers, DeCrow championed equal pay for equal work.

DeCrow was also willing to trigger argument - and occasional unease - within her own movement. When an infant was born, she felt a father was also entitled to paternity leave from work. She argued that men didn't just deserve more time with their children in custody agreements; she felt it ought to be expected, even demanded, of them, in order to provide greater freedom for women and to strengthen and redefine what it means to be a man.

She contended that true equality couldn't happen until men "stepped up" to fully embrace child care and other family obligations, as she told Hickey - which is why she saw a symbolic imperative in working toward diaper changing stations in a family restroom at Syracuse Hancock Airport.

Yet it was her success in opening up barrooms for women that brought her national renown, and also put her celebrated sense of humor to the test. In 1968, DeCrow joined Joy Osofsky, vice president of the Syracuse chapter of NOW, and Joan Gordon Kennedy in a discrimination suit against the Rainbow Lounge at the Hotel Syracuse. They were represented by Faith Seidenberg, another young lawyer.

Kennedy had tried to get a drink there during the Christmas season. She was turned away because the hotel refused to serve "unescorted women."

DeCrow's part in challenging the policy triggered fury in Syracuse. One woman, in a letter to the editor of The Post-Standard, claimed DeCrow sought a world of grim equality modeled on the Soviet Union, an America where women would be reduced to "ditch-digging" laborers.

During the same period, when DeCrow became a candidate for mayor, reporters greeted her announcement with a piece-by-piece description of the clothing that she wore. She ran into more resistance by lobbying the all-male Syracuse Press Club, in the late 1960s, to add women to its membership.

When the Press Club finally made that change in 1971, The Herald-Journal responded with this headline:

"The gals win."

It only happened, the paper immediately added, "with male help."

The tavern question gained a national spotlight when DeCrow and Seidenberg took on a legend: They filed suit against McSorley's Old Ale House, a New York City pub that openly and enthusiastically excluded women. To go to court, DeCrow needed to be turned away: She and Seidenberg went to McSorley's on Jan. 9, 1969.

DeCrow later told The New Yorker how "guys were hooting at us," and a man who tried to show support by buying them a drink was left bloody after being physically hurled out the door.

McSorley's would eventually, and grudgingly, open its doors to women. Famed comics illustrator H.G. Peter did a drawing that showed Wonder Woman demanding a beer at the bar. William S. White, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, didn't celebrate: He wrote a column that mocked DeCrow and Seidenberg, calling their action "the last deprivation of man."

While DeCrow laughed off the taunts, she found nothing funny about her motivation. She became a lawyer at a time when law schools hardly were welcoming toward women. Her passion for challenging the male-only status in many taverns was an attempt to shatter the old belief that a woman, alone at a bar, must be a prostitute or a woman of "loose morals."

To DeCrow, the barroom ban epitomized the dangerous rationale that a woman -- in a social situation without the "protection" of a man -- was willingly putting herself in a position where, as some men said, she was "asking for it."

Even in Syracuse, Hickey said, the issue split the NOW chapter. Some members feared the campaign to open up bars would be seen as "silly" and lacking substance. DeCrow, for her part, had grown to equate men-only rules at taverns with white-only policies at lunch counters. Overturning illogical barriers, she believed, made a high-profile statement about equality.

"The issue was never about whether you could drink," Hickey said. "It was about whether you could function as an autonomous adult in a free society."

That is one of the reasons she sees DeCrow as historically important, "threaded through a very important period in the history of women's rights, and history in general."

Osofsky, a NOW officer in Syracuse at the time, is a psychologist and a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the LSU Health Sciences Center, in New Orleans. In a phone interview Saturday, she said she was not intimately involved with the Hotel Syracuse case, although she vividly recalls the obstacles of that era.

At Syracuse University, she said, she encountered occasional gender-based hostility while studying psychology in graduate school. One professor told her that if she wanted to fit in, she'd better think about smoking a pipe.

Osofsky and her husband Howard both remember watching with appreciation as DeCrow gained her confidence, and her voice, in a nation that still closed many doors to women.

Transforming that climate, for DeCrow, became a lifetime mission. She understood, Hickey said, that male-only privilege in restaurants or bars gave men an unfair advantage in business or politics. The idea of full access was another step in breaking open a society where women had essentially been restricted to working as "nurses, teachers or secretaries," said Rowena Malamud, a longtime friend of DeCrow's.

"We were very much second-class citizens," said Malamud, today's president of the local chapter of NOW. While girls today might struggle to understand those times, Malamud said that women who remember understand all too well: "We're very cognizant of how those things can be taken away."

In recent months, as DeCrow grew weaker, her caregivers say she did her best to keep her illness private. Her respite was her Jamesville home, built beside a stream, where she loved to play piano, keep her journals or bang out letters on her manual typewriter. She insisted to her doctors and nurses they'd all celebrate with a party once she recovered, and it was only in DeCrow's final weeks that she realized such a rally was not going to happen.

Even then, said Amy Doherty, her friend did not fall into sadness or regret. "She would say to me that she'd lived the way she wanted to live, that she set certain goals and reached them," Doherty said.

Karen DeCrow spent her last days in a community where the mayor and the county executive are women, where women are in charge of hospitals and colleges and many civic institutions, where little girls can grow up with aspirations of becoming engineers, athletes, physicians -- or lawyers.

She died at 6:10 a.m. Friday, just past dawn on a beautiful June morning.

Across Syracuse, children slept, dreaming of anything.



Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Post-Standard, who hopes to learn of whatever happened to Joan Gordon Kennedy, who touched off the lawsuit at the Hotel Syracuse in the late 1960s. Email him at skirst@syracuse.com or read more of his work at www.syracuse.com/kirst.