Box Turtle Bulletin

Born On This Day, 1929: Edie Windsor

Edith Shlain was born in Philadelphia to a Jewish immigrant family living above her father’s candy and ice cream store. When she was two years old, she and her brother were diagnosed with polio. Authorities quarantined her home and the store, which, during the great Depression, quickly put her father out of business. They wound up losing both their store and their home.

She dated boys in school, even though she also had crushes on girls. Homosexuality wasn’t something she was aware of as a concept, so she thought little about it. After she went to Temple University, she was assigned to write a paper on the 1948 Kinsey Report (Jan 5), which introduced her to the concept. She also fell in love with a female classmate while dating Saul Windsor. She broke up with Saul, but then reconciled after Edie decided she couldn’t live as a lesbian. They married, but divorced in 1952 after less than a year.

Edie moved to New York, where she hoped to meet other lesbians. But the gay community was deeply underground in the early 1950s, which didn’t do much for her social life. She studied mathematics at New York University and learned to write software on a UNIVAC that the Atomic Energy Commission had installed at NYU. After graduating, she went to work at IBM in 1958 where she had a distinguished career in computer engineering. She was honored by the National Computing Conference in 1987 as a “pioneer in operating systems.”

In 1963, Edie met Thea Spyer, a psychologist from the Netherlands, and they fell in love immediately, although their relationship caused strains in Edie’s career at IBM, where she had to keep their relationship under wraps. Thea proposed to Edie in 1967, and gave Edie a diamond broach instead of a ring, which would have been too risky. Edie couldn’t share the good news with any of her co-workers. “I [thought], you know, I’m sitting here not saying anything, and the most important thing in my life has happened,” she said. The news also estranged Edie and Theo further from their respective families who were uncomfortable with their relationship. But they grew ever stronger together. “It was a love affair that just kept on and on and on,” Edie said. “It really was. Something like three weeks before Thea died she said: ‘Jesus we’re still in love, aren’t we’.”

Thea and Edie

Neither Edie nor Thea had been very active in the gay community, but that changed after Stonewall. The got involved with the East End Gay Organization on Long Island, and helped to support the LGBT Community Center. Edie volunteered for the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), the 1994 Gay Games in New York, and Services & Advocacy for LGBT Elders (SAGE).

In 1977, Thea was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but she kept up her psychology practice. Edie left IBM to devote more time to travel and volunteering for the gay community. In 1993, they registered as domestic partners when it became an option in New York. In 2007, after Thea was diagnosed with a severe heart condition — multiple sclerosis had already made her a quadriplegic — they decided to go to Canada to get married. It was a very difficult ordeal. By then, Edie had been Thea’s full-time care-giver; it took an hour to get Thea ready for bed, and three or four hours in the morning to be ready to leave the house. “Many people ask me why get married,” she later said. “I was 77, Thea was 75, and maybe we were older than that at that point, but the fact is that everybody treated it as different. It turns out marriage is different. I’ve asked a number of long-range couples, gay couples who they’ve got married, I’ve asked them: ‘Was it different the next morning’ and the answer is always: ‘Yes’. It’s a huge difference.”

Thea died in 2009. Edie’s grief sent her to the hospital with a heart attack a month later. When she got home, the IRS had taken $363,053 in estate-taxes, a garnishment that no married couple would have been subjected to. Edie filed for a refund, but thanks to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act that was signed into law in 1993 (Sep 20), the IRS denied the refund.

Edie decided to fight for her refund in court. But when she went to the gay-rights organizations that one would have expected to be eager to take on the fight, she was turned down. It was too soon, they said. The time wasn’t right, they said. The case wasn’t right, they said. She was too privileged, they said. She turned to a private lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, a lesbian who had been corporate litigator. They filed suit in 2010 challenging the constitutionality of DOMA. While they were waiting for the case to trial, the Obama Administration announced in 2011 that the Justice Department would not defend DOMA in court. The Republican-controlled Congress stepped in with a fistful of taxpayer dollars to keep up the fight. In 2012, the Federal District Judge ruled in Edie’s favor, and the Second Court of Appeals upheld that decision just four months later. In December, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Edie’s case, and on June 26, 2013, it ruled in a 5-4 decision that DOMA violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

The decision didn’t make marriage equality available to all same-sex couples nationwide. But it did have two important effects. First, those couples who were married would now see their marriages recognized by the federal government. But also, the decision in Windsor v. U.S. would become the basis for a string of federal court decisions knocking down barriers to marriage equality in dozens of states over the next two years. That bow wave of decisions reached the Supreme Court again in 2015, when it finally knocked down the last remaining impediments to marriage equality nationwide.

Edie, who is now often called the Godmother of Gay Marriage, is still very active and engaged in a number of causes. Just last April, she successfully raised $107,000 via Kickstarter to provide scholarships for to send LBT women to the coding school or bootcamp of their choice.