Pride Month Spotlight - Edith Windsor

Author: lparsons

_posts/2025-06-13-pride-month.md

@@ -33,7 +33,8 @@ We’ll be publishing these posts during the month of June to highlight such
 people, where we talk about the person and tie their work and life to the RSE
 movement.
 
-<!-- List of posts here -->
+* [Edith Windsor]({% post_url 2025-06-16-edith-windsor %}) -
+  June 16, 2025
 
 In conjunction with these blog posts, we ask the community to think about how
 they will celebrate and reflect on pride this month. This will likely come in

_posts/2025-06-16-edith-windsor.md

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "US-RSE Pride Month Spotlight - Edith Windsor"
+tags: [dei, pride-month]
+---
+
+US-RSE's [DEI working group (DEI-WG)](https://us-rse.org/wg/dei/) is proud to
+help US-RSE celebrate and participate in Pride Month. Throughout June, the
+US-RSE will spotlight LGBTQ+ individuals who have been involved in computing,
+science, engineering, and/or math, and have inspired our members through their
+accomplishments in their careers and their personal stories.
+
+## This week's Pride Month spotlight features Edith Windsor
+
+{% include image.html
+url="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Edie_Windsor_DC_Pride_2017.jpg"
+description="Edie Windsor at DC Price, 2017, Photo by Rex Block, CC0
+<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons"
+style="float:right; padding:1em; max-width:350px;" %}
+
+Did you know that the lead plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case that
+overturned Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 2013, leading to
+marriage being expanded to include same-sex couples, was a systems programmer
+at IBM and then a software development consultant in her own company?
+
+Edith (Edie) Schlain was born in 1929 in Philadelphia. She graduated from
+Temple in 1950, where she met her future husband, Saul Windsor, who she married
+in 1951 and divorced in 1952. She later earned a master's in math from NYU in 1957.
+She then joined IBM, where she worked for 16 years  in senior technical
+and management positions related to systems architecture and implementation of
+operating systems and language processors. As AnitaB.org
+[describes](https://anitab.org/profile/remembering-edith-windsor-tech-pioneer-equality-advocate/),
+she started as a mainframe programmer and later rose to "the company's highest
+technical rank, Senior Systems Programmer, on the strength of her top-notch
+debugging skills. 'They couldn't fix the code because they couldn't read it,'
+Edith told a journalist. 'But I could read code until it wrapped around the
+room and back again. A guy I was working with said, ‘give this woman a roll of
+toilet paper, she can do anything.'" During this time, in 1963, she met and
+began dating Thea Spyer, who asked Edith to marry her in 1967, and they began
+living together six months later.
+
+In her professional life, as AnitaB.org [continues to
+describe](https://anitab.org/profile/remembering-edith-windsor-tech-pioneer-equality-advocate/),
+"Edith left IBM in 1975, becoming the founding president of PC Classics, a
+consulting firm specializing in major software development projects. During
+this time, Edith also helped countless LGBTQ groups become tech literate. 'I
+computerized everybody,' she quipped. 'I got calls from gay organizations that
+wanted to computerize their mail systems. All of my IBM experience continues
+throughout my life.' Her love of computing was personal, too — she was the
+owner of the very first IBM-PC delivered in New York City." In 1993, when New
+York City first began registering domestic partnerships between same-sex
+couples, they registered. Because the US did not allow same-sex marriage, they
+traveled to Toronto in 2007 where they were married. Two years later, Thea
+died, and left her estate to Edie, but because the US did not recognize their
+marriage, Edie had to pay taxes on the estate. This was the cause of her
+lawsuit that led to Section 3 of DOMA being ruled unconstitutional, enabling
+same sex marriage to become legal, after which the US government refunded the
+estate tax.
+
+Again
+[quoting](https://anitab.org/profile/remembering-edith-windsor-tech-pioneer-equality-advocate/)
+AnitaB.org, "Edith was recognized by the National Computing Conference as an
+operating systems pioneer. In 2013, she was the Grand Marshal of the New York
+City LGBT Pride March and a runner-up for Time's Person of the Year.” She died
+in 2017, and was eulogized by Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama said about her,
+"America's long journey towards equality has been guided by countless small
+acts of persistence, and fueled by the stubborn willingness of quiet heroes to
+speak out for what's right. Few were as small in stature as Edith Windsor — and
+few made as big a difference to America."
+
+[Read more about US-RSE's planned Pride Month
+activities](https://us-rse.org/2026-06-13-pride-month/).