In Response to Alito ’72, a Defense of Women’s Rights

We, the undersigned Princeton women of ’72, have been deeply shocked by the leaked Supreme Court draft authored by our classmate Justice Samuel Alito.

We are about to celebrate our 50th reunion — half a century since we graduated from Princeton. As a pioneering class of Princeton women, we find it bitter indeed to see the draft Supreme Court opinion reverse the strides we thought we were making, as part of one of the first classes of Princeton women, towards a world of equity and fairness for women of all races and social and economic positions. 

We ask our classmates, and the community of Princeton, to protest the logic that ties us to a constitutional originalism which resists any movement toward justice but, rather, moves us backwards.  As Jill Lepore so aptly put it in The New Yorker, “Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor.” 

Instead, we want to call attention to this urgent truth: We hang on a precipice, balanced between the draft opinion and the final Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade. The right to manage one’s own health and most intimate personal and family decisions without outside interference is at risk right now and should be preserved to ensure social justice for ourselves, for our classmates, and for the world Princeton purports to serve.   

Women of ’72

Susan M. Squier ’72
Daryl English ’72
Judith White ’72
Joan Matthews ’72
Helene Fromm ’72
Holly Lovejoy ’72
Jacqueline Ariail ’72
Claudia M. Tesoro ’72
Barbara Julius ’72
Alice Kelikian ’72
Diana Foster ’72
Meggan Moorhead ’72
Ann Sease Monoyios ’72 *74
Yaffa Ventura-Beck ’72
Anna Baird Chitty ’72 
Vera Marcus ’72
Helena Novakova ’72
Angenette Duffy Meaney ’72
Larissa Brown ’72
Sherry Peltz Leiwant ’72
Jerri Donovan ’72
Carol Rahn ’72
Barbara Geller ’72
Mary Watkins ’72
Susan Brownstone Eig ’72
Ellen Moriece Rome ’72
Mary Baldwin ’72
Elizabeth Houghton ’72
Katherine Ott Verburg ’72
Amanda Eggert Stukenberg ’72
Sherry Boswell ’72
Mary McLeod ’72 *75 *85 
Gayle Delaney ’72
Anne Mariella ’72

Friends of the Women of ’72

Christine LaLonde Robinson h’72
Mara Melum ’73
Carol Obertubbesing ’73
Macie Green Hall VanRensselaer ’73
Beth N. Rom-Rymer ’73
Nancy Teaff ’73
Ellen Hymowitz ’73
Barbara Dash ’73
Alice Fahs ’73