Mary C. Dunlap

Dunlap was born in Napa, California, the daughter of Frank Leslie Dunlap and Betty Marion McBean Dunlap. Her father was a lawyer. She attended Napa High School, earned a bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968,[1] and completed a Juris Doctor degree at UC Berkeley School of Law in 1971.[2] In law school, she and other students founded the Boalt Hall Women's Association, and took over a restroom for the association's office.[3]

In 1973, Dunlap co-founded of a non-profit law firm specializing in sex discrimination law, Equal Rights Advocates, with Wendy Webster Williams and Nancy Davis.[3][4] In 1976 she debated Phyllis Schlafly on the Equal Rights Amendment at Mills College.[5] In 1977, she represented a pregnant teacher forced to take maternity leave in Berg v. Richmond Unified School District.[6] In 1984, she represented women in a class-action suit against laundries for discriminatory price differences between services for men's and women's clothing, saying "ring-around-the-collar ought to cost the same to remove, whether a man or a woman put it there".[7] In 1987, she represented the Gay Games before the Supreme Court, in San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc. v. United States Olympic Committee.[8][9] In 1989, she represented Eleanor Swift in her lawsuit against Boalt Hall over tenure. She supported Black firefighters in a civil rights challenge to the San Francisco Fire Department's hiring practices.[10] She was involved in the early work of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.[10]

Dunlap was appointed director of San Francisco's Office of Citizen Complaints in 1996.[11] In that role, she oversaw the office that investigated complaints against city police officers.[12] She taught at the Hastings College of Law, Golden Gate University, Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco School of Law.[13]

• "The Equal Rights Amendment and the Courts" (1975)[14]
• "The Constitutional Rights of Sexual Minorities: A Crisis of the Male/Female Dichotomy" (1978)[15]
• "Attorneys' Fees against Government Defendants; Economics Requires a New Proposal" (1979)[16]
• "Harris v. McRae" (1979)
• "Toward Recognition of A Right to Be Sexual" (1981)[17]
• "Feminist Discourse, Moral Values, and the Law—A Conversation" (1985, with Ellen C. DuBois, Carol Gilligan, Catharine A. MacKinnon, and Carrie Menkel-Meadow)[18]
• "Sexual Speech and the State: Putting Pornography in Its Place" (1987)[19]
• "The F Word: Mainstreaming and Marginalizing Feminism" (1988)[20]
• "AIDS and Discrimination in the United States: Reflections on the Nature of Prejudice in a Virus" (1989)[21]
• "The Lesbian and Gay Marriage Debate: A Microcosm of Our Hopes and Troubles in the Nineties" (1991)[22]
• "Are We Integrated Yet? Pursuing the Complex Question of Values, Demographics and Personalities" (1994)[23]
• "Gay Men and Lesbians down by Law in the 1990's USA: The Continuing Toll of Bowers v. Hardwick " (1994)[24]

Dunlap also wrote and published her poetry.[3][25] Andrew Sullivan included one of her poems in his Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader (1997).[26]

Dunlap was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2001, and kept an online journal of her treatment and experiences; she died in 2003, at the age of 54, survived by her partner of almost 18 years, Maureen Mason.[13][10] In 2004, the Berkeley Women's Law Journal dedicated a special issue to tributes to Dunlap.[1][3] In 2005, the first Mary Dunlap Fellowships were awarded at Berkeley, and the first Mary C. Dunlap Memorial Lecture on Sex, Gender & Social Justice was held. Her work with the Gay Games is featured in the documentary Claiming the Title: Gay Olympics on Trial (2009).[27]

• Mary Dunlap Health Updates, her cancer blog