As I set down a cup in front of Buzz, I heard Papa hollering down the road. I was playing tea party in the front yard, scooping up dirt with a broken teacup Granny Mac had given me, and Buzz was my honored guest. I was only five the day Papa came after Buzz, but my memory of that afternoon is clear as day. I'm honestly not sure there was any good in him, but I can also say that he wasn't all that different from most of the other men around me.

Papa, who claimed to be part Irish, was so pale that he looked part ghost. I'll never forget the afternoon when my grandfather, Papa, decided he wanted to kill my dog, Buzz. In truth, the tough guys at Goodyear weren't a far cry from what I'd seen and heard in the fields picking cotton or in the barn helping milk the cows at Aunt Lucille's dairy farm. If you grow up in Possum Trot, Alabama, you run across some rough characters from time to time. Marjorie Ainsborough Decker, The Christian Mother Goose Book of Nursery Rhymes Have you heard of the Nothing impossible possum Whose faith and belief made His dream to blossom? 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. But Lilly continuted to fight, becoming the namesake of President Barack Obama's first official piece of legislation.īoth a deeply inspiring memoir and a powerful call to arms, Grace and Grit is the story of a true American icon. Over the next eight years, her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where she lost again. When she filed a sex-discrimination case against Goodyear, Lilly won-and then heartbreakingly lost on appeal. Nineteen years after her first day at Goodyear, Lilly received an anonymous note revealing that she was making thousands less per year than the men in her position.

She was one of the first women hired at the management level.

In 1979, when Lilly applied for her dream job at the Goodyear tire factory, she got the job.

Lilly Ledbetter always knew that she was destined for something more than what she was born into: a house with no running water or electricity in the small town of Possum Trot, Alabama. The inspiring story of the woman at the center of the historic discrimination case that inspired the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, her fight for equal rights in the workplace, and how her determination became a victory for the nation

Grace and grit by lilly ledbetter