Why her, why now: Today the Honorable Justice Eileen Moore serves as an associate justice on the California Courts of Appeal with a reputation for championing veterans’ rights and mentoring the careers of young lawyers, not to mention being an author and a columnist for California’s legal newspaper the Daily Journal.
But once upon a time she was just a girl in a big Irish Catholic family in Philadelphia. “We said grace before we ate and my mother served the food,” is the way she describes it. After winning a citywide essay contest, she told her father she wanted to study journalism at a college. His reply? “We have four boys in the family and the money has to go to their education.”
“I’m not criticizing my father – that’s just the way things were then,” she says. He did, however, encourage her to go to nursing school, which was considered a sensible career for a working-class girl bound for marriage. “He said that being a nurse, if my future husband were ever laid off, I would be able to get a job right away and fill in for him.”
Still, the family couldn’t even afford the $75-a-year tuition to nursing school, so she took a scholarship from the U.S. Army. After graduating she headed for Vietnam to serve in the Army Nurse Corps. Like most Vietnam veterans she’s not naturally forthcoming about her time in combat, but her medals tell the story: She was awarded the Vietnam Service Medal, the National Defense Service Medal and the Cross of Gallantry with Palm.
She likes to say she left Vietnam and “stepped into the middle of the Women’s Liberation Movement,” eventually finding her way to California, where she received her undergraduate degree from UC Irvine and her law degree from Pepperdine on her way to a career on the bench.
In the late 1990s, the local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America contacted Justice Moore to speak at a special event at the Nixon Library, which turned out to be a pivotal moment in both her career and in the lives of California’s veterans. “After I spoke, three rows of men came up to me, wanting to talk. That was the epiphany – it brought back the memory of when the soldiers would open their eyes in the hospital tent or Quonset hut, whichever it was, and look up at me. When they would see an American girl standing there, they would reach out to touch our face, just to make sure we were real. It made me realize that these poor men had absolutely no good memories of Vietnam except speaking to the nurses. I decided then I would start doing something with veterans. I don’t know that I knew what I could do. It took me a while.”
Fast forward to 2000, when, having served on the governing body for the California Courts (fun fact: the largest court system in the world,) she “talked the powers that be” into creating a statewide group for veterans and military families in the California Courts. The group, which she has chaired since 2008, reviews and recommends legislation to make it easier for veterans “to be treated in our courts in a fair way,” she explains, “taking into account what may have happened to them while they were serving our country.”
Today there are 34 veterans treatment courts in California (the first was in Orange County). Moore also mentored female veterans through that group for the better part of a decade and discovered a startling commonality: The vast majority said they had suffered sexual assault in the military. “I feel very strongly there is not enough public attention being given to this,” Moore says. “There are careers that are being wiped out, veterans benefits are being wiped out. And the women just have to go on with their lives. They have to choke it down and forget about it.”
What women inspired you? “I was about 14 years old when I sat down at the kitchen table with my mother and told her I wanted to go to college. I was so stupid and naïve, maybe insensitive, in that conversation. I said to her, ‘Mother, did you ever want to be anybody?’ She burst out crying. She said she always wanted to be a librarian. My mother had to drop out of high school to work at Woolworths to support her brothers and sisters, because her mother had died in childbirth. I think it was that which inspired me to make sure that I didn’t get bogged down the way she did,” says Moore, who is also a mother to one daughter, two stepchildren and nine grandchildren. “When you think about the changes that have occurred in our country – we get really frustrated because so much more has to be done, but we have made a lot of changes and we are going in the right direction.”
What do you wish you’d known sooner? “When the first wave of homeless vets from the Iraq war were starting to appear, I watched some documentaries on how they lost limbs from IEDs. It hit me that what was really missing with our Vietnam vets – we treated them despicably – was the support from the courts and the legal community.”
What do you wish for other women? “I think women carry around a lot of guilt because they feel responsible for everybody and everything. I hope they can relieve themselves from feeling so guilty about their own success.”
