Portrait

Edith Windsor

Born: 20 June 1929Philadelphia, USA
Died: 12 September 2017New York City, USA · aged 88

Activist and computer programmerUnited States

Edith Windsor

A federal tax bill after her wife’s death led to a Supreme Court victory that changed the treatment of same-sex marriages.

Edith Windsor was born in Philadelphia in 1929. After a brief marriage to a man, she moved to New York, studied mathematics and developed a technical career at IBM.

She met psychologist Thea Spyer in 1963. They became engaged in 1967 and built a life together that eventually included Windsor caring for Spyer as multiple sclerosis caused increasing disability. In 2007 they married in Toronto, where their relationship could receive legal recognition.

When Spyer died in 2009, federal law treated Windsor’s inheritance differently from that of a surviving opposite-sex spouse. She paid more than $360,000 in estate tax and challenged the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act responsible for that treatment.

On 26 June 2013, in “United States v. Windsor”, the Supreme Court struck down the law’s federal definition of marriage. The decision brought federal recognition to legally married same-sex couples; nationwide marriage equality followed through a separate case in 2015. Windsor later married Judith Kasen in 2016. She died in New York in 2017, aged 88, having turned a deeply personal loss into a consequential legal challenge.

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