She Learned About the 9-to-5 Grind the Hard Way : Feminism: Activist Ellen Bravo studied classics at Cambridge before on-the-job experience turned her into an advocate for workers.

Ellen Bravo’s life has been one of contrasts.

She grew up on the edge of one of Cleveland’s toniest neighborhoods, but her family had little money. She has degrees in Greek and Latin from Cornell and Cambridge universities but for years held clerical and secretarial jobs.

Yet there have been two constants in Bravo’s life: a commitment to women and work, and an immense dislike of injustice. As executive director of 9to5, National Assn. of Working Women, where she has worked since 1982, she is able use both passions to change other people’s lives.

Based in Milwaukee, 9to5 has become a powerful and respected national voice for clerical and office workers. It inspired the 1981 film of the same name, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, about office workers who rebel against an abusive boss.

“Ellen is so effective at speaking directly from the heart and with information,” feminist Gloria Steinem said. “She expresses the facts about women’s work lives as they experience them.”

Bravo, a slight woman of modest demeanor, has intellectual capabilities that are anything but modest, according to people who know her.

“Ellen is infused with the justice of her cause and helping other people get involved,” said Karen Nussbaum, founder and longtime director of 9to5, and now director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau.

“I’ve never met anyone more energetic, sincere, smarter, more strategic, more dedicated than Ellen.” Nussbaum said.

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Funded by foundations, churches and individual donors, the group has chapters in 25 states from California to Maine and operates a national hot line to give legal advice to women. It also helps women in specific companies or industries organize to push for change.

“Our goal is to empower women to change,” Bravo said.

Nussbaum founded 9to5 in 1973 as a union of sorts for women in traditionally female occupations. The idea was to help clerical workers and secretaries organize to change their working conditions, which often include low pay, shaky or no benefits, and few rights.

Bravo has continued that tradition.

She tells of a bank employee earning $4.65 an hour whose employer announced it would no longer pay for dependent health insurance. Workers were given the option of paying $165 a month to continue the benefits.

Bravo got publicity for the workers’ plight. The employees ended up with a 90 cent-per-hour raise that paid for the insurance.

“The bottom line is that we want to change conditions in individual occupations or change public policy,” Bravo said. “You don’t always win if you stand up for yourself, but you won’t if you don’t.”

Born in Cleveland in 1944, Bravo grew up on the edge of the upscale Shaker Heights community, then a neighborhood of large homes and swimming pools.

But while her school classmates had money, her family didn’t. She was well aware their house was on the wrong side of the rapid transit tracks--the parents of some of her wealthy friends wouldn’t allow their children to visit her house.

Contributing to her sense of injustice was her knowledge, as a young Jewish girl, of the Holocaust.

“I remember as a child finding it hard to understand how people could have known that was happening and let it happen,” Bravo said.

“It helped me understand that in the face of injustice you can’t be silent.”

Bravo also learned about working women’s problems at a young age. When an accident put her father, an aluminum siding salesman, out of work for two years, her mother, a social worker, became the family’s sole source of support.

“It made a big impact on me, realizing that if your mother was the only earner, it meant your family was in economic trouble,” Bravo said.

Bravo won a scholarship to Cornell University in 1962, where she studied classics -- and found an escape of sorts from the world’s ills.

“One of the reasons I wanted to study Greek and Latin was to have this life that was completely apart from reality,” Bravo said. “It would be a world that was isolated from greed and ambition.”

While at Cornell, Bravo met a graduate student in economics who would later become her husband--a Greek man who had spoken out against the rightist dictatorship in Greece and had been forced to leave.

“More and more, I began to realize things people took for granted didn’t have to work that way,” Bravo said.

After continuing her studies at Cambridge for two years--while the civil rights movement and Vietnam War protests were underway--Bravo said she began to feel tormented about focusing her efforts on “an elite field while the world was blowing up around me.”

Still, after the couple moved to Montreal, she completed the course work for a doctorate in classics at McGill University. But in 1968 she became involved in a women’s group--and discovered feminism.

“As soon as I heard the ideas, I thought, of course, this is why my mother, this is why women are faced with the dilemma of children or job,” Bravo said. “Men don’t ask themselves that question. They do both and have full lives.”

After a time teaching women’s studies at St. Mary’s College in Maryland, Bravo moved with her husband to Baltimore. When the two separated a short time later, she needed a job.

“I could type 100 words a minute, so I got a clerical job,” Bravo said.

She moved through a series of mostly clerical and secretarial positions while working with women’s groups and on civil rights issues.

Bravo also met her second husband in Baltimore, a factory worker in a steel mill. He was equally as committed to the ideas she advocated for.

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Her traditionally female jobs showed Bravo the conditions under which most employed women operate.

At one low-paying job in Milwaukee, where the family ended up, Bravo could take time off for illness if she had notified her boss in advance. But if she or one of her two sons woke up sick one morning, time off wasn’t an option.

“I realized I wanted to deal with the issue of balancing work and family,” said Bravo.

And that’s about when she heard about 9to5. Bravo drove with a friend from Milwaukee to Philadelphia, where a 9to5 national meeting was being held, signed up and started a chapter back home.

She eventually worked her way to executive director of the national group when Nussbaum headed for Washington.

Bravo’s work has also taken her into government service. She has received appointments to state and federal commissions to study issues such as family and medical leave, sexual harassment, equal pay for women and the minimum wage.

It has also made her an author. Her book, “The Job-Family Challenge,” dealing with issues close to her heart, was published recently.