The Northern District of Ohio, like many of its sister courts, was reluctantly drawn into the national debate over sex equality. The court’s response mirrored the greater social response, initially showing a hostility to claims of gender discrimination, slowly displaced by recognition and endorsement of sex equality rights. Three of the district’s cases on women’s rights that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, discussed in this chapter, helped navigate this shift towards gender equality. The Northern District was goaded into action by the newly-formed Women’s Law Fund (WLF), one of the first non-profit litigation organizations in the nation to bring sex discrimination claims. The WLF was led by Jane Picker, one of the first female law professors at Cleveland State University, and counseled by board member Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Women’s Rights Project and later Supreme Court Justice. These leaders instigated the reforms needed through the judicial process, believing, like many social justice groups, that the courts were the best vehicles to bring about change. In 1971 the fund’s first case, LaFleur v. Cleveland Board of Education, challenged mandatory maternity leaves for pregnant teachers. As this chapter will show, the lawyers encountered an incredulous court and resistance from the community as they took on deeply embedded notions of the proper role of women in the workplace and family. The community backlash continued as advocates sought to protect women’s right to bodily autonomy and abortion. In 1973 the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. The Roe Court recognized a fundamental privacy right for a woman’s choice of abortion, free from governmental interference in the first trimester, but new regulations continued to circumscribe abortion. Two major abortion regulation cases came before the Northern District on their way to the Supreme Court: Akron Center for Reproductive Health v. City of Akron and Akron Center for Reproductive Health v. Rosen. The Northern District wrestled with the legality of highly-detailed regulations designed to discourage abortion, first upholding them in part, but later invalidating the laws. The Supreme Court overruled the lower courts in both cases. While the district courts had carefully tried to fit the cases within constitutional parameters, they had not predicted the Supreme Court’s changing standards. These three cases from Ohio together offer a snapshot of the larger societal change for women’s rights. The nascent women’s movement in the courts proceeded initially along dual fronts of employment and abortion. The Northern District cases show the tensions and commonalities between these approaches and exemplify the development of broad scale gender litigation across the nation.