Rhoda Karpatkin traces the start of her long career in the consumers movement to a simple fact: After finishing Yale Law School in 1953, she couldn’t find a decent job.
As a woman in New York’s male-dominated legal world, she figured she might do better going solo. Karpatkin started her own firm. Representing a tenants’ group, she battled a local landlord over lack of hot water and heat, and won. In 1958, when one of those tenants went back to work for Consumers Union, a nonprofit that campaigned for tougher consumer protections and evaluated products, he got Karpatkin to represent it.
