David Engstrom, a professor at Stanford Law School, who brought the case back to light in 2017 while tracing the origins of employee class-action lawsuits, outlined in a 2018 Stanford Law Review article how St. John’s remarkable success inspired other women in Michigan to sue for wage discrimination, and spurred legislatures in 21 other states to pass wage-equality bills before the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Of all the states’ bills, however, Engstrom found that only two—Massachusetts in 1945 and Oregon in 1955—actually offered provisions that would allow women to sue for equal pay in court. At the time, many labor leaders saw courts as a threat to unions’ sovereignty in the workplace, Engstrom writes, and therefore lobbied against many of these bills. Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, writes that after World War II, employers and lobbyists for business groups also played a role in weakening equal pay laws at both the state and federal level.

Engstrom says revisiting St. John’s case can help scholars and policy makers better understand the roles women and organized labor can play in defending workers’ rights. Though he has written that it was “almost certainly…the first significant damages payout in a job discrimination case in the case history of U.S. law,” Engstrom says that Florence St. John v. General Motors Corporation has limited value as a legal precedent for civil rights lawyers today because it is confined to Michigan law. It was also curiously forgotten, including by the media: When the newly formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recompensed an underpaid typist in 1968 who had been denied a promotion at one of GM’s parts manufacturers, the Detroit Free Press declared, “She Wins $885 and Makes History.” St. John died two years later, on December 21, 1970. Engstrom imagines that sometime during those two years, as a recently widowed snowbird returning to Michigan from Daytona Beach to visit her two grown daughters, St. John may have seen the Detroit Free Press headline and smiled.