Virginia Carter, a Feminist Adviser to Norman Lear, Dies at 87

Virginia Carter, a physicist whose activism for the National Organization for Women led the sitcom impresario Norman Lear to hire her in the early 1970s to be his feminist conscience as he presided over taboo-breaking shows that touched on sensitive social issues, died on Oct. 17 at her home in Redondo Beach, Calif. She was 87.

Her friend Martha Wheelock, a filmmaker, confirmed her death but did not specify a cause.

In 1973, Ms. Carter was at a turning point. Her success at Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit think tank that advised the Air Force on space programs and satellite systems, was tempered by being underpaid and receiving inadequate credit for her work.

“Out of the depths of my own insecurities, I’d think, ‘Gee whiz, Virginia, you’re not good enough,’” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1978. “And I’d work harder and harder.”

But she had also been the president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW, building its membership and fighting for feminist issues like the Equal Rights Amendment, which the California State Legislature ratified in November 1972.

“I began to change, to speak publicly,” she told The Tribune. “And I found people outside of physics.”

One of them was Frances Lear, a feminist activist who was Mr. Lear’s wife at the time (the couple divorced in 1985). She suggested that Ms. Carter meet with her husband, who by then was producing sitcoms that sometimes touched on feminist and political themes — “All in the Family” and, to a much greater degree, “Maude.” But Ms. Carter wasn’t immediately convinced.