A fierce feminist who fought for women’s rights on the national stage, Dorothy “Cindy Gams” Judd Hill was also a born performer who lived for the stage.

In 1966, she sued the Chartiers Valley School District for dismissing her after she became pregnant with her fourth child. She prevailed -- and was reinstated two years later with back pay -- and in the process created a new legal precedent for pregnant women, who could no longer be fired without cause.

Nearly 30 years later, the same woman who was a favorite speaker at feminist conventions and who once brandished a protest sign that read “My Uterus is Not Government Property” did the unexpected and won a pageant for older women, saying that sometimes she’d “rather dance than fight.”

“My mother was fearless,” said her son, Jud Hill of Rockville, Md. “She owned her own will and her own spirit.”

Mrs. Hill, who long went by Cindy Gams, died from complications of dementia on March 2 at her retirement home in South Fayette, just three days short of her 93rd birthday.

Growing up in Duquesne, Mrs. Hill walked a mile every day, to and from the 10-cent tap dancing lessons that she took through the Works Progress Administration.

She graduated from Duquesne High School in 1944 and earned a bachelor’s degree in music education from Westminster College in 1947.

Mrs. Hill aspired to become a dancer and singer but shelved those ambitions in April 1945 when she married John “Jack” Hill, a World War II veteran who she met five years before at a local public swimming pool.

“They met when she was 14. My dad went off to war and came back and they got married,” said her son, who said the couple saved a stack of love letters in which Mr. Hill proposed repeatedly until “finally, she said yes.”

The couple settled into family life in Thornburg, but Mrs. Hill was restless, she later said in a newspaper interview.

“I sang in the choir, I baked my own bread and I kept a very clean house. What did I have to complain about? Nothing. Except inside, I felt sick,” she said in a March 1993 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

She went to work in the Chartiers Valley School District in 1956 as a music teacher in the middle and high schools and remained in that job until her retirement in 1984. In 1966, she earned a master’s degree in music education from Duquesne University.

After her landmark lawsuit, Mrs. Hill found herself in high demand among women’s rights groups. She and three other women founded a local chapter of the National Organization for Women and she served as an executive board member of the Pennsylvania NOW.

She traveled the country, promoting the doomed Equal Rights Amendment, debating opponents and speaking at national engagements.

“That was the beginning of a change in her,” her son said. “She went to Chicago for six months to help the state of Illinois to pass the ERA. She went to [Washington, D.C.] a lot to demonstrate in the 1960s for the ERA.”

Everybody knew which house they lived in, Mr. Hill said, by the “ERA” sign that hung in their front window for more than three decades.

“It was in the window for years and years and years,” he said.

His mother taught her children the importance of standing up for what they believed in, Mr. Hill said, and once lay down on the road in front of approaching tractor trailers to protest the lack of progress in the renovation of a bridge in their neighborhood.

“It was like Tiananmen Square,” he said. “They turned around.”

After her retirement, Mrs. Hill began pursuing her long-delayed singing and dancing career, first with a performance troupe based at Robert Morris University, then with her own show, “A Body of Song.”

Famous for her beautiful legs and four-inch tap heels, Mrs. Hill toured retirement homes and senior centers throughout the area, lifting spirits.

“When I’m entertaining, I’m doing what I love,” she said in a April 1999 Post-Gazette story about her one-woman show.

“My mom just wanted to be a performer. She just wanted to be on the stage,” her son recalled. “That kept her young.”

In 1992, she won the Ms. Pennsylvania Senior America pageant and the following year — at 67 — she earned the title of Ms. National Senior Citizen. She sang the National Anthem several times at Three Rivers Stadium and went on to win several gold and silver medals in 1998 at the World Championship for the Performing Arts.

“She was a really talented singer and dancer,” Mr. Hill said of his mother.

Fourteen years after her husband’s death in 1998, Mrs. Hill remarried Frank Youngk, who died last year.

As she had so often in life, Mrs. Hill wanted to set the tone for how she would be remembered after her death, her son said.

“She told us to put glitter in her ashes and cast them into the wind,” he said. “She said there were to be no tears and that we should have a big party to celebrate life.”

Along with her son, Mrs. Hill is survived by her other sons, John “Lanny” Hill, of Melbourne, Fla., and Jonathan Hill, of Rockville, Md.; her daughter, Cherie “Irene” Hill, of Washington, Pa.; and four grandchildren.

She was preceded in death by her sister, Myrtle Judd, and her brother, Raymond “Bud” Judd.

A celebration of life is being planned for April 13. For more details, email Mr. Hill at ajudsonhill@gmail.com.

The family suggests memorial donations to the Pittsburgh chapter of NOW at www.now.org.

Janice Crompton: jcrompton@post-gazette.com.

First Published: March 13, 2019, 4:00 p.m.