Seven months after the death of Lilly Ledbetter, for whom Congress’s Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is named after, a film about her life opens in theaters May 9.

In the biopic Lilly, Patricia Clarkson stars as Ledbetter, a Goodyear employee who found out that she was getting paid less than fellow supervisors who were men, and follows her legal journey to the U.S. Supreme Court. The film culminates in the historic 2009 passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in Congress. Growing up in poverty gave Ledbetter the resilience necessary to endure a lengthy legal fight.

She was born in 1938 in Alabama, when there were few career options for women.

“She grew up without running water, without electricity, with only a high school education,” says Lanier Scott Isom, who helped Ledbetter put together her 2012 memoir Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond. “Her clothes were made out of feed sack material.”

She was never afraid to get her hands dirty. For example, she worked at a chicken processing plant at one point to help her family make ends meet. In 1979, as a married mother of two children, she landed a job as a supervisor at Goodyear’s Gadsden, Alabama, plant.

Her husband was always supportive of job, but she encountered many men who felt threatened by her.

Ledbetter had always been outspoken about the sexual harassment she experienced on the job.

As Isom explains: “One of her supervisors basically said [paraphrasing], ‘If you want to go to the motel down the street with me, I would ensure your promotion.’"

Lilly writer and director Rachel Feldman adds: "There was one guy who could not stop talking about her underwear and what kind of bra she was wearing, and one man who said [paraphrasing], ‘I don't like women around here. What if I have to scratch my balls and fart?’”

Work wasn’t the only place where Ledbetter encountered offensive men. When her son suffered from repeated ear infections growing up and needed surgery, a doctor suggested she earn the money by participating in a program where young surgeons were learning how to perform hysterectomies. Nineteen years into a job at Goodyear, she learned that a young man she had just trained was making more than she was. An anonymous tipster left her a note at work that had the salaries of her male counterparts written out, so she could see that she was making up to $2,000 a month less than they were.