Best Friends at the Bar: Historical Perspectives About Women in the Law

Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on the Best Friends at the Bar blog on September 29, 2011.

I know, I know.  You young women do not like to hear us “older women” dwell on the hardships of life “in the day”.  That seems to be particularly true of young women lawyers, and I think some of that attitude may result from the fact that “seasoned” women lawyers can get preachy and judgmental when delivering the message.  That is their bad, and they should temper their presentation if they want to be heard.

However, you should not disregard the message just because you do not favor the messenger.  There is a lot to learn from these stories and these pioneers.

Here is an article that I recommend to you.  See the September 12, 2011 edition of www.therecorder.com.  The article profiles women lawyers who have been blazing the trail for more than 35 years as practicing lawyers, law school professors and adjudicators.  Maybe I found it fascinating because many of these women are my contemporaries or because at least one of my favorite professors in law school was mentioned in the article.

Women Lawyers Who Rock: The Woman Who Started Women’s Legal Careers and More

Seeing as my column is dedicated to recognizing awesome female lawyers and law students, I found it appropriate to focus my introductory entry on one of the very first women to start it all, Arabella Mansfield. 

Also known as Belle Babb Mansfield, Mansfield was the first woman lawyer admitted to the practice of law in the United States. In 1869, despite Iowa law requiring bar applicants to be white males over the age of 21, at just 23-years-old, Mansfield was admitted to the Iowa bar after passing the bar exam with high scores. Mansfield’s accomplishment paved the way for Iowa legislature to amend its laws to allow women and minorities to practice law.

Although proud of successfully obtaining her law degree, Mansfield’s passion for educating and advocating prevailed, and she decided not to practice law. A devout advocate of women's rights, Mansfield joined the executive committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Not long after, Mansfield became president and chair of the first Iowa state-wide women’s suffrage convention. 

Following her passion for educating others, Mansfield became one of the first female college professors and administrators in the United States and became dean of the Schools of Art and Music at DePauw University in Indiana. Later, she taught at Wesleyan College and Simpson College in Iowa.

Thanks to Mansfield’s hard work in campaigning for women’s equal educational opportunities and voting rights, more women were able to accomplish their goals faster and with greater confidence. 

Deservingly, Mansfield was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1980. Women in the legal world at any level should have confidence and pride in their work, just as Mansfield did. Her strength and determination surely resonates today as female practitioners and law students have taken the opportunity to thrive in a prestigious profession and have shown that they are beyond capable and fit to do so.

First Woman: Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Sonia Pressman Fuentes is a leading author, feminist lawyer and one of the founders of NOW.  The following is her story of how a she went from fleeing Nazi Germany as a child and went on to become an activist and the first woman lawyer in the EEOC's Office of the General Counsel. It's a truely remarkable journey...I can't wait to read her full memior later this summer! 

I was born in Berlin, Germany, of Polish Jewish parents in 1928. In 1933, my brother, Hermann, who was fourteen years my senior, saw the threat Hitler posed to Germany's Jews and urged my parents to leave Germany. My father, who had lived in Germany for over twenty years and was the prosperous owner of a men's clothing store, scoffed at this suggestion. He was sure that Hitler and his Nazi followers would soon blow over.

My brother decided to leave on his own, and, in May 1933, he moved to Antwerp, Belgium. Shortly thereafter, my father changed his mind about leaving Germany, met with a group of Nazis, agreed to give them our business for a fraction of its cost, and they gave us permission to leave.

In July 1933, my parents and I moved to Antwerp. There followed months during which my father and brother tried to find a way to make a living in Antwerp and other European cities, but nothing worked out. My brother made countless applications for visas to permit our family to remain in Belgium; all were denied. Then, my father read that ships were departing for the U.S., and my parents decided we would get on one of these ships. Since my parents had been born in Poland, we were able to get visas for the U.S. on our Polish passports. We left Antwerp on the Red Star Line's S.S. Westernland in April 1933, arriving in New York City on May 1, 1934.

After we had left Antwerp, the police came to our apartment to serve us with deportation papers; they planned to deport us to Poland, where my parents hadn't lived in twenty years. Had our visas to remain in Belgium been granted or had we been deported to Poland, we would, in all likelihood, have been killed during the Holocaust.

'Miss Jim' blazed new trail for women in state

Ed. Note: This piece, by Judith Bainbridge, was originally published in The Greenville News and is reprinted here with the author's permission.

James Margrave Perry wanted a son.

The teacher of stenography and accounting at the Greenville Female College and his wife, a former music instructor at the Due West Female College, had been blessed with two daughters. But he wanted a child to bear his name.

When his wife delivered their third daughter in May 1894, he was undeterred. She was named James. Her middle name, Marjory, was about as close to Margrave as it was possible for a female name to be, but this baby would be known as “Jim.”

Just what the impact that name had on a gently reared young lady in turn-of-the-century Greenville is difficult to assess, but it certainly did not produce a traditional Southern belle.

Congratulations to Fernande Duffly, Nominee to the Massachusetts Supreme Court!

Yesterday, Governor Deval Patrick nominated Massachusetts Appeals Court Justice Fernande Duffly to sit on his state's Supreme Judicial Court.  Duffly is Indonesian-born and, if confirmed, would become the court's first Asian-American justice. 

Duffly is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former attorney at K & L Gates.  She was first appointed to the Family and Probate Court before being promoted to the court of appeals.  She has been a tireless advocate for equality in the profession and is a past president of the National Association of Women Judges.

I've had the privilege to work with Justice Duffly through the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, where she serves as a Commissioner.  In particular, she has spearheaded the effort to hold NALP and their participating law firms to account for their inaccurate reporting of the number of female partners.  Her work on this project brought it to my attention and convinced me of the urgency of the law firm transparency problem in general.

So a very heartfelt congratulations to Nan on this occasion, to Governor Patrick on his choice, and to the members of the Supreme Judicial Court and the people of Massachusetts on their good fortune.

First Woman: U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade

Ms. JD founding member Jill Russell interviewed Barbara McQuade, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, for our First Women series.

Barbara L. McQuade is the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.  She is the first woman to hold this position. Before becoming U.S. Attorney, McQuade served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit for 12 years and as a professor of criminal law. She was Deputy Chief of the National Security Unit, where she prosecuted cases involving terrorism financing, foreign agents, export violations, and threats. During her career as a federal prosecutor, McQuade has also prosecuted cases involving violent crime, fraud, narcotics, racketeering, and cybercrime.

If you could give one piece of advice to women in the profession generally what would it be?  Relationships matter.  I think that when I was in law school I thought I’ll just work hard and make it on my own. I don’t need any special favors from anybody. I don’t need connections of any kind. I was almost proud of that, like it was a badge of honor. But I think one thing I have seen is that relationships are really important in the world, they’re what makes the world go round. And there’s nothing improper about that. If you are in a situation of trying to choose between two applicants for a job and they both look wonderful on their resume and one person you’ve never heard of but the other clerked here in the office two years ago and you’re familiar with their work, that’s probably going to be a deciding factor. Build relationships with your professors, your law school classmates, your co-workers; don’t sit behind your desk all day. They’re more important than you realize.

What made you decide to go to law school?  I wanted to change the world, right? The same reason lots of people want to go, I suppose, that it was a chance to have an impact on my community and the world, and I didn’t know exactly what but I hoped I would do something positive for the community.

Tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get into this area of work after law school?

Summer Reading: Justice Older than the Law By Katie McCabe and Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Editor's Note: This review was written by Deborah Froling for NAWL's Women Lawyers Journal.  Deborah Froling is a partner with Arent Fox LLP in Washington, D.C.  She has been a member of the Executive Board of NAWL for the past four years and currently serves as its Treasurer-Elect and editor of the Women Lawyers Journal.

Before reading “Justice Older than the Law,” I had never heard of Dovey Johnson
Roundtree. I find that astonishing since I’m a news junkie, have spent close to 25 years in the Washington, D.C. area and 23 of those years steeped in the D.C. legal profession. However, the life of Dovey Johnson Roundtree – from Charlotte, North Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia to Washington, D.C. -- from the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps to Howard University Law School to ordained minister in the A.M.E. church – and the people with whom she associated – Mary McLeod Bethune, James Nabrit and Joyce Hens Green, among many others – is a story about a woman who had enough courage for five or six lifetimes. The book is an awe-inspiring tale – it’s part story of a woman growing up in the Jim Crow south, part story of a woman who serves her country even though her country does not really want her to, it’s part story of a woman who joined and changed the legal profession in Washington, D.C. and it’s part story of a woman who became an ordained minister in a church that resisted her full participation. It’s all of those things and none of those things. The story is about universal truths that apply to all of us -- these truths happen to come in the life’s journey of one spectacularly courageous woman named Dovey Johnson Roundtree.

I was fortunate enough to not only to be able to read and review the book but also meet with co-author Katie McCabe and interview her for this article. The process of writing the book took more than ten years and I must say it was time well spent. The book was an enthralling read from beginning to end. McCabe and Dovey are as unlikely a pair as you will ever see but their collaboration results in a book that is much more than just a story of Dovey’s life and a history of the civil rights movement. It is a universal story about one woman’s journey through life during a very tumultuous time in our country.

Dovey is introduced to us first as a child at the feet of her grandmother, Rachel. Those feet were broken, gnarled and misshapen – the result of a beating by a white slave master. Her grandmother was Dovey’s first beacon. After Dovey’s father died in the flu epidemic of 1919, Dovey, her mother and sisters went to live with her grandmother and grandfather, a minister. It was life with her grandmother that shaped Dovey’s life and it was with her grandmother that Dovey first experienced racism in the Jim Crow south.

Change I Can Believe In: Obama Nominates Kagan to the High Court

This evening brought the news that President Obama will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to fill Justice Stevens' seat on the Supreme Court.  As dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan was an enthusiastic supporter of Ms. JD, so this is a source of excitement on many levels. 

Mostly Kagan's nomination to serve as one of three women on the Court is exciting because it represents the breaking of a particularly pernicious glass ceiling: the ascension of a critical mass of women to positions of leadership in the profession.

For 20 years women have enjoyed relative parity in law school admissions, but there has been virtually no change in the percentage of female partners, general counsels,  attorneys general, judges, or tenured faculty.  In each sector of the profession the number of women in leadership hovers on one side or the other of 20% with little movement in the last decade.

20%. It's more than tokenism. But not enough to effect real change in the experience of the women in the pipeline.  For example:

• I graduated from UCLA School of Law in 2007. At the time, almost 25% of the faculty were women.  But I had only 2 female professors in three years.  One was gone by the time I graduated the other was denied tenure a couple years later.  
• AmLaw100 firms have had more than 15% female partners for more than 10 years. But this year those same firms reported to NAWL that less than 6% of their "rainmakers" are women.
• What happens when there's no where for the pipeline to go? The pipeline dries up. For 20 years women's progress in law has stagnated. And, perhaps as a result, for 7 years the number and proportion of women attending law school has declined.

This moment may be our last best chance to recharge the movement of women into positions of power in the profession. I can think of no better way to inspire that kind of commitment to excellence and achievement than putting a third woman on the Court.

Canada's First Woman Supreme Court Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin, Celebrates Her Tenth Year as Top Judge

"I have always wanted to be known as a good jurist, as a serious jurist," said Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin in a recent interview with the Globe and Mail, marking her tenth year as top judge.  It appears that she has, without a doubt, succeeded. 

McLachlin has presided over thousands of cases in a 29-year career on the bench.  Lately, the Court has tackled difficult press freedom and free expression issues.  And McLachlin still feels the pressue of making difficult decisions.  "They are all really, really important issues at this level," she said.  "One does ponder them, and go back and forth agonizing about them.  I must say, it is a preoccupying thing."

Equally noteworthy is the fact that McLachlin presides over a Court where four of the nine seats are occupied by women.  "I think that's a wonderful situation for the court to be in," she said.  "It gives encouragement to people who might otherwise feel they ought not to try for whatever it is they want to try for."  As the Globe and Mail reported: "In her early years, Chief Justice McLachlin often found herself wondering whether colleagues were parsing her statements with the subconscious thought, 'Is that her hormones - or her women-ness - talking.'  That is no longer the case, she said.  'We just don't think in terms of gender on this court.  I don't think it is for the men on the court, either.'"

Rather, the challenge has become leading nine independent, brilliant minds in pursuit of making the best legal decisions possible.  As she tackles this challenge, McLauchlin moves closer to becoming the longest-serving chief justice in the 135-year history of the Court (she is three years away).  Yet, through it all, she continues to conduct herself with poise and intelligence, while maintaining perspective: "Whatever happens, happens.  It has been a great privilege, one I could never have imagined in my wildest imaginings when I started out in law."

To read the full Globe and Mail article click here.

Ms. JD at William & Mary: A Lunch with Justice O'Connor

Ed. note: This weekend Justice O'Connor participated in a round-table discussion with fifteen law students. Julie Silverbrook, Ms. JD's liaison to William & Mary's Women's Law Society had these reflections to share:

Fifteen lucky students arrived for Saturday’s lunch with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor with tickets in hand and questions on their minds. Questions ranged from the current state of the legal profession to judicial accountability.