A Social History of Everyday Practice: Sadie T.M. Alexander and the Incorporation of Black Women into the American Legal Profess

This Article presents a humanist social history of the everyday professional lives of Sadie T.M. Alexander and her peers at the early twentieth-century black women's bar. Alexander and her peers' professional lives were hemmed in by race-and gender-based structural features of the bar, but those professional lives were also shaped by an under-theorized social milieu of race and class formation, gender role contestation, lawyer-client conflict, and day-to-day professional relationships. That social milieu would provide Alexander and her peers with tools that would enable them to obtain a surprising, and often ironic, degree of power and prestige in the profession - surprising, at least, from the perspective of the dominant interpretive paradigm for the bar in this period.

Print Location Kenneth W. Mack, A Social History of Everyday Practice: Sadie T.M. Alexander and the Incorporation of Black Women into the American Legal Profession, 1925-1960, 87 Cornell L. Rev. 1405 (2002).

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