Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers

Lives in the Law

Jill Norgren

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479835355
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Legal History
• Index: Law

The captivating story of how a diverse group of women, including Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, broke the glass ceiling and changed the modern legal profession In Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers, award-winning legal historian Jill Norgren curates the oral histories of one hundred extraordinary American women lawyers who changed the profession of law. Many of these stories are being told for the first time. As adults these women were on the front lines fighting for access to law schools and good legal careers. They challenged established rules and broke the law’s glass ceiling.Norgren uses these interviews to describe the profound changes that began in the late 1960s, interweaving social and legal history with the women’s individual experiences. In 1950, when many of the subjects of this book were children, the terms of engagement were clear: only a few women would be admitted each year to American law schools and after graduation their professional opportunities would never equal those open to similarly qualified men. Harvard Law School did not even begin to admit women until 1950. At many law schools, well into the 1970s, men told female students that they were taking a place that might be better used by a male student who would have a career, not babies. In 2005 the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession initiated a national oral history project named the Women Trailblazers in the Law initiative: One hundred outstanding senior women lawyers were asked to give their personal and professional histories in interviews conducted by younger colleagues. The interviews, made available to the author, permit these women to be written into history in their words, words that evoke pain as well as celebration, humor, and somber reflection. These are women attorneys who, in courtrooms, classrooms, government agencies, and NGOs have rattled the world with insistent and successful demands to reshape their profession and their society. They are women who brought nothing short of a revolution to the profession of law.

1

Cataloguing Childhood Influences

Catcher in the Rye, the iconic coming-of-age novel, opens with the alienated Holden Caulfield telling us, “[T]he first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like. . . . and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.”

Well, yes. Beginnings are the foundation of a biography. So, we do want to know what people were important to the Trailblazers early in life. Who supported, or discouraged their aspirations. Who or what put them on the path to law school. The women say that the stories, and the answers, involve parents but also grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, teachers, friends, and neighbors. Birth order, gender, hometown culture, race, and religion accounted for aspirations and ambition but also deterrents. No one template shaped the childhoods of Trailblazers or determined how gender would influence school achievement. Each woman’s experience was unique, but some patterns do emerge, beginning with those that occurred in childhood and adolescence.

Sara-Ann (Sally) Determan, a retired partner at Hogan and Hartson, says that she never thought about being anything but a lawyer, like her father. In first grade she drew a stick figure walking into an office. Not yet able to spell the name of her future profession, Determan called her picture “Sally Layer.” She wanted to be a lawyer, in part to please her father. By the age of twelve she was sneaking into his briefcase and reading transcripts. She recalls thinking, after making her way through a rape trial report, “Woo hoo hoo, this is the life.”

In Texas, Irma Herrera’s Mexican American family saw the makings of a lawyer in her before she did. She was an inquisitive and argumentative child who loved to read, and relatives told the young Herrera that she was “abogada sin libros” (a lawyer with no training; literally, a lawyer with no books). At the age of five, in 1923, Shirley Adelson Siegel sat next to strangers on a Pennsylvania Railroad car and talked for the entire two-hour trip. Arriving home, her family said that Shirley was such a chatterbox she should become a lawyer. Soon afterwards, her kindergarten teacher asked class members what they wanted to be as grownups. Shirley did not miss her chance. Although she had no idea what a lawyer was (except that they got to talk), she replied “lawyer.” Florence Roisman thinks the idea of becoming a lawyer was “implanted” into her brain because, when she was a baby, her father, a lawyer, wheeled her around in a pram while neighbors called her the “little lawyer-kin” and assumed she, too, would become an attorney.

In Los Angeles Miriam Wolff shaped her vision of the future with more concrete information. She benefited from having a neighbor who worked in the local DA’s office handling high-profile criminal cases. From sixth grade on, Wolff would visit court to listen to him. Her father, a doctor, encouraged these outings and also introduced his daughter to family friends who were judges. Although the year was 1927 and Wolff was eleven, friends and family knew that she intended to be a lawyer.

Fathers and Mothers

Fathers figure strongly in this story. Not surprisingly, a dozen were lawyers. This was not unimportant, but their transcendent power lay in the ability to make or diminish their daughters’ sense of worth, and their interest in challenging society’s gender expectations. More than half of these Trailblazer daughters were the first born. Psychotherapists call being oldest “kind of loaded to be domineering,” with first-born children tending to be very strong, opinionated, determined, and highly responsible.1 Other Trailblazers had no brothers. One daughter spoke frankly of her father, who wanted, but did not have, a son. As a result he treated her as his son. Joanne Garvey’s dad had two daughters; Garvey was playing catch “with a glove” at the age of three. Sally Determan said, “I think I was the son my father was destined not to have. . . . [M]y mother never said I couldn’t be anything that I wanted to be, but my father was so ego-involved in the fact that I had chosen so early to be a lawyer like him, and of course that was the reason I chose as early as I did.” Both of Tamar Frankel’s parents supported her “almost without reservation.” Frankel believed that her father saw her as his first born, and “to some extent I was a boy in that sense.” Jodi Bernstein, however, had a brother and said her dad made a “fetish” of treating them equally.

Esther Lardent was an only child. Her parents were Holocaust survivors; she was their “hope.” Her parents encouraged Lardent to become a doctor or lawyer and discouraged her from learning to cook or to sew. Her father would show Esther pictures of Golda Meir and say, “You see, see what she can do, you see.” Lardent was certain that if her parents had a son he would have been the focus, “but instead it devolved to me.”

Roberta Ramo said of her father, “[H]aving three daughters it never occurred [to him] that we couldn’t do anything we wanted to do.” He held Ramo and her sisters to this expectation by having “extremely high standards.” She tells the story of her dad, later in life, being asked if he didn’t wish he had a son. To anyone who dared to say that to him, her father would reply that they were right: he was sorry he and his wife had not had a fourth child because he thought three daughters weren’t quite enough and a fourth girl “would really be the icing on the cake.”

Mothers, while sometimes reluctant or even hostile in the face of a daughter’s professional ambitions, were, more often, nurturing heroines. Low-salary moms and homemaker moms counseled these daughters not to count on the support of a husband, and to have sufficient education to earn their own way.

Some mothers tried to dispel stereotypes for both girls and boys. During her early childhood in San Mateo, California, Mary Cranston’s mother found the only female pediatrician practicing in the Bay Area after nuns told her second-grade twin daughters that women could not be doctors. While Cranston was training to become an attorney, her twin, Susan, became the first female board-certified vascular surgeon in the United States. Nancy Duff Campbell took her young son to a woman pediatrician. He was quite surprised to learn in elementary school that men could be doctors. Barbara Robinson’s two-year-old son knew that his mom was a lawyer. Told by his grandmother that he was so good at defending his baby brother he ought to grow up to be a lawyer, the child replied, “Oh Gamma, I can’t be a lawyer, only girls are lawyers.”

As a child Shirley Hufstedler spent much more time with her mother than with her father. Her life decisions as an adult were influenced “by mom conversations,” a story not uncommon among these women. Hufstedler’s mother left school when she married and expressed to her daughter dissatisfaction with her subsequent role as a woman. Hufstedler reports that her mom had strong views about those expectations and constraints: “She didn’t call it discrimination, but that’s what she was talking about.”

By the time Karen Mathis was born in 1950, twenty-five years after Hufstedler, her mother had named society’s expectations “discrimination,” and engineered a solution for Karen, her eldest daughter. As a child Karen’s mom, a graduate of Kathryn Gibbs Secretarial School, began to call her K.J. Asked how she had decided on this nickname for her daughter, her mother said, “Because no one will know if you are a man or a woman and they won’t discriminate against you.”

Many daughters were prepared by mothers to have the professional life forbidden to mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. Other daughters spoke specifically about honoring their mothers by not permitting fathers, husbands, or society to curtail their ambitions. One element of these Trailblazers’ drive toward becoming professionals was their desire to be surrogates for their older female kin.

In families of all backgrounds—religious, racial, and economic—it was commonly reported that fathers did not want their wives to be employed, even where they had trained for a career and worked before getting married or having children. In the decades of the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, societal pressure pushed women into domestic lives. Husbands argued that a working wife would bring disgrace on the household and questions of why the “man of the house” could not support his family. Carolyn Dineen King’s mother, who had practiced law for several years before her marriage, was in this position. King’s father, illogically, believed women should have every educational opportunity but insisted that his wife not work because it would be a “poor reflection on him.” As King grew up, her mother spoke highly of women becoming involved in law, telling her daughter and other young women, “There’s a whole world out there of things that you can do in addition to teaching.” Cornelia Kennedy’s mother taught by example, returning to law school once her children went to school.

Zona Hostetler’s father left his family of four children in 1945 when she was nine. Her mother also taught by example. She commuted sixty miles a day from rural Virginia to Richmond, the state’s capital, to work at secretarial jobs and then as an office manager for a personal injury law firm. Smart and ambitious, Hostetler’s mom figured out that she and the other secretaries could do a lot of the work the lawyers were doing. Zona refers to her mother as a “pioneer” in the creation of the paralegal profession in Virginia, a woman who gave talks throughout the United States about how she and the firm were breaking new ground. Hostetler experienced this example of female professionalism first-hand as a summer employee at the law firm.

Patricia King’s single working mom, learning of King’s interest in a legal career, said simply, “[G]o for it.” While corralling her seven children, Wendy Williams’s mother found time to clip items from the newspaper about how girls could do anything, and she would leave them on her eldest child, Wendy’s, pillow.

In contrast, several daughters reported no words of encouragement but eventually took flight as professional women because of their silent observation of their home situation. Gail Harmon’s mother was “very capable but high-strung, [a] frustrated person.” Harmon perceived that she had enough of her mother’s characteristics that she would need a life outside of the house to give her life balance. Joan Klein’s family offered her no encouragement to study or get good grades. She, too, looked and listened and concluded that “[m]y dream was to have a life unlike my mother’s.” Klein liked neither the way her mother was treated nor the way her mom lived: “She had no independence about anything. [Father] called her ‘woman.’”

Ada Shen-Jaffe says that it was to her advantage that her parents, as recent immigrants from China, “were somewhat oblivious to and therefore less susceptible to the American cultural ‘norms’ of the Mad Men era.” Her father encouraged Shen-Jaffe to sign up for debate class where, for the first time, Ada heard someone being ridiculed for having been bested “by a girl.” At the same time Ada’s mom discouraged her from signing up for a typing class so that she would not be able to rely on that skill to earn a living. (She questions now—with humor—how her mom could have foreseen “that in the PC/MAC era typing would become an indispensable life skill.”)

Family, Friends, and School

Mothers and fathers were not alone in offering encouragement or, in some instances, arguing for lesser ambitions. An African proverb suggests, as Hillary Clinton famously noted some years ago, that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Other family members, friends, and teachers augmented or, sometimes, trumped the influence of parents. Older siblings were role models, some exerting a powerful influence and provoking an intense desire to imitate. Roberta Ramo and her two sisters joined their parents in dinner discussions. She said a friend observed that trying to talk at the Ramo dinner table was like “trying to get in the on ramp at the LA freeway on a bad day.” Everyone learned how to be heard, excellent training for the law.

As the eldest, some of the Trailblazers were put in charge of younger siblings. In other instances siblings cast protective arms. While she was a junior political science major in college, one of Maryann Saccomando Freedman’s older brothers came to her saying that he did not see job ads for people in political science: “You’d better start thinking about how you are going to make a living.” Telling this story, Freedman paused to underscore her belief that not everyone thought girls went to school to find husbands. “This girl never went to school to find a husband; this girl went to school in order to be able to earn a living that was substantially better than my parents’ living.”

Some brothers and Trailblazers protected one another and, in one instance, literally flew into the skies together. Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder grew up moving about the United States in a family “without any gender stereotyping.” Her father, a pilot and businessman, believed in giving his children the tools needed to be independent. He taught Pat and her younger brother to fly while they were young, and by age fifteen they were at the controls. Schroeder said that her parents “always felt that the most important thing we could learn was how to bankroll ourselves”—so she and her brother followed that advice. They developed entrepreneurial ventures. While still living with their parents, they arranged to buy cars at the end of the season in Detroit, then fly to Detroit and drive them home to Des Moines, where the siblings would sell them.

Constance Harvey speaks powerfully of the pain and toll of being born into, and growing up in, violent, segregated Mississippi—her village. She was in the second group of African Americans to integrate the University of Mississippi law school and was almost killed along with a group of poll watchers in 1968 in Marshall County. Meals with her parents and siblings provided “our own school about life,” including the tumultuous politics of her childhood years. But she also turned to the company of elderly relatives “to listen to how things use to be.” Her favorite grandparent always had advice for her. When she complained about segregation and racism her grandfather would say, “Times were worse than they are now.” Harvey was grounded in the fact that there had been two different racial worlds and “you did not venture into the white world if you were black.” The history that she learned from family, “the unfairness and the pain associated with that,” infuriated her. This upbringing, in her view, “had quite a bit to do with what I wanted to do in life.”

Maryann Freedman’s educational ambitions were supported by her brother, but female relatives in their Italian immigrant community worked hard to undercut her aspirations. They thought, Freedman said, she was being “‘high falutin’” for going on in school. In her presence they asked, “Who does she think she is?” One of these women relatives said, “There is nothing that makes me happier than scrubbing my floors and making them gleam and that should be enough for Maryann too.”

Yet opinions were divided, and laced with humor. During the discussion of clean floors versus Maryann’s dreams of higher education, another relative responded, “Nobody wants to eat off your floor and if Maryann wants to go to college, she should go to college, and if Maryann wants to go to law school, she should go to law school, because no one wants to eat off her floor either.”

In other villages messages were unequivocally supportive. In Patricia King’s family, only one uncle had attended college. When King’s college scholarship money ran out, he mortgaged his property in order to finance her sophomore year of study. Betty Murphy’s father died when she was young; an uncle paid for her undergraduate years at Ohio State.

As champions of talent and the drive for betterment, some teachers were important mentors, urging these young women on, often giving them the first information they obtained about good high schools and colleges outside the local area. Freedman’s teachers in Buffalo, New York, recognized her outstanding drive and intelligence, encouraged her, and made certain she signed up for courses that would prepare her for the all-important (and prestigious) New York State Regents tests, while friends were placed in secretarial courses. Esther Lardent’s high school newspaper adviser urged her to try for a top college.

But not every teacher bestowed encouragement. Some teachers could, and did, respond to their students’ class, race, and ethnicity as well as gender with cutting, dispiriting words. Antoinette Dupont views social prejudice as the root of a much-repeated opinion voiced by a New London, Connecticut, Latin teacher who told Dupont’s aunt that her niece “should not go to college and that most people with Italian immigrant parents were better suited to work at Woolworth’s.” Latina and African American girls heard from teachers that aspiring to be lawyers or physicians was an unreasonable goal. Mexican American Trailblazer Antonia Hernandez, raised in a civic-minded East Los Angeles family, never believed that being a girl excluded intellectual interests. In 1965 Hernandez wrote an essay about her dreams and ambitions for her high school English teacher. The teacher returned her paper with a drawing of a sad face, accompanied by the comment “that it was wonderful to dream, but [she] had to be practical [as she] was not college material.”

Irma Herrera, a self-described Chicana, went to segregated parochial schools in Texas. The nuns demanded that only English be spoken. Very early in school they gave the message “that it was not okay to be who we were.” The Spanish nuns, Herrera felt, “viewed themselves as superior because they were light-skinned women.”

Elsewhere, middle-class high school girls were told that college offered them only two options: a teaching degree or an Mrs. Degree. Most Trailblazers attended local high schools. A few attended all-girls’ schools where parents, or daughters, sought the absence of distractions they associated with coeducational institutions. Others enrolled in public girls’ schools that were known for their high academic standards, ones that required high test scores for admission. Immigrant Ilana Rovner, born in Riga, Latvia, in 1938, was sent to Philadelphia High School for Girls. She loved the “incredible” mix of races, ethnicities, and religions, and the educational preparation. Rovner was a complete fan of single-sex education and elected to go to Bryn Mawr. At college she was told that women could “accomplish anything.” The all-women’s school filled her “with a sense of hope and possibility.”

Barbara Robinson also attended Bryn Mawr, where she expanded her already well-honed leadership skills. As president of the Undergraduate Association, she called for more respectful relations with the maids and porters, asking that they be called by their last names. She says that the college administration went “ballistic.” Still, like Rovner, she found an atmosphere respectful of the students, one that included an expectation that each young woman would go on to a serious career. She believed that Bryn Mawr, by making women the main focus, immunized them from feeling like second-class citizens. Yet, while spending time at the nearby all-male Haverford College, Robinson noticed that the intellectual life there w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Against the Odds
• 1. Cataloguing Childhood Influences
• 2. The Lure of Law
• 3. Law School: “You’re Taking a Man’s Place”
• 4. Work Profiles: The Post–World War I Generation
• Entr’acte: Tales from the Clothes Closet
• 5. The Next Generation: The Path to Private Firm Partnership
• 6. Breaking New Ground: Law Schools and Public Interest Law
• 7. The New Face of Government
• 8. “Judge Cookie to You”: Women Lawyers Join the Judiciary
• Entr’acte: Home, Hearth, and the Pursuit of a Career
• 9. The Case of the Century and Other Tales
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Case References
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author