Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace: High Hopes, Mixed Outcomes 9781626375512

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WOMEN ATTORNEYS AND THE CHANGING WORKPLACE

kitzerow-qu-fm_ff-fm 1/10/14 10:37 AM Page 2

WOMEN ATTORNEYS AND THE CHANGING WORKPLACE High Hopes, Mixed Outcomes

Phyllis Kitzerow

kitzerow-qu-fm_ff-fm 1/10/14 10:37 AM Page 4

Published in the United States of America in 2014 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.firstforumpress.com and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2014 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-1-62637-045-6 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This book was produced from digital files prepared by the author using the FirstForumComposer. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

To my family, with love

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Women Who Chose Law

1

2

Pathways into the Law

13

3

Finding the First Position

35

4

Building a Career over the Long Run

67

5

Was Law a Good Choice?

105

6

Balancing Work and Family

137

7

The Impact of Gender

161

8

High Hopes, Mixed Outcomes

193

Bibliography Index

225 235

vii

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the sixty-five women I interviewed who made this research possible by their cooperation and willingness to recap their lives and careers. I am also grateful to Westminster College for financial support through the Watto Award and other research funds. In addition, I would like to thank Andrew Berzanskis at Lynne Rienner Publishers for his good suggestions and his ability to see this as a book when I could see only an untidy mess. The anonymous reviewers who gave such detailed feedback have contributed much to this final version. They did their best to lead me away from the mistakes that undoubtedly still exist. Finally, I am so grateful for the loving support of friends and family, especially my husband, Gene, my grammar pedant; Zach, my painstaking copyeditor; Ellen, my tech support; and Kate, my research adviser. Your help has gotten me through this process. My parents, who thought I could do anything, would be pleased.

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1 Women Who Chose Law

To be successful in an environment like this, and to compete, and to do this kind of work, you can’t say, “Well, I’m leaving now, because I have to go home [to be] with my family.” If your case is going to trial tomorrow, you’re working ’round the clock, you’re working 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. . . . I’m closer to my kids now that they’re adults than I was then, because I did miss a lot. I was not a mom that was driving kids around doing stuff. . . . At least in that era, being one of the first women, I felt that there was some pressure for women in the profession to prove that women could do it, could be trial lawyers, not just be a back office trust [lawyer]. . . . but to be a trial lawyer and to go head to head and be willing to make the sacrifice and be here. If the guys were here, I was going to be here, too. I made it a point, maybe I’m still to this day making a point that I’m here and I’m not distracted by [family], but yet still was fortunate to have a caregiver and a husband that were willing to allow me to do that. —Gloria, Modern group1

Gloria foreshadows this book in giving her story as one of the women lawyers who graduated by 1975. For her, the question of career and family was both a personal one and one that tied into the expectations of the legal world at that time. Finding a position, doing well in that position, and combining career and family were personal dilemmas. Women like Gloria figured out what they could and could not do, guided by their perceptions of the workplace. Some were very successful, others less so. The stories of their careers tell the outcome of the circumstances they faced and the choices they made and make up the framework of this book. Using these stories, this book explores the timely and important topic of women professionals’ abilities to balance career and family. 1

All names are pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Pseudonyms were given in order of graduation date with the earliest graduates receiving names beginning with A on through the alphabet. This should enable the reader to have a general sense of when the person speaking graduated. 1

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Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace

Women like Gloria, law school graduates of 1975 or before, talk about their experiences over time and their outlook on the current world of law from their individual perspectives. An important part of this experience is the career decisions made, with the movement from the initial position to successive positions or sometimes out of the labor force. Charting this balance of career and family makes visible the decisions being made and the factors involved. Kay (1997), studying Canadian lawyers, looked at the movement across work-settings, charting career mobility for successive cohorts of lawyers as a way of accounting for gender differences in career paths. She used a life course perspective to bring together life and career events with structural changes in law firms. Important in her analysis were the social-psychological factors of job satisfaction and organizational commitment in making these moves. In a similar way, this book ties together the environments in which the women entered the profession of law with their personal lives and concerns. Leaving a position might reflect not a lack of professional commitment or dissatisfaction with the position but an overload on the personal or family side of one’s life. Change might mean a step upward or a move toward a more manageable life style. This book offers the unique experience of input from many of these women in both 1975 and 2010. The women are divided into several cohorts depending on year of graduation. The experiences of these cohorts are compared, thus offering both a longitudinal and comparative focus. When women started to enter law and medicine and other professions in larger numbers in the 1970s, most people were not sure whether these women would succeed or even stay in these professions. These women are now at the advanced stage of their careers, but there is little information available about what has happened to them. Connected stories of the lives of these women are mostly available in the form of individual biographies or a profiling of a particular law school class (Abramson and Franklin 1986; Hope 2003). Stories of a large group of women found in the same setting, in this case a large eastern city, and their progress over time are seldom available. Brockman (2001) gave this kind of information but for Canadian women lawyers who were, at most, only in their sixth year of practice. Being able to hear from women who have been in practice for thirty-five years or more makes it possible to see both the effects of individual decisions and the extent to which women have made their way into the legal profession. Brockman (2001) asked the question “Are younger women lawyers fitting into the established legal profession, or are they altering the old

Women Who Chose Law

3

mould (sic) in which lawyers have traditionally been formed, or at least having some impact on it?” Her thought was that if things were getting better for young Canadian women lawyers, perhaps the legal establishment had changed because of the large influx of women. In the 1970s, the assumption was that in the future work would be more family friendly and manageable, husbands would be equal partners in family responsibilities, and the wrenching pressures would subside to an occasional busy moment. Has that happened? Did the generation of women who came into the law in the 1970s have enough of an impact to change the structure of law settings? Were they able to reach the top themselves or did their careers show the effect of gender and unyielding structures? When looking at law settings today, what has changed since these women entered the field? What changes in the settings due to factors other than women’s entry have advanced or hindered the brave new world predicted? An important part of this book is what it can contribute to the ongoing debate on career/family balance. Slaughter’s (July 2012) article entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” drew instant public discussion. Most of the discussion centered on whether her conclusion was accurate although the point of her article was to suggest changes to make having it all more manageable and thus more likely. Spar (2012) in Newsweek made a comparable statement by saying that no one can work a sixty-hour-per-week job and be the same kind of parent that he/she would have been without the job. “And yet,” Spar says, “women are repeatedly berating themselves for failing at this kind of balancing act.” Sandberg’s (2013) Leaning In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead raised the related question of why professional women had not made more progress and whether that progress had been halted by the concern about family. Despite the surge in women entering the legal profession since the 1970s, women are still underrepresented in the top ranks and salaries of lawyers today. Much scholarly research on women in the law (Epstein et al. 1995; Gorman and Kmec 2009; Kay 1997; Noonan et al. 2005; Williams 2002) has focused on why women are still underrepresented in top positions. Why does a pay gap between male and female lawyers still exist? Are women being promoted and retained to the same extent as men in law firms? Have changes come about in firms to make the combination of family and career more manageable? The book examines this literature after giving the women’s stories as another way to understand the present situation of women in law. Included are questions of opportunity and expectations, emerging

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Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace

alternate definitions of professional success, and the extent to which gender norms still impact the profession of law. Exploring the careers and lives of these women will show how the profession of law has changed and what has remained static. This is an opportunity to catalog the changes seen by these women and use that information to understand how changes in gender relations come about, thus illuminating one area of gender studies. What have been the effects of gender norms? Does gender still matter in law? How much is due to choice on the women’s part and how much to the structures in which they are embedded? The Impact of Gender

Gender pervasively affects everyone’s lives, influencing the nature of people’s experiences and the ways people are evaluated. The examination of gendered differences is of the utmost importance for sociology, and the social construction of gender has become a familiar theme in gender studies. West and Zimmerman (1987) suggest that because society sees gender differences as “essential” or built-in, gender expectations are unavoidable. They call attention to ways our society both creates gendered spaces (e.g., gendered bathrooms) and then uses these as evidence of gender differences. These expectations are visible in the negative reactions to women entering the professions, so much so that people still speak of “women lawyers” as an exception to the norm which is, of course, lawyers as male. As individuals interact, the evaluations of their conduct by others and themselves according to gendered standards legitimate the “naturalness” of gendered behavior. According to West and Zimmerman, “If we do gender appropriately, we simultaneously sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional arrangements that are based on sex category.” If the society is simply reacting to “real” male/female differences, then such differences legitimate issues of allocation, who gets what or gets to do what. Thus people are encouraged to ask not why differences in compensation still exist but to remark instead on how well women are doing. Because legal competency is hard to quantify other than by the rewards attached, perception remains very important. Particularly in evaluating lawyers for partnership, the gender expectations still held by those in power are likely to shape how successful or competent those lawyers are assessed as being. Lorber (1994) points out “believing is seeing” rather than the usual statement of “seeing is believing.” That is, people see what they expect to see, often regardless of the reality. If people believe that women should be “ladylike,” then a woman’s

Women Who Chose Law

5

assertive behavior will be seen as inappropriate despite the fact that this behavior is normal for the work role she holds. Examining a particular group of women who have a set of experiences over time highlights how this gendering process comes about. Looking at women who have been very successful, as some of the women in this group have been, can show where traditional gender rules have been modified or seen as less relevant. Thorne (1993) examined the relevance of gender norms in particular contexts. In her study of girls and boys in a school setting, Thorne talked about the circumstances in which gender is extremely relevant and other circumstances when it is of much less importance. While gender might always be noted, it does not always carry the same burden of differentiation. Thus the context and the situation over time must be considered in determining how important a role gender is playing. Which women have been able to escape the constraints of gender expectations and why? Knaak (2004) reminds us that gender itself is “socially constructed” and changes over time as other assumptions and beliefs change. She suggests that gender is both a process and an outcome. The interaction between individuals and between individuals and social structure teaches and reinforces gender roles while, at the same time, the social institution of gender affects that structure and influences the choices that individuals make. Gender then becomes an independent variable influencing actions such as occupational choice and progress. Seeing the changes in the field today and comparing them to the situations these women have faced catalogues that perceptual change which has so influenced the gendered structure of the legal field today. Studying the Women Who Graduated from Law School by 1975

This book contributes a two-stage look at baby-boomer and earlier women lawyers and the setting in which they practiced. The first stage, the interviews in 1975, focused on seventy- seven women who had graduated from law school between 1925 and 1975. The area of women and work has been a prominent topic in gender studies and in 1975, I was interested in gender as one of the factors influencing women’s success in professional careers. In order to look more closely at this situation, I wanted to study a group of women in one of the professions that was beginning to change in gender demographics and decided to focus on law. At that point I wanted to understand why the surge in women professionals was happening and what the consequences would be. I wondered whether the women I interviewed would be able to break through the glass ceilings that characterized so many occupations in the

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Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace

1970s and succeed on equal terms with the men with whom they studied and worked. I interviewed seventy-seven women who were practicing law in a large eastern city. I was able to find these women through a combination of three methods. Most of the women were located through the bar association membership list of Eastern County. Additional women were added from the fall 1975 Bar Exam pass list. The names of a few additional women were given to me by the women I interviewed. Although one hundred and nineteen women were listed in the membership list, many were hard to trace as they had moved from their original placement and their former employer was unwilling to give me any forwarding address. As a non-lawyer, I had only a few contacts within the legal world of Eastern City and was mostly dependent on the existing lists. Ten of the questionnaires were completed by mail since these women were not in Eastern City at that time. The 1975 study was an attempt to answer three questions. Why had these women wanted to become lawyers; what had their law school experience been; and what had happened since law school? At that time, almost half of the sample (48%) was within three years of graduation from law school so their career paths were only beginning. Three patterns were apparent in the responses from these women. The most important variable was the year of graduation, which I used to form my three cohorts. I also looked for similarities within the groupings. The groups do not cover equal numbers of years due to the rapidly shifting gender roles causing women who graduated only a few years apart to have very different experiences. The Pioneer Group

Those women who had graduated from law school by 1963 were the most distinctive in motivation. They had usually had some contact with law, either a parent or family friend. Their parents encouraged their ambitions and placed little emphasis on more traditional expectations for them. They tended to come from middle class or higher backgrounds and had expected to go to college. They wanted not just professional status of some kind but, more specifically, a career in law. They had been very successful academically before law school and were usually very successful in law school. The early group was quite different from the next two groups. I picked the date of 1963 to separate the first and second groups because this seemed to be the breaking point for these differences. Women in the early group were true pioneers in both numbers and the extent to which

Women Who Chose Law

7

they were breaking the norms. The modern women’s movement had not yet become visible and few attitudes towards women in the law had changed (Fossum 1981). In 1966 only 6.5% of those taking the law school admission test (LSAT) were female. By 1970 this would more than double to 13.3%, an indication of how quickly things were changing. The next two groups show some of the effects of this change, as shown by their law school experiences, first positions, and their careers that followed. The Transition Group

The women who graduated between 1964 and 1972 were a more mixed group in motivation and background than those who came earlier. Their connection with law was more tenuous and their backgrounds included some women from working class families. A number of them had had other careers before the decision to become a lawyer. Their contact with law, if they had any, might have been as an employee or friend or spouse. Often this contact convinced them that they would be capable of earning a law degree although they had not earlier had this confidence or considered this option. They were more mixed in terms of academic success in previous academic work and in law school. A number of these women attended a local law school’s night program while working full-time. The Transition group experienced law school as the Women’s Movement became more visible. Change was beginning to be felt in both attitudes and actions as law schools became more receptive and employers began to relax some of the barriers that had existed earlier. The results of these changes were most evident for the next group; the most numerous group even though only three years of law school graduates are included. The Modern Group

The third group, made up of women who graduated from 1973-1975, was similar to male law students in terms of wanting some sort of professional status and choosing law as one possibility out of a range of others. It was no longer necessary for them to have encouraging families or a connection with law. Perhaps the messages about women achieving professional status which had begun to appear in popular culture as the women’s movement progressed took the place of the individual messages that had been necessary for the earlier groups. Popular media was beginning to carry stories of women in new careers and emphasize

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Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace

the “first” woman in various settings. Women in the third group were generally academically successful before law school and showed the same range of academic success in law school as male students. Some of them were able to take advantage of placement opportunities formerly unavailable to women once they had graduated from law school. When I interviewed these women in 1975, the expectation of both the women interviewed and the legal world in general was that gender equity in not only numbers but also status and compensation would come with time, and that as women reached the mature career stage, their rewards would equal those of male lawyers. The Modern group, composed of those who graduated between 1973 and 1975, was excited about their entry into the field of law and optimistic about women’s progress in law. Many of them felt confident that their careers would progress quickly and well. The 2010 Study

In 2010, I went back to the original list of women I had interviewed in 1975 and contacted those who could be found. Forty-three were deceased or could not be found. Seven individuals also refused, two on the basis of illness. I used the current bar association directory of Eastern County to locate additional women who had graduated from law school by 1975 and added those women who had not been part of the original study. Some of these had moved to Eastern County since 1975 or had been missed the first time. I interviewed sixty-five women (thirty-two of whom I also had interviewed in 1975). In my interviews with these women, I was especially interested in their occupational histories. My questions were particularly focused on how they made their choice(s) of position. Other questions focused on compensation and perceived success as well as career satisfaction. Most questions were open-ended. An important area was the work-family balance for those women who combined employment and marriage and/or children as many of these women had. I encouraged the interviewees to move into a career narrative rather than just respond to each question. Most interviews ranged from 30 to 60 minutes and took place in the interviewee’s office or home. Much of this book consists of quotes from those interviews. I made only minor changes in the quotations I used, either for readability or to maintain anonymity. Only a few of the women interviewed were part of minority racial or religious groups. I did not designate them as such as it would have often destroyed their anonymity. Nor did I try to generalize about members of these groups since there were so few included.

Women Who Chose Law

9

The interviews were recorded and transcribed and then coded using qualitative data analysis software. I chose forty-one relevant themes and coded the interview data according to these themes. Most of the themes related to the questions asked in the interview but a number also emerged from the answers given. The material is presented in terms of the three groups, Pioneer, Transition, and Modern. It is also presented in order of the career progression from law school to the present day. Three concepts, opportunity, success, and work/family issues, focused the analysis and discussion of the women’s experiences. Placement categories such as private practice, corporate practice, and government positions were often important influences on satisfaction and problems encountered. The constraints influencing the original choice of position and the career decisions following are examined through the narratives of the individual careers of a representative sample of these women. The interplay between agency (the women’s own choices and actions) and structure (what the legal world was like over time) becomes clear through these narratives. The stories of these women illustrate the benefits and disadvantages of being early on the scene of a profession which has changed radically in its gender makeup during their time in the profession. All of the women I interviewed graduated from law school by 1975. They were part of that first large infusion of women into the legal profession and are now at a mature stage of their careers. Their experience illustrates what has happened to both the profession and the women who entered it. The effects of the gender shift on the profession, the story of the careers of these women, and the lessons learned make up the core of this text. This book addresses the degree to which the pre-1975 women perceive gender equity as having been reached and what their career paths have been. It applies a modern understanding of gender to a particular example and gives an opportunity to examine the outcome for a group of women who entered law so early. A number of questions arise when looking at women who are at a mature career stage or beyond it and in retirement. What was the professional world like for women in 1975? What have their careers and their lives been like? Are they happy with the careers they have had? Do they feel that they have reached their goals? What should women entering the field of law now expect? I also conducted a focus group with ten women students from one of the Eastern City law schools as a way of connecting the lives of the women I studied with the conditions for women today. In this focus group, I asked some of the same questions that I had asked in 1975 and

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Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace

also questions to gauge the students’ aspirations and expectations. I was particularly interested in the expectations of these women who are entering law approximately thirty-five years after the last of my group. Are they better prepared for what they will face? What will their experiences be like? How do they think their careers will progress? I also attended a roundtable on work/family conflict conducted by a division of the local bar association. It was attended by approximately twenty-five people, mostly female. A short program consisted of two speakers, one female, one male, who discussed how they had handled and were handling work/family conflict. The program was followed by extensive questions and discussion. In the first study, when I interviewed women lawyers in 1975, the professional world was a fairly new experience for almost half of my sample (48%). They had finished law school within the last three years, were often still in their first jobs, and were getting used to the experience of being lawyers. For the rest of my sample, some of whom had finished law school as early as 1925, the experiences were often much different and much more difficult. One woman, despite her law degree, was hired as a secretary for the law department of a large corporation. Only after ten years in this position was she allowed to join the law department as a lawyer and start out on the same level as the new male lawyers coming in. Other women told me of great difficulties in finding positions and the often very overt discrimination that they faced in those positions (Kitzerow 1977). In Eastern County, the first woman passed the bar in 1895. It took until 1955 for the total of women lawyers in Eastern County to reach one hundred and a number of my interviewees from the 1975 interviews were part of that group. In my 2010 interviews, I was able to talk again to some of those first hundred women lawyers, a few of whom were still practicing, including a woman who had graduated from law school in the late 1940s. What Follows

Chapter Two looks at the surge in the number of women going to law school as well as other professional schools in the 1970s and connects this to the difference in the model of women and work over five cohorts during the twentieth century, a concept introduced by Goldin (2004). The chapter also categorizes the five main reasons women chose law and discusses their law school experience. Chapter Three looks at the process of finding the first position. In most of the chapters, the coverage is split into the Pioneer, Transition, and Modern groups since the experiences might be expected to differ

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depending on the time period. This was particularly true in Chapter Three where women in the Pioneer group had a much more restricted choice of position and had much less desirable positions available. The Transition and Modern groups benefited from some of the legal and attitudinal changes in the legal world and were more likely to have a range of positions open to them. In Chapter Four, eight individuals were followed throughout their careers to give us a detailed sense of decision-making, choices available, and constraints on the career. These eight women were chosen to illustrate different eras with women from all three groups, Pioneer, Transition, and Modern. They were also chosen to illustrate different placement settings and levels of success. Chapter Five looks at the varying levels of success for these women and what seemed to account for this. The interviewees were asked if they had progressed as fast as they had expected and what their biggest achievement had been. I was particularly interested in their own perceptions of success as well as how the legal world would classify them. Chapter Six examines how work/family issues played out for these women. What were the most common problems and what strategies did the women use to solve them? Balancing child care and work responsibilities took a number of different forms and brought up issues that still surface in the lives of women practicing today. Chapter Seven looked at the impact of gender. Since work/family issues were not the only source of differential gender treatment, the women were asked to respond as to whether they would have been treated differently had they been male. They were also asked whether gender was still an issue for young women now entering the legal world. As a further way to look at the impact of gender, a focus group of current female law students was asked questions about their law school experience, their aspirations, their job hunting and employment experiences and what they saw as possible problems in their first fulltime positions. Their answers as well as the answers of the 1975 graduates give us a good idea of what has changed and what has not. Finally, Chapter Eight sums up the lessons learned from the lives of the women who graduated from law school by 1975. How might they be useful to current female lawyers, especially those who are just beginning their careers and to women in other fields? The same work/family issues, the same problems in moving upward in one’s occupation, the same pressure to be “superwoman,” and the same gender expectations are faced by women in many occupations. This book is an attempt to

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Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace

make the information available to those women and anyone else who is concerned about women and work. Two questions dominate Chapter Eight. Why have so few women lawyers have made it to the top? Can women have it all, i.e., career and family. These questions are examined in terms of both the experience of the 1975 graduates and the current research on women in law. The continuing interest in this topic speaks to the concern that gender equity has still not been achieved. However gender equity may be defined and to what extent women are able to choose what they will do, constraints still exist. Part of this work must be to examine these constraints and to negate the expectations that would continue them. Of particular concern is the present lack of progress towards gender equity. Work should be manageable. Obviously, it would be undesirable to return to a world in which women can only, with great difficulty, use their education and intelligence in the workplace. If women face untenable situations or positions which require undue sacrifice, attrition from these positions will surely continue. Nor does a world sound appealing in which men are well compensated financially, but encouraged to immerse themselves in work, making only minimal commitments outside of that sphere. What solutions are possible for women and men to have full lives with work as a part, not the whole, of their lives? Employers, too, must be encouraged to move to a different model. Chapter Eight will examine the proposed solutions put forth by a number of those who have studied the problem. How might employers benefit from these solutions? What methods might be used to encourage them to participate in change? If the bottom line is the most important consideration for the law firm, what arguments can be made that the bottom line will be improved, not hurt by these changes?

2 Pathways into the Law

There was a little funny guy that was the registrar and he was coming out and he was all excited about too many people and everything and he looked at me and he said, “Come in here,” so I went in with him and he said, “Now, what are you majoring in?” I said, “Well, I’m going to be prelaw.” He says, “Prelaw, that’s ridiculous. You’re not going to be in prelaw.” So I got angry. I thought, the hell with that, I really am going to be pre-law after that, you know. —Anna, Pioneer Group

Anna, who graduated from law school in the early 1950s, was not willing to accept the norms of the time. At that point, going to law school was a very unusual decision for a woman. It continued to be an unusual decision until the surge in law school attendance by women in the 1970s (Ginsburg 1994, Martin and Jurik 2007). This chapter will be looking at reasons for that surge and also at the individual reasons that women in the 2010 study chose to go to law school. The chapter also looks at the reactions to their decision, and the experience itself. Three groups of women, separated by date of graduation, emerged from my 1975 study. The small group of women who graduated from law school between 1925 and 1963 was very distinctive and I have called them the Pioneer Group. They shared a number of background characteristics and were often the first women in any particular legal setting. Some of them had to deal with problems being admitted to law school, some met with unfriendly treatment in law school, and most had trouble being hired after law school. Anna, quoted above, was one of these women. The group I termed the Transition Group graduated between 1964 and 1972. They shared many of the characteristics of the first group but had less distinctive backgrounds and were able to benefit from slightly more accepting law schools, faculty, and employers. The Modern Group, who graduated from law school from 1973-1975, were part of the surge of women attending law school in the 1970s. Their

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Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace

experience was quite different from the first and second groups although they were still a minority in their law school classes and placements. How did women in the pioneer group decide to go into law? For many years, only small numbers of women went to law school or other professional schools. As recently as 1960, the ratio of men to women in professional schools was 23.4 to 1.0 (Goldin 1997). What characterized the unusual women who went to law school before 1964? These women were strikingly similar to each other. They were academically outstanding, had middle class or higher social status, and had usually had some contact with law through a relative or family friend. While many of these factors continued to be important for women who chose to go into law, the later groups seemed to be able to choose law without having all of these factors. Women in the later groups might have less supportive parents, be more varied in class membership, be more diverse in academic standing, consider other careers besides law, or even have held other careers before choosing law. Very few of these pioneer women remain in the 2010 study. The 1973-75 graduates were the majority of those interviewed. Fewer than 13% of the women in the 2010 study graduated from law school by 1963 and only 34% before 1973. Differences between the three cohorts exist in terms of motivation, reaction to the decision to attend law school, and law school experience. What created the surge of women enrolling in professional schools in the early 1970s? Many reasons have been suggested, with many tied to the events and changes of the 1960s. Social movements, the Vietnam War, and new technology that opened up new occupational roles all seem to have had an impact on women’s educational choices. Fewer constraints on women’s roles and occupations and the steady climb in college attendance for women set the background for what would become a surge of women in professional schools such as law (Martin and Jurik 2007). The proportions of men and women going to college had been roughly equal and confined to a small proportion of the population until approximately 1940. Going to college had been very dependent on family resources and thus had reflected class membership closely (Goldin 1997). With World War II and the resulting G.I. Bill of Rights, many men found college education newly available and took advantage of the federally subsidized education they were offered. Women also began to attend in higher numbers although the male/female ratio for college graduation in the early 1950s was 1.79, almost two males for every female. Only in the early 1970s did this gap disappear. The larger number of women college graduates in the 1970s provided the pool

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available for graduate and professional school. As important as the change in numbers, and certainly tied to them, was the change in attitudes that took place. The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and the resurgence of the Women’s Movement encouraged women to think about their occupational futures in a new way. Although women continued to struggle with accommodating “contingency planning”, they also found support for new options capitalizing on the college educations so many were now obtaining. Angrist and Almquist (1974) use the term contingency planning when describing women undergraduates who try to plan their careers while keeping their plans flexible enough to accommodate personal relationship and outcomes. Women have struggled with combining work and family since the first movement of work outside the home with industrialization. Once production moved to factories, most women were not part of the factory labor force unless driven by financial necessity (Kessler-Harris 2003). Middle-class women were expected to have only a family role and to stay in the home if at all possible. Loss of a male breadwinner or other financial exigency was the only acceptable reason for seeking a career or work role. Although ideas of women’s independence came with the early Women’s Movement starting with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, these ideas did not affect most women’s lives. The early Women’s Movement did stress education and new roles for women (McMillen 2008). Increased pressures for women’s education during this time also came through the need for teachers and some new employment opportunities as well as the newly available leisure time for women provided by labor saving household inventions. This resulted in the opening of a number of women’s colleges and the gradual willingness of many formerly male institutions to admit women. One problem that had not been solved by the opening of higher education to women was how to combine a family role and a work role. The small number of early women college graduates in the 1870s and 1880s were faced with the pattern of a work role only before marriage or having to choose between marriage and work. A number of women did choose work over marriage. To quote Goldin (2004) “By the 1890s it was clear that college women were marrying at decidedly lower rates than were those who did not attend college, and that, even if they married, they were having considerably fewer children than their less educated counterparts.”

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Goldin’s Cohort Theory

In Goldin’s (2004) work on women’s educational history through the twentieth century, she introduced the idea of five cohorts of college graduates, each lasting about 20 years. In her first cohort, women graduating from college between 1900 and 1920, the model had been “family or career,” as it had been for the women graduating from college in the late 1800s. This model of either/or was very much the norm and enforced by attitudes, economic opportunities, and even the laws of the time. Many of the women became teachers (the most common training) and were barred from teaching by most school districts if they were married. Only private schools and some public schools desperate for teachers were willing to hire married women. Just as the women college graduates of the 1870s and 1880s had done, these graduates of the early 1900s married at much lower rates than those who had not graduated college and, if married, were considerably less likely to have children. Many of the women who did not marry worked much of their lives as schoolteachers. The policies of the time continued to restrict the hiring of married women for teaching positions. With the rationing of jobs during the Great Depression, this spread to other positions women held. Many of these “marriage bars” were not lifted until the 1940s. So women could marry or they could have a career in teaching (with the exceptions above) but not both. In Goldin’s second cohort, the model was “job, then family.” These were the women who graduated from approximately 1920-1940. According to Goldin, these women did not exit the labor force immediately upon marriage but waited until they were pregnant with their first child. Most women were still teachers and taught in private or urban schools (considered less desirable) if married since the marriage ban was still being enforced in most public schools (Goldin 1997). These women were more likely to marry and have children than the first cohort and held jobs before marriage with some (25%) having jobs after marriage until they became pregnant. Virtually all of them observed the norm that women with children would not work outside the home. The women in Goldin’s third cohort graduated from 1945 to 1965 or so. They married and had children at exceptionally high rates (only 8% never married and only 10% of those who married did not have children). Their model was “family, then job.” They married at early ages (the mean was under twenty-three years of age) and had limited job possibilities. Women were largely expected to work at “women’s jobs” which offered low salaries and little chance for advancement. The term job is used for both the second and third cohorts since in neither cohort

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were women expected to be in the labor force over their lifespan and thus seen as having careers. This term was reserved for the idea of a continuing occupation with movement across levels or a professional role. According to Goldin, the frustrations of the third cohort helped to fuel the Women’s Movement as explicated by Friedan. These women had bought into the norm of the early marriage and childbearing but often found their lives to be unsatisfying (Friedan 1963) and encouraged their daughters to follow a different model. One woman interviewed, Faye, illustrated this history with her anecdote. My mother was a great baker. My sister and I know how to bake nothing, because my mother didn’t want us to know how to bake these things, she didn’t. ‘Read a book, ride your bike, I do not want this life for you.’ Even though she had a good life and she and my father were very happy, married 50 years before she died, she did not want the life that she had for her daughters.

Only with the fourth cohort does the model become “career, then family.” Goldin suggests that the social movements of the 1960s, especially the Women’s Movement, made a new model available. This new choice now included the possibility of career, followed by delayed marriage and child bearing. The availability of this model and the increased number of women graduating from college worked together to draw many women into professional schools. In this cohort (made up of women graduating from 1966-1979), women married an average of two years later, were less likely to have children (about 28% remained childless by age forty, 19% of those who were married), and both expected to and did spend more time in the labor force. About 65% of those who were married were in the labor force at age thirty and 80% were in the labor force at age forty-five (Goldin 2004). Goldin’s 1966-1979 group is the cohort of most of the interviewees (88% of them). This cohort was the first to move out of teaching into a variety of professions, including some of the most prestigious. Most middle-class college-educated young women expected to have the same access to careers as comparable young men and to receive the same compensation (Isserman and Kazin 2011). This is also the first group where large numbers of women were willing to invest in their careers by acquiring professional degrees with the expectation that they would be in the labor force in a professional capacity for a long period of time. This was true of professional women in general and certainly true for

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my interviewees, many of whom have been in professional positions in the labor force since graduating from law school. The fifth cohort is made up of women who graduated from college from approximately 1980-1995. Since my interviewees predate this cohort, this later group will be discussed briefly in the last chapter when looking at lessons learned from the earlier group. The expectations of this cohort were also to combine career and family, but to do it simultaneously. Some of the outcomes from this are now becoming known, particularly the problems still encountered in this model. Chapter Seven examines the expectations of a still later cohort, present day law students, as shown in the focus group conducted with them in 2011. The Admission of Women to Law Schools

Before considering other factors affecting whether women pursued professional degrees, particularly in law, it is important to consider the restrictions upon law school entry earlier women faced. In 1869, Iowa became the first state to admit a woman, Arabella Mansfield, to the bar (Fossum 1981). Other state bars still often denied women admittance. When Myra Bradwell was denied admittance by the Illinois State Supreme Court, she appealed to the United States Supreme Court only to have her appeal denied. (Martin and Jurik 2007). Not until 1900 were women permitted to practice law in most states (Fossum 1981) and it took until 1920 for women to be able to practice before the courts in every state (Martin and Jurik 2007). Women made up only 1% of lawyers in 1910 and were not permitted to join the American Bar Association until 1918 (Fossum 1981). The early women lawyers had often learned law as their husbands’ apprentices. This route was superseded by the academic route by the end of the nineteenth century as more lawyers sought formal education in law. Many law schools refused to accept women as students, particularly the more elite schools. Harvard, arguably the most elite school during the first half of the twentieth century, did not admit women until 1950 (Martin and Jurik 2007) although most schools were admitting women by the 1930s (Fossum 1981). Only in 1972 were they admitted to all American Bar Association approved schools. Although women were admitted to most law schools by the 1930s, there were very few women law students. This began to change in the late 1960s as law school applications tripled and the number of women applicants increased dramatically.

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Goldin and Katz (2000) suggest another factor in the greater number of women pursuing professional degrees. They believe that the availability of reliable birth control was important in encouraging women to make the investment in professional education. The FDA approved the first birth control pill in May of 1960. As evidence for the impact of the pill, Goldin and Katz point to the timing of various changes. The changes in the percentages of “high-powered” professionals (lawyers, judges, physicians, etc.) who were women went from 4.7 in 1960 to 25.1% in1998 (Goldin and Katz 2000). These changes began in the 1970s with a sharp rise in the number of women entering professional schools in medicine, law, dentistry, and business. The ratio of men to women as first year law students went from 10/1 in 1970 to 1.67/1 in 1980 (Goldin and Katz 2000). In the 1970s, the age at marriage for women also began to rise sharply. Married women had been able to access the pill by 1960 but it only became widely available to unmarried women in the late 1960s and 1970s due to legal changes. Goldin and Katz (2000) suggest that the availability of the pill allowed women to postpone marriage and concentrate on career without the cost of abstinence or the fear of pregnancy. For these women, it is likely that the upheavals in expectations concerning women impacted their decision to apply to law school. The new norms of the society concerning sexual behavior and the availability of the pill had reduced the cost of postponing marriage. The expectation of being able to have career, then marriage and family may have encouraged their willingness to invest in a professional career. The new societal expectations as transmitted by college faculty, friends, and popular culture encouraged individual expectations of a career. These were women who had gotten the message in college that they were bright and competent. Women who did well in college increasingly assumed that they would move on to professional careers. The framing of expectations as “career, then family” meant that they could do this without sacrificing family as earlier cohorts had thought. While factors like changing norms and the availability of the birth control pill may function as overall explanations of why more women enrolled in graduate school, the question remains, “What specific reasons did these particular women have for choosing law?” Did they fit the general explanations and what led them to law? When asked, “How did you make the decision to go to law school?” five reasons accounted for over 90% of the sample. Many women had more than one reason but the discussion will focus on the first one given or the one most emphasized.

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About 28% of the women in the 2010 study chose to go to law school as a result of a personal contact or example. Sometimes it was the example or encouragement of a parent or spouse or friends who saw this as a good choice. Barbara said, “I always wanted to be a lawyer. I don’t think I had any real idea what it was all about, but my father was and I idolized him and I think that’s where it came from.” Other times, admiring someone who was a lawyer was enough to suggest this as a career. Sometimes another woman became a role model and an influence for choosing law. Faye had been very impressed by another woman who was a senior when she was a freshman in college. She identified with this woman in terms of ethnic background and became part of a singing group with her. They became close friends. When this woman went to law school, Faye decided that she would do this as well, that it was the right career for her. She had done well in college and was able to obtain a full scholarship for law school. Since her family resources were fairly meager, this scholarship made law school possible. The woman Faye admired continued to be a strong influence and mentor for her. The influence of a role model was particularly important for Faye in that she had no family models for a professional career or even a college degree. Although her parents were emotionally supportive, they could not offer financial help or expertise in her aspirations for a legal career. Although having a personal contact was the most frequent reason given for the group interviewed in 2010, having a personal example was even more important for many of the women interviewed in 1975. For the Pioneer group women, the pre-1964 law school graduates who received so many cultural messages discouraging the choice of law for women, it seemed only personal contact or examples could reverse the message. These examples were generally positive ones, people that the woman already admired or liked, but not always. An unusual example came from one of the women in the first study, someone who had gone to law school in the 1960s. Her statement about her employer, “If that jerk could be a lawyer, I knew I could do it” expresses the way in which she redefined herself as capable of becoming a lawyer. Although this was a negative example of a lawyer, the experience was still reassuring for her in terms of considering law as an option. To return to the 2010 study, another 21% of the women approached the choice of career by trying to assess what their talents were. These women wanted to find something they could do well, that would fit their talents. Joyce, a member of the Modern cohort, knew early on that she wanted to be a lawyer. She felt this was a career that would fit what she saw as her strengths as reflected in the following quote, “There were no

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lawyers in my family, but I thought I was good at things like history and English, which I thought lent themselves to law.” Joyce felt the opportunities for women were very limited and that she would work as a government lawyer since the government would be more likely to hire a woman. She felt that in doing this, “she would change the world” expressing not just the fit with law that she gave as her main reason for law school but also another reason given by many women, the desire for social justice and change. Often women in the modern group were told by others that they would be good lawyers. Sometimes this was because they were seen as argumentative, not an approved “feminine” trait. But it was usually a more positive appraisal. Ruth remembered, It was an uncle always saying to me, ‘You know, you’re just always talking, why don’t you go be a lawyer?’ None of my family had ever been in that field, so it’s not as if I followed because my grandfather had done it or my father had done it. My father worked in a steel mill and my grandfather worked in a steel mill, so did this uncle who had advocated that I be a lawyer, I think it was a crossing of circumstances, of being in college and saying, ‘Well, what am I going to do next?’

Generally these women were top students. Parents, teachers, or friends encouraged them to consider further academic work and sometimes a more general message was taken as a personal message. Linda, also in the modern cohort, said, “My boyfriend told me I should be a lawyer.” She took it as a compliment and followed his advice. Later she realized that he told everyone that. She says now, “Nevertheless, it took me twenty years to realize [this], but life is strange and I absolutely loved law school.” Women in this category, “law as a good fit,” often took some time in deciding what to do. Joyce was an exception in deciding on law early; the others in this category generally did not make the decision until college. As they thought about careers, they analyzed their strengths, ruled out other possibilities, and made the decision to take the LSAT’s and apply to law school. If they did well, they took this as a confirmation of their choice. The next most common factor accounting for 16% of the women was the choice of law as a substitute vocation. Margaret from the Modern group said, Well, I could be very cynical and say I couldn’t get into medical school, because my first choice was to go to medical school, but I had

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a really hard time with organic chemistry. I was a political science major, and I love working with people and I loved the policy ends of things, and I didn’t think that I wanted to teach, and so kind of, what do you do? And so law seemed to me to be the closest to what I was really interested in doing. And so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Deanna, a member of the Transition group, could have followed her original plan but changed her mind as she explained, I thought I would go to social work school and get my M.S.W. and do social work. I finally, shortly before I was scheduled to go, came to my senses and realized that in law you can really solve problems and help people, and you have a nice office. You don’t have to go to dangerous places, and go to people’s houses and visit them in jail, and have no resources to solve problems.

Deanna’s mother was a social worker and Deanna had worked as a social worker so she was quite familiar with what she would be doing. When another career was seen as impossible, law was seen as a good substitute. The first choice of career might not offer any jobs or might be a problem in a new location that had been the result of a personal move. Sometimes it seemed that events converged to make law school more of a possibility, a better choice than the original career. Gail was discouraged from entering college teaching in her major by being told by faculty that positions would be scarce and poorly paid. After working in business for a short time and finding it unfulfilling, she decided to go to law school. Both Deanna and Gail were members of the Modern cohort and expected to have careers. Both of these women were also top students, which helped them find alternatives when their original careers did not pan out. Sometimes the woman had held a position in a first career before deciding to switch to law. Agnes, a member of the Pioneer group, had planned to teach and had found a job in a high school. Her unenthusiastic comment conveys her disappointment with the career choice. “I taught at [Eastern City] High School and really thought I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with these kids.” After taking some summer courses in law, she felt that she had found a much better alternative and enrolled full-time. She continued to teach full-time to support herself while attending a four-year night law school program. Some women spent years in the first career before making the switch, held back by financial demands, lack of confidence, or uncertainty about the availability of alternatives. Occasionally a chance event would bring the disappointment to a head, prompting a more

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serious consideration of alternatives. The woman may have considered law earlier and felt it was unobtainable. If events or encouragement made it more accessible, that was sufficient for the woman to make the choice to apply to law school. Sometimes the first career choice turned out to be disappointing either because it was less interesting than anticipated or the woman was blocked from doing the more interesting work by expectations or even rules about gender appropriateness. A law degree was seen as supplying what the other career had not or giving a credential that would make it easier for the woman to avoid such restrictions in future work. For these women for whom law was a “good fit,” a law degree made future employment easier. The utility of the law degree was affected by the momentous events in the era in which some women were making career decisions. For the women in the “save the world” category, 16% of my sample, the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s had a strong influence on their decision to attend law school. Toni became active in the antiwar movement in college, hitchhiking to the nearest large city from her sedate campus in order to participate. As her involvement grew, she changed colleges and decided that a law degree was the best tool for accomplishing social change. After college, she enrolled in law school in the same city and continued her participation in the anti-war movement. As the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement became more active in the 1960s and 1970s, participants in these movements began to look to law as a necessary tool to bring about change. Certainly the impact of lawsuits and legislation on these movements carried the message that law could advance change and that a law degree made one a more effective movement participant. Peggy became active in the Women’s Movement and found that progress would be easier to accomplish if she had legal credentials. Already involved in preparing for an academic career, she dropped her pursuit of that degree and went to law school. Janet’s boyfriend was active in the Civil Rights Movement as a lawyer and she began to think that she could be more effectively involved if she also became a lawyer. Thirteen percent of the women were attracted by the intrinsic interest of the law. They had discovered that law was interesting by participating in programs or holding jobs or being selected for an experience that exposed them to law, and their response was overwhelmingly positive. Donna, whose delayed attendance at law school will be discussed below, is one of these. She said,

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I loved the concept of the rule of law from the time I was in high school and I think it may have begun when, as a freshman in high school, I was put on a constitutional committee where the school was going to write its own constitution….it was such an adventure!

Beth, a member of the pioneer cohort, also fit this category. She found no impediment in her studies for a career in the sciences but became more interested in literature and writing. She found her boyfriend’s law books fascinating so took the LSATs and switched to law. These five reasons, personal contact, possession of appropriate skills, substitute for another career, a tool to “save the world”, and law as interesting accounted for over 90% of the women’s primary motivations. As mentioned above, women often gave more than one reason. A few women gave idiosyncratic reasons. Surprisingly, only one person mentioned the financial payoff of law. In general, women were unlikely to have specific expectations as far as income or status for their future. Those who graduated before 1972 were especially uncertain about their future and how well they would be accepted. This was realistic since even very well qualified women had trouble finding positions. Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the Supreme Court, graduated from Stanford Law School in 1952. She had been on Law Review and graduated third in her class. No law firm in California would hire her other than as a legal secretary. She ended up going into public service as a deputy county attorney (“Sandra Day O’Conner” 2012). Looking at women who graduated about this time in the next chapter, some of the same kinds of difficulty in finding a position are visible. In contrast to many of the women who went directly from college to law school, some women entered law school after a considerable time away from school. Donna had gone to college with the intention of being a lawyer. As an undergraduate, she was able to take courses at the law school for credit and managed to accumulate a semester’s worth of law school credit by the time she graduated from college. However, “There was no money for me to go to law school and I remember having a conference with a professor and asking something about student aid or some kind of help.” The faculty member’s response was “Ah, there’s nothing like that. We can’t possibly do anything like that.” The law school did not have an evening program. As a result, Donna got a lawrelated job, married, and had five children. In the 1960s, ten years after graduation from college and her first attempt to attend law school, Donna decided, “I’ve got to do it; I’m just going to do it.” At this point, her youngest had just turned three. She

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arranged childcare with the help of family and began law school. The statute of limitations meant that she no longer had that semester’s worth of credit and was starting from scratch. When Donna was told by a faculty member that she might not have enough time available for the demands of law school, she responded “Well, I will not only survive, I’m going to prevail.” When her husband and parents suggested it might be easier to wait a few years, Donna said, “Yeah, but as it is, I’m thirtytwo years old, I’m going to be thirty-five when I get out of school. I can’t make it any later than that.” Clearly, Donna was unusually determined to become a lawyer. An additional pressure was the need for a second professional income with all of those future college educations, but what determined her enrollment was her initial interest and her feeling that she must get to it. She did manage, juggling family and law school and later, family and career. Diane, another member of the transition group, was a clear case of financial need as motivation for law school, one not listed in the five major categories of motivation and seldom mentioned by the other respondents. She saw the need for more income and a better long-term financial outlook as a divorced mother of two daughters. She was then earning a small salary in a traditional “woman’s job.” With two children to educate, Diane knew she needed a better alternative. Her employment as a legal secretary enabled her to see the advantages of a law degree firsthand. She realized one day that her employer was sending his children to college on the income that his practice made possible. It seemed particularly ironic that she was doing much of this work as a legal secretary but was earning so little. Diane’s situation was extremely difficult since she had only finished one year of undergraduate work. This meant nine years of working during the day and going to school at night and finding childcare for the hours that her children were not in school. Diane persevered through these nine difficult years, graduated with her law degree, and was able to take advantage of the opportunities it offered. For her, a law degree meant a life of relative wealth and security with advanced degrees for both children and a comfortable life for herself. Both Donna and Diane had to cope with the attitudes of those around them concerning their decisions to go to law school. In both cases, their decision was met with some skepticism as it was for some of the other women. But for many women, their decision was applauded. Most (63%) had supportive parents, a few because they had wanted this as a career for themselves. Wendy’s father was so anxious to have his daughter become a lawyer that he insisted she apply. “While I was working at the shore, my father sent in my acceptance,” Wendy

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remembered. Most parents were not as insistent or involved as this one but many were thrilled. They valued education or thought their child could do whatever she attempted. Lisa said, “I, of course, thought that the whole world was as non-discriminatory as my father, which turned out to be a mistake.” Sometimes the response was connected to a previous career path or the respondent’s image of the woman. Eileen’s response to the question of whether her parents had discouraged her from applying to law school was an emphatic “Hell, no! My parents were so happy I was leaving social work.” Harriet said, My parents were relieved I was doing something more traditional. Prior to that time, I’d been kind of, you know, a hippie kind of person and they thought I was really kind of way out.

Sixteen percent of the women were fortunate in that everyone important to them was encouraging. Gail remembered, “My boyfriend/fiancé was thrilled with the idea that I was going to law school and my relatives were all thrilled . . . . I don’t remember anybody being discouraging.” Even when the financial demands of law school would be difficult for the family to meet, the response was usually one of excitement, pride, and support. Often the family communicated the idea that they thought the woman could do anything she wanted, a warm and loving confidence booster. For 10%, the response of others in their lives mattered more than family reactions. For some, the importance of other’s responses came a long time before law school as when one woman found the support of a teacher important in deciding to attend college. Norma explained why this had been so important to her when she said in response to the question of why she had wanted to go into law, I don’t know, it was something I always wanted to do. From the time I was in grade school, it was just something that seemed appealing to me. I grew up in a very poor family and I saw my parents sort of having problems and issues and stuff. They didn’t have the wherewith-all either education-wise or financially to fight the issues that happened to them. It just seemed like a way to have more power over your destiny. I have found that’s probably not necessarily true . . . [but] that was kind of the first time I had a consciousness about it. . . . I was lucky I’d had a teacher in high school who turned out to be a real mentor. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I didn’t have somebody there saying, “You can do it, I’ll help you, and this is something you should do.” Once I got to college, the whole idea of going to law

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school just seemed like, “Well, I made it here, then the rest is all possible.”

Getting to college really was the key for Norma. She had doubted whether it would ever happen in terms of her background and the family expectation that she would finish high school, get a job and get married. She said of the high school teacher who had been supportive of her, “She was really somebody that pushed me. She took me to college visits, helped me fill out applications for financial aid and just helped me with the whole process.” Once Norma was enrolled in college, this teacher continued to mentor her and helped her decide which law school of the two that accepted her would be more manageable. Norma felt that without this teacher’s support, she might not have ended up as a lawyer and had the life she has had. For a few women, parents and others expressed little encouragement. The decision was seen as the woman’s own responsibility and little reaction was given. This may have been easier to handle than when negative opinions were expressed. For about 16% of the women, parents gave disapproving responses to the decision to attend law school. One unfortunate woman was told by her father that he was sorry she wanted to be a lawyer since he had never met a good woman lawyer. Some parents assumed that another career, such as teaching, was better for women. For some women, this discouragement was easier to take because they had moved away, physically or emotionally, from their family and felt free to disregard the comments. For the 10% of the women who received discouraging reactions from individuals other than parents, this discouragement followed two patterns. Sometimes this was in terms of the image of a lawyer the individual had. When asked about negative reaction to her decision to go to law school, Pamela said, “Mostly people who just really cared for me from the point of view of ‘You’re not a crass person who wins at all costs, that’s not who you are.’” The other pattern was in terms of gender expectations. Several women’s relatives were discouraging because they were not sure a woman should really be doing this. Sometimes this was from a romantic partner. Margaret dealt with this perception rather decisively. She remembers dating a guy who said to her “Why would you want to do this?” Her response was to break up with him, feeling that this relationship would not work out. Generally the women were undeterred by negative responses to their decision. Although they might feel hurt by them, all of the women continued on the path to law school. As mentioned earlier, since this is a

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study of those who completed careers in law, there is no way to know whether some women who had decided on law school were dissuaded by others’ responses and chose not to pursue a career in law. Gender and Treatment in Law School

Did gender affect the law school experience? The women were asked about their perceptions of differential treatment by gender. My principal interest was in the gender component of the law school experience apart from the student’s degree of enthusiasm for the law school experience. I wondered whether differential treatment of women based on their gender might have been an additional strain along with the academic pressure of law school. Some of my respondents were in the same class in the same law school, which allowed me to compare their responses to the same setting. When this happened, sometimes one woman would aver that women students had been treated differently while another woman in the same class had found no differential treatment. Some women said they were simply not very aware of disparate treatment and did not feel that they would necessarily have noticed discrimination. It was not always the women who attended law school earlier who met with more differential treatment although it is difficult to be sure since generational differences in perception may exist. Women who attended in the 1970s may have been more likely to perceive discrimination than women who attended in the 1950s and 1960s since the Women’s Movement and media coverage of discrimination suits probably heightened awareness. Other factors in the treatment of women were related to location, as women who attended law schools in larger cities sometimes found larger numbers of women and more acceptance of them. Some law schools had a more politically progressive atmosphere and women found a more congenial atmosphere there. Although women who graduated in the 1970s were part of larger groups of women, this should be placed in context. To be part of a group of twenty rather than a group of five was still to be a minority when the class size was 150 or 200. A woman was still very visible, very out of the ordinary. A little over 60% of the women felt they had been treated differently than the male students. Most of this was in terms of how faculty treated them with 42% feeling that faculty had treated them differently, almost always more negatively than they treated male students, and 32% feeling that at least some male students had treated them differently. There was

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some overlap with 19% of the women feeling that both faculty and male students had treated them differently. Several themes emerged when women felt they had been treated differently by the male students. One theme was that women were easy competition. Beth, an early graduate, said, There were some people who were maybe a little less courteous than others, but, for the most part, I don’t think women were envisioned as any sort of competition anyway. It wasn’t until my second year that I began to get some resentment from the guy who came in second.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s when women were becoming more numerous and competition for law school spaces was stronger, some male students viewed them with resentment. One of the more frequently expressed resentments was criticizing the woman for taking up a space a male could have had. Iris stated, It was very difficult for women in law school then because the attitudes of most of the men were “Why are you here? Even if you make it through, there’s a seat that could be occupied by a man and you’re just going to go off and have children and you won’t practice anyway.”

Another woman, who attended law school at the height of the Vietnam War, said, Especially there were people who felt that veterans deserved preference and that we were taking the place of more deserving men and they made it pretty clear….[Y]ou know, they’d openly talk behind your back about this.

Sometimes this would come from wives of male students: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for taking the job away from a man who has to support a family?” While fairly unfriendly comments, these pale beside the following comment addressed to Deanna during the Vietnam War days, “Don’t you feel terrible about taking up a place and somebody’s over there getting killed because you’re going to law school and you’ll probably never do anything with it?” The women sometimes responded to these comments with guilt or anger or frustration. Most said they simply brushed them off and moved on. Given that the women had no difficulty remembering these comments forty years later, the women who said they brushed them off may have overstated their ability to ignore them.

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Faculty attitudes were a more challenging part of law school and were less easy to brush off. Sometimes faculty were seen as being tough, nasty or demanding of all students while others were seen as being problems especially for women. The faculty of the 1940s and 1950s were skeptical until the woman had proved herself with an excellent performance in class. Beth remembered, “Some women were treated almost as second class citizens in terms of how professors expected them to perform.” Beth gained respect from the faculty at the end of her first year in law school when she was first in her class. “I had the thenDean of the law school, who was kind of an intimidating figure, and when he would call on the women…it was clear that he didn’t really expect them to do well.” After Beth did well in his class, he treated her with respect. The law faculty of the 1960s and 1970s were more mixed in their responses to women. Some still saw women law students as a novelty. Often the women were not taken seriously as expressed in Ellen’s quote, “I think the women in the class, women in general, I think, the professors sort of looked down [on], sort of took as a joke.” Another attitude toward women was described by Carol who graduated in the 1960s, He was speaking on the difference between a man with daughters he has to educate and a man without and he made some comment about having daughters who don’t get married and are over the hill, and he went like this and pointed to Betsy (pseudonym) and me, the two women in the class, just little things like that, but we just sort of laughed about it.

One practice that came up in repeated comments was that of “Ladies Day” where women were called on only on particular days. A story told by a 1960s male graduate of Harvard Law School shows a particularly demeaning version of this. In this case, the professor not only skipped the women students as he methodically worked his way around the room, he also set aside a day where he had them come up and take a seat at his desk as he sat in the audience and questioned them throughout the period. This male graduate said in amazement, looking back, “And no one objected to this.” (E.S., pers. comm.). Another disturbing practice was described in Deanna’s comment, “Some professors would not call on the women ever at all. And some of them would call on you for the rape cases.” Patricia said, “He didn’t believe we belonged there, that’s for sure.” She added, “I think, just in the classroom, in general, it seemed to me that we had to fight harder to get the professors to do legal

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analysis with us.” This refusal to engage seriously with the women students is also seen in Ellen’s comment, And I remember, one professor would actually use the names of the women in the class and they would be committing mayhem on each other in the question and stuff like that. It was just sort of demeaning.

This treatment, along with frequently being the butt of a joke, was often ignored by the students, including the woman herself. It was difficult to object to the behavior of someone with such power over you. Occasionally, resistance would take place as shown in the following comments, both of which came from 1970s graduates. Vicky said, Well, we were still new enough that we got cracks, and, in fact, one professor made a crack about…. one of the women students and I hissed him, and there was a general hiss spread out through the room. It was the only way to handle him, because if we’d said anything, he would have gotten the last word. And he heard it. He was affronted by it, poor boy.

In the second case, the victim responded in a very straightforward fashion. Lisa spoke about how the professor called on the same few women students in every class, the opposite of the earlier practice. The fourth time she was called on in his class, she said, “There are three women and you’ve called on us every single class, while not favoring my male colleagues with the same attention.” After saying this, Lisa sat down. According to her, “And, you know, that created an uproar.” This woman went on to say that the blind grading system of law school enabled her to do this. Had the system not been blind, she could not have spoken and chanced retaliation. Another pattern mentioned by several women was the sexual harassment that some professors practiced. Although only a few cases were mentioned, it was clear that women found this especially difficult in a time when few mechanisms existed to deal with unwanted overtures. The law school acted to dismiss faculty where this had become known, but for the women involved, it was a difficult and frightening occurrence. These antagonistic patterns of treatment by some fellow students and faculty were additional stressors for these women. Obviously they managed to cope with these behaviors and finish law school or they would not be part of the study. It would not be surprising if some women who faced discouraging reactions to their decision or discriminatory treatment in law school would have abandoned the idea

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of a career in law. These women are the survivors; these are the women who attained their law degree. By the middle of the 1970s when the women in the Modern group graduated from law school, the numbers of women in law school were growing quickly and the feeling of being a pioneer group faded. However, moving out into the world of law firms and other legal settings presented these women with new challenges. Conclusion

The legal world changed in the 1970s as many women began to attend law school. The influence of social movements, particularly the Women’s Movement, new ways of solving the career/family conundrum, the availability of reliable contraception, and the greater pool of women college graduates can all be seen as factors in this change. When looking at motivation for choosing to go to law school, five major categories emerge. They are, in order of frequency, “personal contact or example”; “law as a good fit”; “law as a substitute vocation”; “law as a tool for social justice”; and “law as intrinsically interesting.” Although it may have been important for women who graduated from law school in the years before 1964 to have a personal contact with the law, the eight women in the Pioneer group had an interesting variety of motivations for attending law school. Half of the group chose law school because of a personal contact while two felt that a legal career would fit their talents. One of the women simply found law fascinating and another found it a welcome substitute for a disappointing first choice of career. There was even more diversity in motivation when including women who graduated from 1964-1975, with all five categories of motivation represented in both the Transition group and the Modern group. The reactions of friends and family to the women’s decisions to attend law school were largely positive. Most parents were supportive but about 16% of the women received discouraging responses to their decision from their parents. Another 10% of the women received discouraging responses from individuals other than parents. The two patterns for this response were in terms of perception of lawyers and gender expectations. Generally the women were undeterred by the negative responses and felt supported by the positive responses. Many credited their parent or parents with making a difficult task (law school) easier by the kind of support they gave whether monetary, emotional, or other.

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Their treatment in law school by faculty and male students was often negative. Forty-two percent of the women felt that faculty had treated them differently from male students with most characterizing the treatment as worse. Another 32% felt that at least some male students had treated them differently. Nineteen percent of the women felt that both faculty and male students had treated them differently. Usually the faculty treatment was in terms of not being treated equally in the classroom or being ridiculed. Negative treatment by male students was more often in terms of negative comments expressing the idea that women didn’t belong in law school and were taking the place of men who did. From today’s perspective, all of these women could be seen as a “pioneer” group in that they were women lawyers when it was still an uncommon role. Most had some experience that would sound surprising and insulting to today’s women law students. These women survived and went on to graduate and practice but it is impossible to know the number of women who were discouraged by negative reactions at the different stages covered here. These are the survivors and, having graduated, went on to the challenge of the next chapter, finding employment in the legal world that, depending on their year of graduation, was more or less likely to hire them.

3 Finding the First Position

I think of trial work as [meaning that] you have to be a really good tennis player. Things are coming at you from all directions. I tend to be a person who [wants to] plan things and know what I’m doing all the time. You just can’t be that way and be a trial lawyer; you’d be an alcoholic in fifteen minutes.—Elaine, Transition group A lot of what I do is decedents’ estates and I always say, “The best client’s a dead client. They’re not calling in the middle of the night. The beneficiaries are happy at the end, because they get checks.” I mean, it’s a wonderful practice.—Iris, Modern group

The quotes from Elaine and Iris bring up their individual preferences in practicing law. What, besides these individual preferences, influenced the first positions the women in the three groups obtained? The last chapter explored how the women in this study made the decision to go to law school. This chapter looks at the experience of finding the first position, the transition from law school to employment in the law. The quotations from Elaine and Iris give some idea of what lawyers look for or try to avoid in a position, but what were their options? The employment stage was less under the women’s control than attending law school had become. By the 1930s the policies denying women admittance to law school had changed and women were free to attend most law schools. But the number of women in law school remained low for years due to two factors. Women were socialized to see going into law as inappropriate through cultural messages, and the law schools also imposed informal quotas and used more stringent criteria for female applicants (Epstein 1981; Smith 1984; Martin and Jurik 2007). The women in the Pioneer group and the Transition group are part of the small number of women who disregarded these messages and made it through the quotas and criteria to graduate from law school by 1972. Now they needed to find that first position. Going to law school,

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assuming one could be admitted, was up to the individual. But being hired was up to someone else. What was the reaction of the potential employer? What were the hiring practices and implicit criteria for these early women lawyers? When asking why a particular woman took a particular position, it is necessary to recognize that the position was the outcome of both what she desired and what was available. Although this might be seen as always true for employment possibilities, here women were dealing with some specific factors of attitudes, laws, and timing. For the Pioneer group, the possibilities and outcomes were both clear and bleak. For the Transition group, the situation became less clear as some attitudes and practices changed. For the Modern group, the rapid change in terms of numbers of women and the growing restraints on the employer’s ability to discriminate changed the opportunity structure a great deal. The Modern group also benefited from the expansion in positions in firms, government, and corporations that took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the change in firms’ ideology (Wald 2010). An additional problem for many of the women in the study was their geographical immobility. They were married or in relationships and felt they had little choice about where they would work. Some also had the problem of coming to Eastern City as a trailing spouse and having few contacts. If they could have sought employment outside of Eastern City, especially in the 1970s, many would have had better prospects. It was also in the 1970s that some of the women in marriages or relationships negotiated more of an equal chance to select their location, sometimes by who got the first offer. For most, however, the husband’s location determined the wife’s location. In addition to the timing factor, location had a big impact. The size and structure of the legal world in different locations was an important factor. What was Eastern City like when the Pioneer group was being hired? Looking at the situation faced by the Pioneer group demonstrates the impact of the gender attitudes of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The opportunity structure depended not only on the amount of work available for lawyers and the state of the economy but also reflected the gender attitudes and practices at both the particular point in time and location where the individual sought a position. Epstein (1981) reminds us of this by detailing a 1963 survey of 430 law firms carried out by the Harvard Law Record. This survey found that, for the law firms, the most negatively rated characteristic when selecting applicants was being female. According to Epstein, Jews, blacks and women were all viewed negatively but women were the most negatively viewed. When law firms were asked to rate different

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characteristic of applicants in terms of desirability on a scale of -10 to +10, the average rating for “being female” was a -4.9 rating. The only characteristic that matched it in negativity was poor scholarship. The size of the firm also mattered, the smaller the firm, the more negative the response. For firms that had between one and five members, the rating for women fell to -7.8. Epstein suggested that larger firms could track the women differently (usually into the least prestigious areas) and thus could be less negative in their ratings. This is what the Pioneer group and some of the Transition group were facing in their hunt for employment. These attitudes did not immediately go away in later years. When listening to the comments made during some of the interviews, even from those who were job-hunting in the 1970s, it seemed as if much of this negativity changed very slowly, at least in Eastern City. Epstein (1981) pointed out that in general, even in the 1970s, employment discrimination was openly practiced. The legal world of Eastern City in the 1950s and 1960s where most of the Pioneer group women would have been looking for a position was not a very welcoming setting and would probably have held the attitudes Epstein detailed. For the women looking for work before the expansion of firms that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, most private practice positions were in small to medium firms. Many lawyers practiced as sole practitioners. There were few large firms. The largest firm, one of the most prestigious, employed seventy-five to one hundred lawyers. There were a few other large firms with about fifty to seventy-five lawyers but most firms were much smaller. Corporations had small legal departments with all of the court representation being handled by outside firms. Legal positions with the government were much smaller in number. Placement possibilities that would consider women were not extensive and women were largely invisible in the legal community at the time. Women were seldom in court except for two female judges in the county. (Personal communication from male lawyer practicing in Eastern City from 1960 until the present who graduated from the same local law school as many of the women.) Generally the few large high-profile firms were seen as the most prestigious and most desirable places to work. A number of smaller firms were also seen as prestigious because of the work they did. Important clients and interesting legal questions were assumed to be most available in these settings. The immediate rewards of salary and the long-term rewards of partnership and power were apparent, and success was landing a spot in one of these firms. On the other end of the prestige spectrum was the unsuccessful sole practitioner with a small, precarious practice, unrewarding in terms of both interest and financial

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remuneration. However, being a sole practitioner in this era did not necessarily mean being unsuccessful. Many sole practitioners were able to be quite successful, building up a practice and maintaining it over time. It was not an unusual way for a new graduate to begin. In between were small and medium firms, governmental positions for which one was hired as opposed to elected or appointed, corporations, public interest law such as legal aid entities, and law school teaching positions. There were also elected or appointed positions such as the judiciary, which carried a higher prestige ranking. In most law schools, students would be socialized to want the positions higher in the prestige and reward rankings. This was not always an accurate assumption, as some of our quotes will show, but was generally true. Some variability in preference may also have come from the motivations for law school discussed in the previous chapter. Looking for legal work is usually a situation in which one does not have much power. Much depends on the economy, one’s credentials, and the supply of law graduates as well as the demand for lawyers. Prospective employers may not be willing to accept members of a certain group. As mentioned earlier, in 1963, many firms were not willing to hire women (Epstein 1981). In Eastern City, several of the women seeking the required preceptorship found a negative response. The preceptorship was a six month period when an employer agreed to supervise a fledging lawyer and seemed to be a vestige of the original apprenticeship method of training lawyers. It also acted to control the supply of lawyers since the employer had to agree to this arrangement. It seems surprising that anyone with good credentials would be refused since the law firm or other supervising agency was getting a very good deal, free or cheap labor for about six months. And yet, in the interviews, women spoke of a number of potential employers unwilling to accept outstanding women applicants. Alternately, if they did accept the woman for her preceptorship, they were not interested in keeping her on as a paid employee. A number of employers throughout simply did not wish to employ women as lawyers. How much difficulty did women experience in finding work? It is important to look at the years in which women were looking for work since this was one of the areas of real change between the different groups. To get a sense of the changing opportunity structure, it is useful to look at the three groups separately, Pioneer (1945-1963 graduates), Transition (1964-1972 graduates), and Modern (1973-1975 graduates). It is not always possible to give the exact year of graduation while still concealing the identity of the woman being discussed, but the general time frame will be given.

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The Pioneer Group

There were eight women who graduated between 1945 and 1963 in the Pioneer group. These women had been part of a small group nationwide and, as illustrated by the earlier example of Sandra Day O’Connor who graduated in 1952, would seem likely to have had the most trouble finding a job. This section examines all eight women since there are so few. Interestingly, when looking at Bernice, one of these early graduates, it turned out to be advantageous to be female. She heard through the bar association that a specific judge was looking for a female law clerk; she applied and got the position. Audrey also found a position fairly easily. She worked on a research project funded by a trust. When asked why she had chosen the position, she replied that she felt it was a very important project. Catherine, another early graduate, benefited from the particular time at which she graduated. A new tax code had been passed and Catherine had been thoroughly trained in the new code by her law school. She was offered a position by two firms. Although firms were willing to hire her, once hired, someone in her firm made the comment that he did not expect she would stay very long. Anna, who graduated about the same time, had a different and rather daunting response from two different potential employers. One was the small father and son firm where she was doing her preceptorship. When she asked the head of the firm whether she could get something permanent with the firm, his response was, “Well, you might try some of the big firms, they might let you be a secretary and make the coffee for them.” Her second potential employer was an insurance company where she hoped to get a job as an adjuster. Anna got as far as an interview and, when she said she had finished law school, the male interviewer’s response was, “Oh, now, you’re going to go home and have babies. You’re not going to [want to work].” At this point Anna was getting pretty desperate and talked to a friend who volunteered at a legal assistance group and asked her whether they would let her finish her preceptorship there. The legal assistance group agreed and, following her preceptorship, they hired her. Barbara graduated in the early 1950s. She had served her preceptorship with a judge in a small county outside of Eastern City. When Barbara looked for a position after this, she said, “I interviewed with a couple firms in [Eastern City]. . . . but there would have been great resistance. [Eastern City] then was a very conservative place. Still

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is to some extent.” She felt that the attitude was very much “Why are you taking a job from a man?” With no offers of employment, Barbara started in private practice in the small town in which she had grown up. She was one of four or five lawyers who rented office space with each person having his or her own office (she was the only woman in the group). One of the older lawyers gave her some work but building a practice was a struggle. The clients who came to her were mainly women and mainly divorce cases. She practiced for about a year, married, had a baby and took her first “retirement.” Barbara had served her preceptorship with a judge she met through her father, who was also a judge. Employers who would agree to supervise these required preceptorships were often recruited through family or friends. In some cases this led to the first position. Agnes and another of the early graduates were able to stay on with their preceptors as regular employees. Agnes’s job was a law-related job that did not really require a law degree. The other woman was hired by a firm but housed with the secretaries and occasionally thrown a case by the male lawyers. Beth went into her husband’s newly launched firm. This followed a rejection in which she was first turned down for her preceptorship by the firm at which her husband was serving his preceptorship. At this point, Beth was first in her class and the firm was not very prestigious. But the partner’s reaction when asked by her husband was, “Well, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I don’t know whether, how the clients would feel about it, and there are heavy books over this title searching and I’m sure that it would not be a good thing for her.” At this response, her husband quit and got a preceptorship with another firm which had also accepted Beth for hers. Following graduation, Beth became a part of her husband’s new firm. How good were these jobs? All of the women were able to find employers who let them serve their required preceptorships and then were able to find positions; so they can be seen as successful to that degree. However, most were paid little and most of the positions carried little hope for advancement. These positions were certainly not the prestigious ones with the bright futures that similarly situated men with excellent law school rank likely secured. Most of the women were in the upper quarter of their law school class with one being in the top ten and two women being first in their class. Had they been male with these qualifications, their first position undoubtedly would have been as associates at prestigious firms. Instead the positions were more determined by what the individual woman could find. For many of these

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women, every step, from enrolling in law school to getting started in the field, had been a struggle. It would improve to some degree by 1964 when the first of the Transition group graduated. The Transition Group

For the thirteen women who graduated between 1964 and 1972, prospects were somewhat better than they had been for the earlier Pioneer group. The following stories relate the outcomes for these graduates. Carol had served her preceptorship with a judge she met through her father. Afterwards she worked in her father’s office where she was paid for the contributions she made to his cases and other lawyer’s cases. Carol also searched titles for them, a task that does not require a law degree, and was paid for that at a piecework rate. Charlotte, one of the late 1960s graduates, had an easy time finding her first position. One of the adjunct professors in law school, who was a judge, asked her to clerk for him. She wanted to do trial work and felt this would be an opportunity to see who was doing good trial work and for people to see her, a chance to get known a little. Since Charlotte was not from Eastern City but wanted to stay there, this seemed like a good way to start. In contrast to the women in the Pioneer group, Charlotte found a good position and she found it easily. It became an even better position in terms of salary when the judge moved from a trial court to an appellate court. Was this good outcome a fluke or were things really getting better? Donna, one of the women who went to law school some years after college, had taken as many courses as possible in wills, trusts, and estates intending to go into her husband’s firm which specialized in estate work. However, Donna was offered a law clerk position and held that for a year before going into practice with her husband. The law clerk position seemed too good a chance to pass up in terms of getting other kinds of experience and, with its regular hours, also fit well with her busy home life. Diane, the other woman who had attended law school after being out of school for some years, found a position with a federal agency. Although she had been delighted to be hired immediately after law school, Diane found that she was unhappy with the position. It was not the kind of position where she felt like a lawyer because of the rules and regulations she had to follow. “You had to take a midmorning break, and you had to take an afternoon break, and punch in and punch out. It was really not lawyer-like.” In order to quit, Diane had to find another

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position since she was supporting herself and two children. Through a former faculty mentor, she found a position working for him in his new position as a county official. Diane also worked part-time for a law firm and was thrilled to be making enough money to support herself and her two daughters easily from the combination of the two. “I made close to $20,000 a year. It was a fortune.” That $20,000 would be worth almost $120,000 in today’s dollars. Dorothy found work at a large firm, a position she had coveted when working there as a summer associate. Simply getting the summer associate position had been an accomplishment. Although she applied widely, this position in a large firm was what she most wanted. Dorothy mentioned that her law school had imposed a policy where firms could not pick whom they interviewed; they had to interview the people who had signed up first. This was an example of the kinds of policies that law schools were beginning to implement in response to complaints from women students of discrimination in hiring (Fossum 1981). Dorothy did not find any negative reactions from the interviewers when she was interviewed by a number of different firms. This policy may have helped women get positions that would not have come about had the law firms been free to pick whom they would interview. A number of women commented that many firms would not choose to interview women in these years. Some of the women in the Transition group were beginning to reap the benefits of the changing social and legal worlds. Some of the women in this transition period had a more difficult time finding work. Deanna, who had been a social worker before law school, stated, “I decided in my last year of law school that I wanted to be a litigator, and I had trouble. Nobody wanted to hire me, so I got a job with the Legal Aid bureau.” Deanna held this position for two years until she moved to another city to accompany her husband for his training. Unfortunately, she faced problems again in the new city. In fact, a number of women yet to be discussed had to keep starting over, essentially finding the first position again and again, as they accompanied spouses. Occasionally, especially for women who had been working full-time while attending law school, graduating did not mean changing positions. Elizabeth, who had been working for a state agency, was able to move into a more interesting aspect of work at the same agency, although not one that demanded a law degree. She did find the legal training useful. At the same time, Elizabeth was able to set up a small night practice with a family member, which she moved to full-time when she retired from the state agency. The part-time practice allowed her to use her skills and increased her income during the years she was still working

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for the state. This outcome would probably not be viewed as successful by the legal world since Elizabeth could have continued to hold her job without the expense and effort of completing law school, but it worked well for her. In terms of how successful the Transition group was in finding first positions, most people would see a job that did not require a law degree as one of the less successful outcomes. One of the issues to be discussed in the chapter on how successful these women were is whose definition of success is used. Is it enough that the individual was happy with the outcome to qualify that outcome as successful or did it also need to be seen by others in the legal world as successful? Chapter Five addresses this question in greater detail. Perhaps Elizabeth was lucky considering the response given another woman in the Transition group. Shortly before graduation from law school, Elaine, who was working as a secretary at a well-known local corporation while attending law school at night, said to the head of the department, “When do you think you’ll hire your first woman lawyer? And he said, “Never.” Elaine said, “This was 1970, and truly, the thought of a woman lawyer at [X Corporation] in those days. . . . It was just inconceivable, inconceivable, it was such a male place.” Elaine said that he had explained to her, “A woman couldn’t travel and she couldn’t listen to dirty jokes. So…” In the face of this reaction, Elaine did not attempt to do her preceptorship there. Instead she contacted a law firm that agreed to let her do it. The preceptorship was all that the firm committed to at the time but they gave her a regular position after she had passed the bar. The firm was a prestigious firm and Elaine’s interviews with two of the partners came about through her father’s contact with them. So, although she found an unfriendly reception at the corporation, the outcome for her first position can be seen as successful. Faye, who had followed her friend and role model to law school, felt law firms were basically uninterested in hiring women. She stated, “I never got interviewed by a firm, you know. I was editor of the law review.” When asked if she had applied to firms, Faye replied, I didn’t, because it was kind of understood that they weren’t going to hire you and I mean that’s from [her role model]. . . . I think it was a couple years after both of us that they started. It was kind of understood that you’re not going to get a job.

Faye ended up clerking for someone who had been appointed to an appellate court. When he was elected to a higher court, she moved with him.

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Eileen, who had also been a social worker before going to law school, wanted to find a position in private practice. She was aware that Eastern City had not really accepted the idea of women lawyers because another woman in her law school class had looked for a job in Eastern City the previous summer. Eileen said, “She was doing very well in school and one law firm, . . . a larger law firm, basically told her flat out, we don’t hire women. It was not a good environment.” But Eileen ended up getting two offers, one from a legal assistance group and one from a small firm. She felt that the reason she was offered the job in this small firm was because a partner in the firm needed help with estate planning, unfortunately not an area in which she had any interest. She accepted the offer feeling that it would work better with her personal life. At this point, it paid less than the legal assistance position. She ended up staying with this firm for much of her career. Women graduating in the last few years of the Transition group had little trouble finding a position. Ellen found work as Assistant Solicitor of a large school district through someone who attended her church. Frances was very emphatic about having no problems in finding work. According to her, “I had six job offers at a time when guys were desperate; because Vietnam had wound down. . . . Everybody was looking for a job. But everybody was looking for women and blacks, I think.” Frances chose a position with a federal agency because it was closest to her area of interest in law school. Florence had been concerned about problems in finding work and had developed a plan for how she would circumvent these problems. She stated, By the time I got to my last year in law school, it became fairly evident that law firms were still not hiring a lot of women. . . . I had developed a strategy that I would acquire a specialty. The primary way that you could acquire a specialty was to go work for one of the government alphabet agencies.

Florence had heard good things about one of the federal agency offices in Eastern City, applied, and was hired by the agency. She described her boss as a very fair, non-discriminatory employer. The balance sheet for the Transition group shows that three women became judicial law clerks, usually through someone they knew. Four of the women found positions in state or federal agencies. A legal assistance group and a school district accounted for another two women and the last four women found positions in private practice with one person being hired by a large firm and three more at small firms. These

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were respectable outcomes and certainly better than those of the Pioneer group. A number of the women mentioned lack of interest in hiring women on the part of large firms although not everyone agreed with this. It seemed that change might be coming even in Eastern City, which was seen as slow to change its attitudes about women in the law. The Transition group did quite well. They ran into some fairly overt prejudice in interviews but ended up in positions that were distinctly closer to the Modern group than those of the Pioneer group. Changes That Affect Women in the Law

The previous chapter stated that women made up fewer than 4% of law students until the mid-1960s (Fossum 1981; Ginsburg 1994). In the late 1960s, the surge of women going to law school began. It is hard to overstate the size and thus impact of the surge. Women went from 8.5% of law students in 1970 to 33.6% in 1980 (Martin and Jurik 2007). Why does this matter when talking about placement prospects and hiring? It meant that many more women lawyers were looking for employment as the decade continued. Although the firms, agencies, and corporations might still have had few women working for them, they saw in the applicants and in the law schools the impact of the surge and the outline of what was coming for the legal world. Only part of how this surge impacted the jobs that women were offered will be apparent in this chapter, by looking at the hiring of the last of the Transition group, which graduated from 1964-1972, and all of the Modern group, which graduated from 1973-1975. Further effects of this change will be examined in the next chapter while following the careers of the women in the study. Certainly change had come in the number of potential applicants who were women. As women made up larger percentages of the graduating classes, employers found it harder to continue to ignore them. This increase nationally was reflected by the large number of 1973-1975 graduates in our study (66% of the women in the 2010 study). As described in Chapter Two, society changed in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the various social movements altering the rules for African-Americans, women and LGBT people, at least to some degree and in some places. For the legal profession, change had just begun (Martin and Jurik 2007). Its personnel, structure, clientele, and profitability would all change although there would be fairly little variance in who held power. There would be many more lawyers, many larger firms, new access to legal representation for the poor and increased income for lawyers in the most prestigious positions.

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According to Martin and Jurik (2007), the legal profession had been able to control the supply of lawyers through 1960, deliberately keeping it low. Now growing demand for lawyers was fueled by the emergence of new areas of the law; among them those spawned by the civil rights, women’s, consumer and environmental movements. The growing economy and expansion of major corporations also fueled demand for lawyers (Epstein 1981; Wald 2010). Part of the control of training had been an emphasis on gate-keeping, maintaining the white male homogeneity of the legal profession. As new law schools opened and legislation was passed making discrimination illegal, this tight control became impossible (Martin and Jurik 2007). The surge of women illustrated this change as did the slightly increasing number of nonwhite students. At this point in the 1970s, many law schools started programs to recruit nonwhite students but the numbers grew slowly. Affirmative action became a reality as first President Kennedy in 1961 and then President Johnson in 1965 used Executive Orders to require federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” In 1967 President Johnson included gender in the categories (Sykes 1995). Few results were apparent until 1969 when President Nixon with his “Philadelphia Order” brought about federal expansion of affirmative action. Results included the recruitment of African Americans in both educational and employment settings and greater acceptance of women. The impact of these orders depended on the resistance of the employer and area and often had to be furthered by lawsuits (Konrad et al. 1999). In addition to presidential action, Congress became active in legislating new regulations. No longer would the employers have the full discretion they had had in the past. In June 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act 1 (EPA) which required men and women to be paid the same for substantially equal work for the same employer (EEOC A 2012). This was the first national civil rights legislation focusing on employment discrimination. The Department of Labor was assigned responsibility for its enforcement. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act passed, to become effective one year later. Title VII, the employment section, prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion and national origin. It applied to private employers, labor unions and employment agencies and prohibited discrimination in recruitment, hiring, wages, assignment, promotions, benefits, discipline, discharge, layoffs and almost every other aspect of employment. One of the effects of this Act was to set up the Equal

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Employment Opportunities Commission [EEOC]. Unfortunately the Act provided the EEOC with no enforcement authority. It also did not apply to entities with fewer than 25 employees. It was only able to hear and conciliate complaints. If it was unsuccessful in conciliating the complaints, individuals had to bring private lawsuits. If the Commission found evidence of “patterns or practices” of discrimination, then they could refer such matters to the Department of Justice and then hope that Justice would litigate (ibid.). Although the EEOC was not able to enforce its findings, it was able to make the case for these powers through its hearings, which pressured Congress to give it enforcement powers. In 1972 Congress passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which gave the Commission the power to sue nongovernmental "respondents", employers, unions, and employment agencies. It could also file “pattern or practice” lawsuits. Title VII coverage was expanded to include the Federal Government and state and local governments, as well as elementary, secondary, and higher educational institutions. The number of employees per employer needed for coverage by Title VII was reduced from 25 to 15 (ibid.). Faced with the 1972 passage of Title IX of the Higher Education Act which outlawed sex discrimination in both enrollment of students and hiring of faculty, law schools finally began to admit more women without the use of quotas or higher gender-based credentials (Martin and Jurik 2007). Three Supreme Court cases were also important in changing the legal climate. Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp. (401 U.S. 424, 1971) determined that employers could not discriminate on the basis of sex plus other factors such as having school age children. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (400 U.S. 542, 1971), the Supreme Court also looked at the effect of the policy or rule or test used. If it disproportionately affected minorities or women in a negative way, the employer had to prove the test/policy was a “business necessity.” Here the basis for the finding of discrimination was the consequences of the employment practices, not simply the motivation (Ibid). In the third case, Pittsburgh Press Company v. Human Relations Commission (413 U.S. 376, 1973), the Supreme Court held in 1973 that newspapers could no longer advertise employment opportunities under headings designating job preference by sex. The court case was the result of a complaint of discrimination by the local chapter of the National Organization for Women asserting that gender-segregated want-ads were unconstitutional in denying women equal protection under the law, based on the argument that the female jobs advertised were fewer in number and less well paid.

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Women law students were also able to use the courts against discrimination in hiring. After complaining to their school’s placement office that their applications were not being taken seriously by Wall Street firms, women students at Columbia and New York University Law Schools filed complaints with the New York City Human Rights Commission against ten firms on behalf of all women law students in New York. When two of the test cases in the courts resulted in findings of discrimination seven years later in 1976, the firms settled and agreed to hiring guidelines and other restrictions (Martin and Jurik 2007). Although employers were less able to discriminate in their hiring, problems persisted in terms of covert discrimination. As mentioned in the previous chapter, law schools became a good deal more careful in their practices and speech. Private employers followed suit more slowly or sometimes not at all. In addition to the changes discussed above, the organization of legal work began to change just as many of the women in the Modern group were entering the profession (Martin and Jurik 2007). As the number of lawyers increased, where they worked also began to change. Smaller proportions worked as sole practitioners; more began to work for large law firms and for corporations and government. The size of firms also began to increase from an average of 27 in 1975 to an average of 141 in 1995 (ibid.). As these firms grew larger, they also grew more bureaucratic and hierarchal. During the 1970s, salaries in these large firms began to grow rapidly making positions in these firms even more desirable (ibid.). This also happened in corporations’ house counsel offices where the average size grew from 17 in 1975 to 55 in 1995. Government legal departments had the largest increase going from an average size of 64 to an average size of 399. Increasingly lawyers worked for businesses or corporations rather than individuals. These changes had begun to take place by 1975 but have markedly increased since then, creating the atmosphere in which the careers of the women interviewed have taken place. The ideology of law firms also changed (Wald 2010). In the late nineteenth century, meritocracy had been introduced as the cornerstone of legal practice and took over from the informal, nepotism and social contact based firms that had previously existed. This was a gradual change with contacts and proper background remaining important but with an increasing emphasis on merit. Wald characterized this limited form of meritocracy as “WASP meritocracy.” The firms could not conceive of “outsiders” such as women, lower-class and ethnic minority men meeting its criteria and stressed education credentials such as graduation from an elite law school, top grades, and law review

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affiliation. Since class and gender had played such a role in who went to elite law schools, this kept outsiders from being considered for firm membership (ibid.). Most of the large law firms held this ideology throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Firms in smaller cities like Eastern City continued to hold the WASP meritocracy ideology for another decade or two. This ideology dictated firm practices such as elite educational credentials, training within the firm, hard work, promotion to those who excelled, and the development of specialization and expertise. The expectation was that the firm would efficiently and professionally serve its clients and clients would remain loyal to the firm, which they generally did (ibid.). By the 1960s and 1970s most large firms were characterized by a new ideology, “competitive meritocracy.” Competitive meritocracy was a readiness to hire and promote without regard to ethnicity or religion. The biases that had marked hiring began to be seen as less important than the need to have the best possible talent to compete in the new and demanding business of law (ibid.). As mentioned earlier, law firms, corporate legal departments and government agencies were increasing in size at a rapid rate in the 1960s and 1970s. As the growth in corporate demand for legal services grew, so did the firms. New firms emerged. Loyal corporate clients began to be won away by other firms and competition for clients became the norm. This new ideology was seen as necessary for the increasingly competitive market conditions and firms moved, at least to a greater extent, to more objective measure of merit such as law school grade, class ranking and law review. Firms paid less attention to the previous status cues of ethnicity, race, and gender and broadened their hiring to compete more effectively. By the middle of the 1970s when larger numbers of women had begun to enter the profession, competitive meritocracy was the leading professional ideology at these large firms. While women certainly benefited from this changeover in ideology, they continued to be hurt by the assumption that they were not competent in certain areas of the law (generally the more profitable or higher status areas) and by the assumption that they would not be willing to put in the long hours that were seen as necessary for service to the clients. While it was now possible for some women to get into the firms, they were still held back by these assumptions. Hagan and Kay (1995), although dealing with Canadian lawyers, detail much the same process. They found that law school grades were the most important variable in attaining article positions (a required apprenticeship in Canada) and first jobs in their panel study of Toronto

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lawyers, first administered in 1985. Interestingly, Hagan and Kay found that grades had a bigger effect for women than for men in their study, suggesting that women were held more stringently to meritocratic criteria. This emphasis on grades is mentioned in a number of responses from the Modern group for Eastern City. The Modern Group

How did the changes in organizational structure and ideology affect the search for positions? Although Eastern City may have lagged behind larger, more cosmopolitan cities, “competitive meritocracy” was probably the norm by the 1970s and there is an echo of this in some of the interviews recounted. All of the different options seemed to be opening up. Graduates in these years found positions in government agencies, as law clerks, in small and large firms, in legal assistance groups, and in corporations. The hiring process and attitudes of employers demonstrate some of the same problems and attitudes as in the earlier groups but also evidence of change, in the greatly improved outcomes of many of the women. The forty graduates from 1973, 1974, and 1975 will be looked at as a group since there were great similarities in their placements. Margaret was very excited about her first position because she was going to Washington, D.C. to work in the legislative area. Her excitement was short-lived, however. She explained, “I realized pretty quickly that being up on the Hill at that time, first of all, it was a very prejudiced place, and women were secretaries, that’s it.” Margaret decided that she needed to develop a skill she could take with her. She was able to transfer into the litigation division and develop expertise in the area of employment discrimination, which led to a corporate position when she left Washington. Obviously Washington had not gotten the message that things were changing even though Congress had passed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1972 extending Title VII to the Federal Government. It did not, however, extend it to House and Senate staff (and many other legislative and judicial branch employees) until 1991, long after Margaret had left Washington (Committee on Rules 2012; EEOC B 2012). Seven of the forty women found positions as law clerks. Sometimes this was out of necessity. As Rita stated, “When we got out of law school in 1975, the economy was horrible and everybody had a hard time finding a job. There were lots and lots of us that didn’t have a job upon graduation.” She took a position as a law clerk with some trepidation. When asked what was good about the job, Rita responded,

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“Well, what was good about it is I had a job, and I had a job with regular hours.” Despite this rather unenthusiastic response, she began to feel this job was a very good fit for her, something where she could still have a life outside work compared to some of the other young lawyers she knew. This idea of reasonable hours in a job was also important to Thelma, who had school age children at the time of law school graduation. She was enthusiastic about the judicial clerkship she took after law school. I ended up doing (an appellate court) clerkship, which was very much a nine-to-five job and I did that for two years . . . . I wanted to stay in my clerkship forever. I loved it! It paid sixteen thousand dollars a year when I started, which was a national rate. All federal clerkships paid that and, at the time, for Eastern City, that was pretty good money. The highest paid person in my law school graduating class got nineteen thousand dollars right out of the box in law school. So sixteen thousand was handsome money and especially (with those hours).

In contrast to this was Wendy who took a position as a trial court law clerk although she would have preferred working for a firm. She had worked for a firm in the summers during law school but, when asked about the possibility of working there, she responded, They still did not have any women lawyers for years to come after that. They did not offer anybody that I worked with at that time a job there. And to be honest, I was so naive, I didn’t realize I would have had to ask them, I thought if they were satisfied with my work, they would have asked me. I was very, very naive as to law and the hiring practice.

Wendy felt that law schools have become much more helpful now. At that particular time, there was no real mentoring in law school. There were not all these classes and practicums and different mentoring programs that gave a student a sense of what direction they might want to go in. I think it’s totally different these days, which helps women tremendously and all students.

One of the factors in the different responses to law clerk positions was certainly the level of the court. Women who had appellate court positions, which paid better and were more difficult to obtain, were generally more positive about their positions. As Gail stated about her appellate court position, “And having gotten that clerkship for (an appellate court) judge, which was like a heck of a coup to get….no way

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I’d turn it down.” Gail, who had been first in her law school class, found that when she moved to Eastern City, despite her clerkship and her high class rank, big firms were not necessarily interested in hiring her. She explained, It was like you were almost competing with that other woman who was an [appellate court] clerk, like there’s only one job….. you know, “We’re not going to hire TWO women. What do you think, we’re nuts?” Everybody seems to have hired one woman. That was all they were going to hire. It didn’t matter whether your resume [was great].

A number of women commented that law firms felt that one woman was sufficient and that 1973 had been the magic year in which big firms had hired “their woman.” Isabel ended up in a law clerk position although she had initially been interested in both law clerk positions and associate positions in firms. She ran into some problems with the placement director at her law school. He had his own view of what was appropriate for female law school graduates. He thought that all the women were interested in being legal secretaries and so the largest problem came with trying to get interviews in the first place, because he was just out to lunch. When he asked me whether I could type and file, I was a little taken aback, I have to say.

Nor did the situation necessarily get better for Isabel when an interview was gained. One of the interviews I attended was with a medium sized firm here in (Eastern City), and I was interested in business law types of things. This firm had a special team, corporate and business law, and the partner who was interviewing me made a couple of comments. You know, you don’t know how to take them at that point. One, for example, was, his wife’s name was [Isabel] and he just couldn’t imagine how she would ever be a partner in a law firm, because every time she’s upset about something, she cries and so, therefore I was going to cry every time I was upset about something. It was a regular thing for people to ask you whether you were using birth control or whether your husband agreed with what you were doing, at that time. I mean, there isn’t a good answer to something like that, but you do the best you can, so that’s what I meant. That’s where I thought that the discrimination came in.

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There was one place that I was really impressed with, that I thought went far and away to try not to discriminate in asking any questions and that was at (a local corporation). I had a very nice job offer from (them) in one of their contract departments and the people there were just fabulous. They didn’t care what color or what sex, just so you could do the work and were interested. I always thought that was very impressive for a corporation at that time. The law firms were lagging behind, I thought.

Isabel ended up taking a clerkship position in spite of this offer because she thought she and her husband might be moving and she did not want to walk out of a corporate position after they had spent time training her. Although Isabel succeeded in being offered a job she wanted, the interviewing experience made her very cognizant of the way some firms might still discriminate. As mentioned earlier, clerkships varied in prestige and compensation. The most competitive clerkships were a good pathway to prestigious law firms. As more and more women held these clerkships, there was some carryover in terms of firm-accessibility. Some firms, however, still found women applicants less desirable. A very clear confirmation of this was the initial enthusiasm for Gail’s application when they thought she was male (because of her unisex name) and the lessening or complete lack of interest when they found out she was female. Many firms had not come far enough to hire without regard to gender. As the big firms began to hire women, credentials such as class rank began to pay off for women as they had for men but only for a very small number. Of the forty women in the Modern group, only six women had as their first position working for large firms. These were very competitive positions and the women with high law school rankings were the first women to get those positions. One example of this was Gloria, who had excellent credentials in terms of class rank and graduation from an Ivy League law school. Gloria was hired by a large, well-known firm. Although she was not the first woman the firm had hired, she was one of the first to make partner. She was heavily recruited to come to Eastern City by this firm and felt strongly that there was not a “one woman” rule about hiring at large firms. Gloria stated that both she and another woman had been summer associates for this firm and both were hired the next year when they graduated. She said: Sometimes the big firms got a bad rap. I think the larger firms were more receptive to hiring and developing and promoting women than some of the smaller firms. I think this firm was just interested in

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getting good lawyers who did good work and my sense [of] it was always, you do good work and you’re going to be advanced, it just is so. We all made partner and never had an issue.

Gloria was generally happy with the firm and felt she got wonderful assignments. This was certainly a different situation than those the earlier graduates had faced and a more positive appraisal than a number of the other women gave (including those who graduated in the same time frame). Hiring more than one woman in a firm seems to have happened more in cities larger than Eastern City. One woman’s first position was at a big firm in a larger city. She was offered a number of positions and came into a firm which already had a female partner and two female associates. She was one of two women hired at that time. Having one’s first position at a large firm was not always a guarantee of a road to the top. Nancy also found a position in a big firm. She had clerked there her second summer in law school. Nancy started out working in part for the litigation department and in part for the trust and estates department but ended up, “not fitting in the litigation department whatsoever.” She was “the third or fourth or fifth chair on some absolutely dazzlingly wonderful cases. Cases that were so much fun.” Despite the excitement and fun of these cases, Nancy decided that she did not have a “litigative” personality. In looking back on this time, she said, I think driven is a helpful character trait in a major law firm. I also think that you need to have a level of confidence in yourself and it took me a long time to get it, so I ended up on the estate side, I was a math major in college, so I was not intimidated by numbers.

When Nancy was asked how her life would have been different if she had ended up on the litigator side, she laughed and answered by saying, “I would not be still paying off a mortgage on a house,” a reference to the profitability of becoming a partner in this firm. Instead, “I began to do orphan’s court litigation, so I sort of got the best of both worlds.” Thus she was able to continue to do litigation but without the intense atmosphere of the litigation section. This outcome seemed good at the time. It became a disadvantage when Nancy came up for partnership and her section and thus her backers had little power in partnership decisions. She did not make partner and is now working in a corporate setting. In reference to the confidence level needed and the “driven” litigation style she found difficult, Nancy pointed out,

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The firm learned and there became women at the firm who were able to nicely transition into the litigation department and do quite well, because it was a good litigation department. Sound people.

Irene also got her first position at a big firm. She accepted the position because it seemed the natural next step. She remembered, “They came and recruited at the law school, I went to interviews, it sounded interesting and I just said, ‘Oh, that sounds great. I think I’d like to go.’ ” As Irene was going through these interviews, she found that the firms varied, Now I interviewed the four big firms at the time and two of them were very unfriendly. And two were extremely friendly. [The one she ended up joining] was very welcoming, very open and [another large firm] was very open.

When she went for her interview at one of the unfriendly ones, a partner looked up and said, “Oh, a woman, I suppose you’re going to want to take 9 months off to have a baby.” She was offered a position by both of the “friendly” firms and ended up accepting one of them. Although someone who had clerked for an appellate judge had suggested Irene apply for the clerkship, she felt she needed to get a job and she did not realize clerking would be a good start. I didn’t realize that I got credit for it. I said I’m already two years older than everybody else because most people went straight to law school and then I’ll be another year older and I’ve got to get started here. I don’t know what I was thinking of and nobody really disabused me of the notion and I didn’t know enough to really ask the right questions, so I’ve always been sorry I didn’t do that.

When Irene was asked why she chose a large firm over a medium or small firm, she indicated that she was responding to their initiatives, These were the people who came courting and they had these programs. You could be a new associate and try out all the groups and be exposed to all these different areas of the law. They had the resources to support it and the clients, so it didn’t seem like a bad thing at all.

Although Irene expressed regret about going directly to the firm, in fact it was viewed as a coup by other graduates. The six women who started out with big firms (this includes those who clerked for a year and then went with a big firm) would seem to

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have attained what most law school graduates wanted. As stated earlier, the assumption was that these were the positions to get. Certainly the salaries and chance to work on important cases made these positions very competitive. Generally the large firms looked only at the highest ranking graduates. Formerly, they had looked only at the highest ranking male graduates but now, in the early 1970s, this was beginning to extend to women as well. Although Gloria felt that her firm did not have a “one woman” policy, other women felt that this was indeed the case for many firms. Irene’s experience demonstrated some sense of the variability among law firms where some were much more welcoming of women than were others. Nancy’s example countered, showing that being one of the women hired by a large firm was not always the career starter it was assumed to be. Although Eastern City was described as slow to change its attitudes toward women, it was clearly changing as big firms and other placements began to hire women. Iris hoped that it would be better than the region in which she had grown up. She had worked summers at the firm of her family’s attorney in her hometown. When she graduated, she went back and spoke with this attorney because she was feeling she might like to go back and practice where she had grown up. Iris described his response as, Well, he had just hired a male lawyer . . . who was just being graduated from law school and he had a wife and a couple of children and he would have to pay him. But if I wanted to come in and take whatever I could get (I could), but not be salaried or whatever, because I was a single female and living at home and I wouldn’t need the salary.

At this point, Iris decided she would not return home where these attitudes persisted but instead stay in Eastern City where she had attended law school. She also decided that she would prefer working for a corporation with its more limited hours and demands rather than her first choice of a small firm. For Hazel, returning home did work. When asked about her choice of a small firm, she responded, I interviewed maybe a couple of other places. Very frankly, I didn’t have the grades to get into a big firm. You know, there was a lot of competition. The year that we entered in ’71 [was] very competitive, very tough to get into, so I was really with a lot of people who were able to get better grades than I was. [This] was what was available, and

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it was the perfect match for me because it was going home to my small town.

Another six women were hired by small firms for their first positions. For Patricia, the small firm was just a stopgap on the way to the position she really wanted, which was legal assistance work. For Pamela, the position was temporary because the firm broke up. In choosing the small firm offer she accepted, she said, At this point it was a very good firm in town, smaller, [I] didn’t want a huge firm, and it had everything. I just had a great feeling about it, so I went with them and then, they were good people, they were all good people. In the end though, they had different philosophies as to how to run the practice so by January that year, they were breaking up. They were breaking up right in front of my eyes and the two of us that had been hired for September, the prior September, lost our jobs, because neither side could absorb us.

When Pamela was asked why she had not applied to the big firms, she stated, I was pretty frank in my mind as to what the hiring realm was going to be. The big firms were not used to hiring (her law school) grads. That was a reality back then. They were just starting to, let’s put it that way and there was not a lot of opportunity. I also was realistic about what my focus was. You know, I was comfortable, most comfortable, with tax law and so I had to go places where tax law was practiced. And so I didn’t really apply to many of the big firms.

Here the choice of a small firm seemed both preference and realism. Janet and Vicky both ended up in small firms. Janet did not get the clerkships she wanted and went to a small firm where her husband worked. The firm was anxious to get her and she would be doing plaintiff’s law. Janet had gone to law school because she wanted to make a difference and she felt this kind of law would help people in a very substantive way. Vicky decided to go into her father’s office, which she described as: Two man practice, and they did mostly real estate. Developers, they represented developers and builders. My father couldn’t give me clients, so he gave me office space and the clients were up to me…. I did a few things for them, but it wasn’t enough to support myself. So, and I was a feminist, and the only work really that women had for attorneys at that stage was divorce work, so I did mostly divorce work.

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When Vicky was asked whether she had always thought she would go into her father’s firm, she answered, “Yes, I always . . . I didn’t apply anywhere else. . . . It was a place to start.” Vicky’s position was similar to some of the ones the Pioneer group had received even though other women were much more successful in finding positions in the modern era. Perhaps the ease of moving into a familiar setting was the reason for this outcome since Vicky did not really search for work outside of her father’s firm. It is clear that a number of women ended up in small firms at least partly through a lack of other alternatives. For some, these positions ended up being a good fit and the women stayed in them or the small firm setting for much of their careers. For others, this was a temporary situation, which allowed them to find out whether this was a setting they would want for their career or gave them time to find something they preferred. Among the women in the Modern group, seven took positions with the government. Today women are still slightly overrepresented in government work with 10% of women versus 7% of men choosing this setting (Kay and Gorman 2008). Why were government jobs so likely for our 1972-1975 graduates? Government agencies were less likely to discriminate against women in hiring (Epstein 1981). Agencies were less concerned with client reactions since they often served clients who had little choice about obtaining services and who were often poor and powerless. The regular hours permitted more of a life, a factor mentioned by some respondents and particularly by those balancing family responsibilities. The security of government work and the freedom from looking for clients were also perceived as advantages (Epstein 1993). Several people mentioned the number of lawyers looking for work. Several women said that if you did not happen to be in the top 10 % of your law school class, firms were not really interested in you. The perception was that government agencies would be less selective or, at least, less focused on class rank. Peggy, when asked about her reasons for taking a government position, replied, Well, I think probably it was “Oh, here’s a job. Yeah, because I had checked out firms, I had checked out corporations. You know, it’s funny, I hadn’t thought about this for a long time. But the feeling that I had and it seemed to be a feeling that some other women had, is that, let’s see, it was 1975, ’76, that a lot of law firms or maybe corporations felt, “Well, we have our woman.” Ok, so the [government position] was sort of, “Here’s a job and I’m not running into this.”

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Although Peggy had not been enthusiastic about this choice, she ended up staying in this setting for many years as she moved up into different positions. Another woman who ended up taking a government position said: Government was the best employer. I wanted to do trial work and I knew I would get to it very quickly, and I was offered clerkships. . . . so those were my options and I got hired before I even got my bar results. . . . and I’ve stayed ever since.

When she was asked if she had applied to other firms, she replied, I didn’t think my class standing was good enough to apply to firms. . . . I wanted an assured income, I wanted medical benefits, I was not a strikeout on your own, struggle through it at that age. So I made a few attempts but I was so turned off with [my] one interview that I was like, let it go.

Her government position turned out to be a very successful placement, lasting many years and leading to promotions, a variety of positions and satisfying work. For some lawyers, certain government positions were a chance to build a practice while still having the safety net of a salary. Sandra explained, They were called part-time jobs, so you were allowed to start your own practice and you’re not allowed to do that now. So at the time, I started to work at the D.A.’s office and also when I was clerking for [a judge], I started a private practice on my own. I shared space with a group of lawyers who were all space-sharers. A few of them knew people in my family and I had worked for one of them in law school, so I basically rented an office there and also started my practice.

When Sandra was asked why she stayed in the clerkship for a number of years, her answer was a combination of the attraction of the position and the support it offered for building a practice. She explained, “It was interesting. I was writing opinions, basically doing research and writing opinions and it was a nice job for me to support my private practice.” One of the things that often happened to women in private practice happened to Sandra as well; she ended up in family law without really intending to do so. When asked about the type of practice, she answered, It was varied in the beginning. I did some work for people I was sharing space with, so I actually did some labor negotiation, I did some

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municipal law, I did a little bit of workers’ comp. Then, in my own practice, I think because there weren’t that many women practicing, I started getting calls. I never intended to do family law, I just started getting calls and had to [respond].

One advantage for Sandra was that her family had political and social contacts that she was able to utilize. Many other women did not. Many of the women studied were the first in their family to attend law school and had few legal or political contacts which could help in finding a position. If the woman had gone to a hometown law school, she was somewhat more likely to have these contacts. But this also depended on the woman’s background. A number of first generation college women in the study had few contacts with anyone helpful in finding employment. Sometimes summer jobs and, earlier, preceptorships (dropped as a requirement in 1973) led to a position. As mentioned before, those who were following spouses were often stranded in terms of helpful contacts since the spouse’s job or training program seldom made any attempt to connect these women to helpful contacts which could lead to work possibilities. Linda took a government position doing tax law but left it after a year because she felt they didn’t give her enough to do. Linda might not have been able to make this choice had she not had the alternative of going into practice with her husband. It did mean giving up tax law but she quickly discovered other areas she found interesting and she was able to utilize skills she had brought to the practice. Linda was enthusiastic about this new direction as seen in the following quote, I ended up doing research, talking to clients. I had patience to talk and to listen and to ask again and I drafted wills, which they hated to do. [M]y husband was by himself with some other attorneys working, but they really did complex litigation, business litigation or avoidance of, so I worked, did research and they’d have difficult research problems. I loved research, and also did writing and things like that.

Six women went to work for corporations. One of these was Iris who had thought she might go back home and work for her family’s lawyer only to find that he would not pay her a salary. In her case, as well as feeling that Eastern City was more progressive, Iris felt that the corporation would make more limited demands and that the shorter hours would allow her to have more of a life outside of work. Was she typical of the women who decided to work for corporations as their first positions? Why did they choose corporate settings?

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Some people simply did not like the atmosphere of the big firm. Sharon worked for a big firm between her second and third year of law school and hated it. She explained, Law was new to me, I was still a student rather than a professional, and I really wasn’t equipped for the assignments. I didn’t have any sort of support; I was supposed to be able to figure out the [work] myself. . . . I really felt a lot of pressure, and it wasn’t something I enjoyed. I like people contact. I liked being in charge. I didn’t like to be responsible to someone else. It was intense, and I went home . . . and I said, “That’s not my lifestyle. I want to live, you know, I want to have everything. . . . I want to have a life.” Yeah, it was clear to me, I wasn’t going to a big corporate firm.

For Sharon, the summer job was a good experience in showing her she did not want a big firm position. Her Ivy League degree meant that she had the chance to be in a big firm and the summer job gave her a chance to see what it was like. She was also someone trailing a spouse to a new city but, in this case, her degree gave her an entrée to the big firm position unlike some of the other women in this situation. In addition to the discomfort of the big firm position, Sharon’s desire to have a life outside of work also made the corporate position more desirable. When she interviewed with the corporation, however, she was told that they liked her very much but they already had a woman. Only when that woman left soon after the interview did she get offered the position. Sharon took it and discovered that the atmosphere was much more comfortable for her and that she found it an enjoyable challenge rather than an overwhelming pressure. Sharon felt that she really had a handle on this job and did very well, moving up in the corporation. Judith found a corporate position when she had really only started looking for work. They wanted her because of her ability to speak French. Judith was one of the few women in the study who felt frustrated that the old preceptorship system no longer existed. She explained, I think that hurt us tremendously. Because you would have had a summer job with them, a foot in the door meeting other people and law school was all [theory]. There was very little practical application and that’s what the preceptor was for as well as networking, so we had nothing. If you didn’t know someone, if your dad wasn’t an attorney or knew attorneys, you were on your own. So this job just sort of fell into my lap. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I really didn’t and it

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fit so well. It was not what I wanted, but it fit very well and the pay was very good.

When Judith was asked what she had wanted instead, she answered, “I was idealistic, I wanted to help poor people…. I loved the medical field, I wanted to be involved in the medical field somehow and there just wasn’t the opportunity.” When she was asked about legal assistance group possibilities, Judith said, “I tried . . . you had to know someone. And there were so many people who wanted that.” This had been a year when one of the local law schools had more graduates than usual and most of the options for placement were overcrowded. Judith accepted the corporate position but left after three years, remaining convinced that this was not what she wanted. Sometimes getting the position was not the difficult part, especially if the woman was the first woman in the corporation. Mary wanted a corporate position as she felt that her time would be more her own. Additionally she felt that her personality was more suited to corporate work, “I knew I didn’t have the personality to go out and really drum up business, which you have to do if you‘re in a private law firm.” Mary heard that a large corporation in Eastern City was looking for a woman because they had no women. She interviewed and was hired. It turned out to be a bad experience for the first few years. Mary explained, I had a really tough first couple of years. Really, really tough, I wasn’t given any responsibility. I wasn’t trained, I wasn’t anything, I was just there and it was really tough, but I certainly wasn’t going to leave the job. I was going to stick it out.

Mary was finally assigned to someone who was willing to train her and give her more responsibility. She began to enjoy the work and stayed there many years. Corporations were attractive to these women for their more reasonable hours than those required by private practice. Some women also appreciated the less pressured atmosphere and not having to bring in clients. Although it may not have been the type of position they had expected or been encouraged to pursue while they were in law school, most of the six preferred the corporate atmosphere and were happy to find a corporate position. Many held these positions for all or much of their careers. Another alternative was Legal Aid which refers to those positions in which low income populations are able to access legal assistance they would otherwise not be able to afford. Generally those women in the

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study who chose legal assistance positions were happy with their choice. They had sought work of this kind and were happy to find it. This was not true for everyone who ended up in this type of work nor did those who wanted public interest law positions always find them. An example of someone who really wanted this type of work and found it is illustrated by the following quote from Harriet who, when asked why she chose this job, answered, Oh, it was unquestioned. I mean, there was no question in my mind that I would go to work for [Legal Aid], because they were representing the indigent population. That was the kind of work that I wanted to do. I really felt that I did not want to be a mainstream lawyer.

Often, although not always, these were the women who had chosen to attend law school because they were motivated by social justice concerns. In contrast to these very enthusiastic seekers of Legal Aid positions, some people also saw it as a more accessible position than those in law firms. Norma spoke of the difficulty of finding work in those years. She mused, I think that it was really hard for women to break into law firms. I think even the women at the higher end of the class were having problems. People were finding jobs more in [other settings]. One woman went into a corporation, people going in to clerk for judges and stuff, so I think that law firms just weren’t used to having women. If they did, the women weren’t really on partnership track. It was really difficult to break into a law firm at that point in time. I was just not really having a lot of luck and I knew somebody who had gone on over to [Legal Aid] and they told me there was a job available there. I interviewed and they accepted me and actually [it] was good because it kind of fit some of the things I liked to do. It’s very social-minded and I thought that it was a good way to start off practice and all.

Only three women had Legal Aid positions as their first position although several other women in the study ended up working at Legal Aid or another public interest legal entity sometime in their careers. Other graduates found positions through contacts or special skills they were able to offer as well as the law degree. In many cases, contacts through friends, family, or faculty led to a satisfactory position. No one failed to find work. All of the positions were seen as fairly desirable in terms of interest, pay, hours, or chance of advancement. The happiest outcomes were for those who found the positions they had

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wanted. Others, conscious of the oversupply of new lawyers in Eastern City due to the swelling enrollments in nearby law schools, were happy to have found work, if not the kind they had most wanted. Looking at this group of forty women who graduated between 1973 and 1975, seven of them became judicial law clerks, seven took positions with the government, and seven took positions with small firms. Another six of the women took positions with corporations, large firms hired five of them (none in 1975), four of the women went to work for legal aid or another public interest entity and one person became a sole practitioner. Three people found law-related work that didn’t fit any of these categories. Conclusion

Real differences between the three groups are visible in the outcomes for women’s first positions. The women in the Pioneer group had the most difficult time finding positions. They ended up in positions that generally were poorly-compensated, had little future or promotion possibilities, and sometimes made little use of their legal training. They were usually treated condescendingly by potential employers and often felt lucky to be able to practice at all. Although all stayed in or returned to the field over time, several took long “retirements” to raise children or worked part-time to accommodate family responsibilities. These women were looking for positions when the prejudice against women in law was still very strong as shown by the 1963 Harvard Law Record survey (Epstein 1981), which found that being female was one of the most undesirable characteristics in an applicant. It is not surprising then that their outcomes for a first position were so poor. The Transition group, graduating from 1964-1972, also faced many of these prejudices. Although things improved for the later graduates in that category, there were still some of the same negative responses during interviews for positions. There were also positive outcomes, with three women becoming law clerks and one person breaking the “big firm barrier.” A number of women sought government work, some as a response to the negative reaction from firms. Several barriers had come down by the time of the Modern group. Women were able to be hired by large firms, including some of the most prestigious. Women’s law school rank had begun to pay off in the same way men’s had for decades, in that women with high law school rank were being recruited for the big firms or as appellate law clerks. Corporations were beginning to hire women and even seek them out. Although it was a time of oversupply of lawyers, all of the women

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managed to find employment, usually at positions they wanted. It now became much more the norm that women law school graduates would be hired for positions that demanded and utilized their law degrees. Admittedly, some of the quotations point out ways in which women were still being evaluated differently and had to endure negative treatment in some of their interviews. Overall, though, the placement situation was vastly better for the Modern group than it had been for Pioneer group or even the Transition group where the outcome in finding jobs was still mixed. The next chapter traces the careers of eight of these women. One of the things to be examined will be the impact of the first position. Does it affect the likelihood of success in the career or quickly become unimportant as other positions are found? What happened to the women in the three different groups? Did the Pioneer group, which had such a difficult time finding work, do well as the legal world became more inclusive? Were the women in the Transition group able to move into more rewarding positions since they were closer in time to the surge of women law school graduates? Did the generally good hiring outcomes of the Modern group translate into successful careers or did the women in this group still face discrimination? How much had firms and other settings changed? Did the willingness to hire women mean that their chances for promotion and partnership were now equal to that of men or were there new ways of disadvantaging women in the years to follow? Following the careers of eight of the women in more detail will answer these questions and prompt new ones.

4 Building a Career over the Long Run

A number of questions come up when looking at the career paths of the women in the study. What factors were important in building a career? How did the women make career decisions? What were the choice points that influenced their career outcomes? The constraints influencing the original choice of position and the career decisions following are examined through the narratives of the individual careers of eight women. The interplay between agency (what the woman does) and structure (what she faced in the legal world of her day) create the outcomes visible when looking at these women thirty-five years later. The stories of these eight very different women, with different strategies and outcomes, illustrate the benefits and disadvantages of being early on the scene of a profession that changed radically in its gender makeup during the last four decades. How much can the women control and how much is determined by other factors such as existing structure and/or the decisions of others? Choosing the Eight Narratives

The core group of eight women’s stories were chosen to illustrate as much diversity as possible with occasional examples from some of the other fifty-seven. One factor considered in picking the narratives was placement. Different placements affected the decisions and strategies necessary and the rewards available. The narratives look at one or more women in each of the six placements: large firms, small firms, sole practitioners, corporations, hired government positions, and elected or appointed government position. A second consideration is rank attained. Understanding what the woman has done in her career requires looking at where she is now in terms of both placement and rank within it. Is or was she a star, somewhere in the middle, or barely making it? Looking at women who 67

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vary in rank attained gives further clues to successful (and unsuccessful) strategies within the legal world. Thanks to the thirty-five year perspective, it is possible to measure achieved position with little reliance on prediction. By 2010, only a few women were still advancing up the career ladder and likely to reach a position above their present one. Some may move into other positions even at this point, but the majority will not make any further movement, other than retirement. Most of the women are at or near the end of the career, and, as such, it is possible to look back and see what they have achieved. Of the total group, thirty percent are retired, ten percent work part-time, and several people mentioned that they were thinking of retiring in the next few years. Interestingly, two of the eight women from the Pioneer group still work full-time and two more work parttime. A third consideration in picking the eight participants is the inclusion of some participants from each group, Pioneer, Transition, and Modern, as a way of examining the impact of the time one entered the profession. Did it make a difference to start before the changes in the legal world in the 1960s and 1970s? Were the better initial placements of the Transition and Modern groups decisive in career success over time? Was there an ideal time to become a lawyer? Was the initial placement really a career starter if good or a permanent liability if bad? Was there an advantage to being early to the profession or was it always a disadvantage? The final consideration in selecting the narratives is the resources that each woman brought with her. Some women had the advantage of having resources such as family contacts in finding the first position. How important were these contacts in the continuing career? What other advantages were important? What role did financial resources, status of law school, grades in law school, work habits, personality and other individual characteristics play? How did marital status and children influence the career? Sometimes these same individual characteristics could be both advantages and disadvantages. How did the choices the individuals made in their careers reflect these resources? How might changes in these characteristics have changed the outcome of the individual careers? The core group is eight women, with two from the Pioneer group, two from the Transition group, and four from the Modern group. One is from a large firm, two from small firms, two from corporate settings, one a sole practitioner, one a former government agency employee, and one an appointed government official. Although these are the current or immediate past placements for each of the women, many have had

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experience in one or more placements other than their current one. For each, this chapter looks at the first position and succeeding positions, the important career steps taken, the advantages and disadvantages held, the woman’s feelings about her career, and the lessons learned. The Pioneer Group Catherine

Catherine, a member of the Pioneer group, found her first position in a firm that needed her expertise in what was then a new tax code. This firm was in the large city where she had grown up and gone to law school. Catherine stayed at this firm for two years. She left because her new husband began his service in the Army, which had paid for his professional school training. She accompanied him to the Midwest, where she had two children in two years. When he was discharged from the Army, he did further training in still a different city, and then they moved to Eastern City to be closer to family. During this time, Catherine did not practice or take the bar exam for the two different states, knowing that these were going to be temporary stays. After moving to Eastern City and having two more children, she prepared to take the bar exam for Eastern State. At this point, she had four young children and a husband who was just getting started in his profession. Catherine explained that she had taken and passed the bar exam after moving to Eastern City but did not start practicing law immediately because of her busy family life. A few years later, Catherine was recruited by a friend from law school to work with him on his legal research at a local university. She agreed to do this but stipulated that she could only work part-time (twenty hours a week). In this position, she helped put together a work manual and then coauthored several books with the friend who had recruited her. Catherine managed to balance work and family by working 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day for some years. She did have live-in household help in the form of a series of university students but stated, “That’s not a panacea.” Catherine continued to work part-time in this position until she was asked by someone with whom she had studied for the bar exam whether she would like to rent space with his law group. She accepted his offer and started her practice. She explained the advantages and disadvantages of the new position. “I enjoyed it and I got a lot to do, most [of it] interesting. I got two or three trials; of course that was hard, because I

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didn’t have someone to bat my ideas against and ask for the procedures.” Catherine continued to practice, sharing a secretary and working about 30 hours a week. At this point, she had a very successful age discrimination case with a woman who had worked for a major Eastern City corporation, I fashioned it as a class action, both on the state and federal level. . . . I filed it, but at that point, the law firm that represented this corporation came to me and said, could they settle, it was obvious this woman was let go and clearly because of age discrimination.

Catherine enjoyed the exciting outcome and said, “It was just fantastic!” What followed the settlement offer from the company pushed Catherine into a decision. She stated, I got all these calls from the people who handle age discrimination and discrimination cases for the state, would I take some more cases? But at that point, I was running after some clients for payment and potential clients were calling me at night and I didn’t have the support system, it was just me. I shared a secretary with this group, but that wasn’t enough.

If she had accepted these cases, she would have needed much more in the way of a support layer. It would have required full-time work and been much more deadline-oriented and more intrusive of her home life. It would also have required putting money into more staffing and the kind of money that is necessary to “lay out” in these kinds of cases before any money comes in, if it does. Class action cases are very much a long-term kind of practice. Cases may run for years and provide an unstable income. Because of this, the lawyer must have backup in terms of handling a number of cases at once. It may be necessary to put a lot of the firm’s money into expenses for the case and it often requires staffing such as paralegals and other attorneys. It is not the kind of work that one can do as a sole practitioner. This kind of work could potentially have moved her into a higher income category and a more prominent position in the legal community. But it was definitely a high-risk move and one that would have required long hours of work. As Catherine stated later in the interview, “I found trial work very exhausting, I mean, I’d be doing the dishes and thinking about it.” Catherine decided not to make this move into class action work. After considering the possibility, she said, “I didn’t have a secretary and all that. At that point . . . I guess I just decided I couldn’t finance something like that to get it underway.”

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Instead Catherine heard about a corporate position and felt this would be a better situation for her. Although her children were in college by then, she felt the corporate position was preferable in terms of regular hours and less intrusion into her personal life. As Catherine put it, “when I was done, I was done.” This decision point could be seen as a lost opportunity to become a “star” or as a wise choice permitting a more reasonable life style. If the question is “Why did more women not reach the top positions?” then this example could be seen as evidence for those who suggest that women’s choices make the difference. If having had a very busy combination of work and family for twenty years encourages one to choose the less stressful, more reasonable life style, perhaps the question should be, “Should not everyone do this?” Catherine enjoyed the new position and found the combination of learning new areas of the law and teaching others a satisfying combination. She held this position for another fifteen years until retirement. She also taught courses in her earlier research area as an Adjunct Professor at one of the local universities. Catherine is an example of someone who decided that work should be a part but only a part of her life. After a few years at home when her four children were very small, she worked twenty hours a week, then thirty hours or more a week and then forty hours at the corporation. As Catherine graduated in the 1950s, when women were not encouraged to make a commitment to a career, her choice to have a work role over time and one that competed with her family role was unusual. Catherine had a number of advantages, but these can also function as disadvantages in terms of outcome. Her husband earned a good income, which allowed her to delegate some tasks to the live-in help that they could afford. But many parenting tasks were hard to delegate, and her husband’s work role left him little time or flexibility for participation at an equal level. Catherine wanted time to devote to her family and gave this as one of her reasons for working part-time for years and eventually for moving to a corporate position. Another of Catherine’s advantages was her excellent legal education at an Ivy League law school where she had done very well. Her abilities and her contacts through this law school brought her ongoing opportunities even after she left the city in which she attended law school. One of her classmates was the person who recruited her for the part-time research position in Eastern City, which she held for many years. Contacts through her law school led to the opportunity to share office space, which led to the successful age discrimination case she handled. These contacts also alerted her to the corporate law vacancy to

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which she moved. In her case, the law school she attended gave her a lasting advantage in her legal career and led to choices others might not have had. A number of interviewees took on work roles that competed heavily with family roles. Sometimes they were driven by the need for income and sometimes by commitment to the work role or as part of a long-term career strategy. Many of these women were willing to sacrifice sleep, leisure time, or whatever was necessary for career. Catherine is an example of someone who decided that she wanted a manageable lifestyle and chose repeated work placements that she felt enhanced this. These individual portrayals show various ways of handling the work/family balance that so many of these women faced. Eighty percent of the sixty-five women were married and all but four of these had children. The Pioneer group mostly graduated from law school in the 1950s when family was assumed to be a woman’s main and only concern. How did these women find their own solutions to balancing work and family when the culture was so heavily skewed to the family side? Moving into the Transition and Modern groups, the model changes to one in which women were expected and expected themselves to “do it all.” How did they manage? Six of the vignettes give some of the answers and this work/family balance theme will return in Chapter Six. Beth

Beth, another member of the Pioneer group, differed from Catherine in many respects even though she faced many of the same challenges. Beth was the person who switched her career preparation from medical school to law school when she read her boyfriend’s law school case books and found them fascinating. After having placed first in her class at law school, Beth joined her boyfriend, now husband, in his sixmonth-old practice as her first employment. She has practiced full-time since graduating from law school despite having three children all under kindergarten age at one point. Beth felt that, I was fortunate enough to be married to someone who was extremely supportive of my going to law school, doing well in law school, proud of the fact that I did well in law school, and very, very, totally supportive of my efforts as a lawyer.

Law was something they shared which made practicing together an expected part of their life. However, Beth’s job description, unlike her husband’s, included not only the law but also home and children.

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Despite this busy combination, when she was asked to teach a course at the law school when her youngest child was two weeks old, Beth accepted. She felt it would be a wonderful thing to do. Well, what I did . . . it was a two-hour course, so they arranged to allow me to teach it first thing Monday morning, so I taught from eight to ten, before I went to the office; in truth, I never slept on Sunday night. I stayed up all Sunday night and prepared.

Beth explained that her children had taught her to do without a lot of sleep. She is similar to a number of women in the study who got by on very little sleep in order to fit into their lives everything they wanted or had to do. Beth did not have live-in childcare. She said she would have liked to, but never found anyone suitable. She did have someone who came to her home every day. Although her life sounded exhausting, Beth explained, Well, I guess it was [exhausting], but it was very challenging. I loved having the children, but I loved work and I worked with [my husband], so I didn’t have the kind of boss that many women have today that you have to answer to. I was able to go to the PTA meetings and he wasn’t going, so what was he going to say?

When asked if she had ever considered not working outside the home, Beth answered, “No. One reason I didn’t was, it was very much a part of my marriage, because not only were we both lawyers, but we shared a practice. . . . it was just part of my marriage and my life.”

She explained, When you open up an office yourself . . . [my husband] really did it, he did it before I joined him, he had a night office in [Nearby City] where he was born and raised, and he had office hours every night. So he used to go to the office every evening. I went with him on Saturday nights. That’s where we went Saturday nights. And when I was pregnant, I went out two afternoons a week, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. The kind of practice you get there, with people coming in from the street or people who knew him when he was a kid. . . . or people in the community who referred things to him, were personal injury cases. So we did personal injury work, and that’s really how I started to try cases and that’s why when I was just a baby lawyer, I was going into court and trying cases, and fortunately we did well.

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But I will tell you that the first case that we ever handled where I was going to be the lawyer doing it, I was concerned, women, men used to tell me, and some women, if you go in front of a jury, there will be women [who are] not supportive of women. Women resent women, they will be jealous of you and they won’t be good to you. That was just such an accepted thing that I worried terribly about it and I said to one of the people whose case I was going to try, now you know I’m going to try [your case], but I’ll understand if you feel reticent about it, because I’m a woman and if you feel that way. . . . I don’t remember what they said, whether I tried it or not, but I discovered that absolutely wasn’t true. Women jurors were wonderful to me and I would talk with them afterward. . . . They were happy to have a woman, proud to have a woman in court and it was really wonderful.

Beth and the firm were very successful. Her husband was very much the business generator until her reputation grew which also brought in business. The practice changed from the personal injury cases which had developed her trial skills to more complex litigation which she found fun and challenging. Beth became a star, arguing in appellate courts and becoming a number of “firsts.” Her name is instantly recognized in Eastern City and she has continued to practice far past the usual age of retirement. When I asked why she was still practicing full-time, her response was, “My father told me you weren’t supposed to be a parasite. I took it very much to heart.” Brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, Beth exemplifies the story of women who became very successful, despite a society that gave little encouragement. Catherine and Beth were both members of the Pioneer group and are both described as brilliant and excellent lawyers. However, their careers went in very different directions and Beth has ended up better known, with higher financial rewards, and is regarded as one of the highest achieving lawyers in Eastern City. What shaped their very different choices as they moved from being high-ranking law school graduates to marriage, childbearing, and career? Beth’s decision to work full-time from law school on despite small children was helpful in developing her skills and reputation. But it may not have been crucial. Since Beth was working in her husband’s firm, she would have been able to take time off and still return to work. She did not face the difficulties in returning that women now often do (Stone 2007). Nor did Catherine find it difficult to find work when she decided to return. What full-time work without a pause did do for Beth was give her a chance to develop her trial skills, begin to build a reputation for winning cases, and try something new (teaching a course at the law school). It

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certainly carried costs as well, such as sleep and time with her children, but for her, the fun and challenge were worth it. The decision point early on was continuing to work full-time after having children. A big factor in this was the expectation on the part of her husband that she would continue to practice full-time. She still carried a heavy load with responsibility for the house and children. Both Catherine and Beth had childcare but neither had the live-in nanny, devoted to the family and the children, that some women had and which freed those women of much family responsibility. The biggest difference between Catherine and Beth is the priority each gave to her career. Although Beth’s husband supported her career and expected her to continue it, it is doubtful she would have been willing to sacrifice it had the situation been different. Her willingness to go without sleep and to be so extremely busy suggests that she would have fought to keep her career. Her high-intensity approach to life might have been expressed in other ways, but it is difficult to imagine her with a more traditional lifestyle. Beth’s career is that of a female achiever who conquered high odds to become successful. How typical of the Pioneer group are Catherine and Beth? Beth is less typical than Catherine. She is much better known than most of the other women in the group and is in a high-income group while most of the women in the group earned less than $100,000 each year. She is also one of only two women in the Pioneer group still working full-time and the only person to work in the same placement setting throughout. Most of the women in this group worked for small firms or as sole practitioners so she is typical in terms of the type of placement but not in terms of the level of success. Catherine is more typical in terms of income. But she is atypical in terms of the variety of positions she has held and her ease in finding these positions. Catherine had a better first position than many of the others. She and one other woman in the group were the only ones to end up in a corporate setting. About half of the Pioneer group’s initial poor placements had a lasting impact on earnings for this group with approximately five of the eight women earning $50,000 or less annually. This may be misleading, however, since no attempt has been made to convert salaries for those who retired earlier. Some of these women were able to take advantage of opportunities that opened up after they had graduated. Others had already chosen from what was available earlier and did not, for a variety of reasons, move into these new opportunities.

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The Transition Group

The women in the Transition group, who graduated between 1964 and 1972, were more successful than the Pioneer group, at least as measured by income. Seven of the twelve are also retired, but usually more recently than the Pioneer group so that may be a factor influencing the income distribution. The Transition group as a whole graduated at least ten years later than the Pioneer group and had generally better outcomes as far as initial position. Donna and Faye are the two narratives from the Transition group that this section discusses. Donna

Donna is the woman mentioned in a previous chapter who started law school with five small children, unwilling to wait any longer and afraid of being too old. She had wanted to attend law school immediately after college but did not have the financial means to do so. Ten years after graduating from college, Donna went to law school in Eastern City. Although she excelled in some of the academic activities of the law school, her class rank was only about the middle of the class. Donna explained, “I remember taking my final examination having had no time to review on that course because it was just too much to do. There weren’t enough hours in the day.” Despite this, Donna passed the bar exam on her first attempt and became a trial court law clerk. She was there a year and then went into her husband’s small law firm. She had planned to do this and had taken every course available on the kinds of cases he handled. Donna found that their plan to work together did not work out very well as they were largely sharing the same number of clients and amount of income as he had been making. They needed to grow the practice but it was difficult. Any of the serious cases that came in were automatically her husband’s since people came to see him, not Donna. The income was not sufficient. About this time, two years after graduating from law school, Donna received a mysterious letter that asked if she was interested in a new challenge. One of the large industries in Eastern City was setting up a small group which would do fact finding on matters of dispute between the companies and their labor force. This had come about through a provision in the workers’ contract. The criteria used to select the group were that the people chosen would have few experiences with the industry and would have the right temperament. Donna found out years later that representatives from the industry had gone to the law schools

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and asked who the faculty thought might have the judicial temperament they were seeking and that she had been recommended. The process started out with one hundred people who went through a series of interviews by both the companies and the workforce. People kept being cut and Donna ended up as one of the twenty selected. She said about her selection, “There were 99 men and me. They weren’t going to cut me. This was the first example of affirmative action, I think. And they knew it; I didn’t know it, but that’s what happened.” The panel was set up and Donna began her new work. The process was that she was assigned a case and got a per-diem amount with a limit on the hours she could spend studying and writing it. She could do some of the work at home, “I can remember lying on that couch probably with dictating equipment, my kids remember it, the TV is on, the whole thing.” Four years later a vacancy occurred on the permanent board (the one with the power to interpret the contracts, not just fact-find) and Donna was hired. This brought in a salary of $25,000 in the late 1970s and still allowed her to do a little private practice. This initial position on the panel was really the start of Donna’s career. She acquired the background for this work as she did it and found that she became very comfortable doing it. She continued to mediate, first as an employee of the board and then as an ad hoc consultant. Her practice had grown very busy when she was appointed to a position in Washington, D.C. as a mediator. At this point her youngest child was still in high school and the next youngest was in college. Moving to Washington meant leaving her husband and son behind in Eastern City. She came home occasional weekends and the son in college spent many weekends with her. As she said, “It was an unbelievable job.” Donna had no second thoughts about accepting it and stayed there for five years. She found out later that they had decided to have the first woman in this position and her qualifications fit the position. She had been recommended by someone with whom she had done arbitration. Donna left the position in Washington after five years when the last child left home. She explained, I just didn’t want [her husband] to be here by himself and I wanted to be with him, so I gave my notice and said I was going to leave. . . . [S]o I left in September and then we had some very nice years. I’m so glad that I left when I did while he was still healthy because then he got sick and then it was a whole new world.

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Although Donna left for personal reasons, she was not long without work. The Washington position had really opened up new areas so her broadened background meant arbitration work in the public sector as well as industry. She again worked as an ad hoc arbitrator and later took a permanent position in industry, which involved frequent travel to the upper Midwest. After five years, a combination of the difficult travel and some problems on the job persuaded Donna to quit. She returned to consulting and then took a full-time public arbitration position in Eastern State, again being recommended by someone with whom she had worked. Donna also revived her law practice, practicing with her son and daughter. During this time her husband became very ill and died. Donna stayed in the state arbitration position for eight years until she remarried. She left at that point since it involved a lot of travel and returned to the law practice she had opened with her son and daughter. Her son has moved on to another position but presently her daughter is practicing full-time while Donna describes herself as working part-time. Donna has had a whirlwind career and the decision points came with each position change. Some were more difficult than others. The first change from law clerk to joining her husband’s firm was not difficult since she had planned throughout law school to join him in the firm. Similarly, the second change from his firm to the mediation panel was also easy since both Donna and her husband felt they needed to earn more than they were able to do, splitting the business that came in. She was still able to practice with him since the mediation cases were on an ad hoc basis. Being selected for that position was out of her hands and a reflection of the new emphasis on hiring women as can be seen from her earlier quote about “99 men and me.” In this case, Donna benefited from being one of the early women in the law. She got an opportunity that would not have been available earlier. She might not have been sought out later when there was less pressure to get a woman “on board.” One of the reasons Donna was part of that group of one hundred goes back to law school and being seen by faculty as someone with judicial temperament. She repeatedly found positions because others with whom she had worked recommended her. The good impression Donna made on others was a valuable advantage. Her next decision point, moving to the permanent arbitration board, was an easy decision since it was a continuation at a higher level of what she had been doing coupled with a good salary rather than the fee-percase that she had gotten on the panel. After five years of doing this as an employee, Donna opened her own office and did the same thing on an ad hoc basis, quickly building a busy practice. This decision seemed to

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come easily, perhaps because she knew she would have plenty of work, having already built her reputation in this field. The next step, the appointment at the federal level, was again the result of being recommended by someone she had worked with, having the qualifications and experience, and benefiting from the timing. Donna was the first woman in the position and the person appointing her wanted to appoint the first woman. So despite her late start in terms of law school, her timing turned out to be excellent. An interesting question is whether she would have been as successful had she graduated ten years earlier as she had wanted. Another advantage she had was, by the time the Washington opportunity arose, most of her children were grown, making the decision to take the position in Washington easier. It did require her to live apart from her youngest child and husband, something she was willing to do for the “fabulous job” she was offered. It is clear, however, that she was not willing to make this bargain forever when she resigned from the position to return home when her youngest child left for college. This was a sacrifice of career for family as shown by her statement, “I loved that job in Washington!” Taking the position had been the opposite, the sacrifice of family for career. How different would this have been if she had been male? The pattern has usually been that a male would have moved to Washington and his spouse would have followed. Three career lessons are clear from Donna and her very successful career. The first is that performance always matters. Doing well in one position may bring the next position as a result of others’ recommendations. This happened repeatedly with Donna. Secondly, success may mean sacrifices in terms of family time and being together and a more relaxed life style. Thirdly, timing is important, but it may be necessary to have the right experience and accept new challenges in order to take advantage of the timing. Clearly Donna had to balance nurturing family relationships with advancing her career. She says now about her children, “They’re all good friends and that’s my biggest achievement.” When asked if she would have done anything differently, Donna answered, “I did what had to be done. I did the best I could in school. I couldn’t be an academic star at that point.” Donna started out as a law clerk, moved to a small firm, then to a corporate position, then to her own firm, then to an appointed governmental position, back to a corporate position, then another corporate position, then a government position, and finally back to her small firm. Donna quoted herself from a speech to students,

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I have good news and bad news for the graduates. The bad news first. You’re not going to be able to get a job, work there for 45 years and then retire. The good news is you’re not going to be able to get a job and work 45 years and then retire.

Clearly, she could have been speaking of her own career. Faye

Faye was also from the Transition group, graduating just a year later than Donna. Faye’s decision to go into law was very much influenced by her college friend and role model as the following quote makes clear. “We maintained our friendship and it was actually she, I think, who had the biggest influence. She loved law school. We would talk about it and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I could be a lawyer, too.’” Faye’s family was supportive of but surprised by this decision. “I have no lawyers in my family. My father worked in the factory as most other fathers did.” Faye did well in law school, graduating second in her class although at first she found it intimidating. I was terrified when I went to law school. First of all, there I was in this room with all these men and two other women and people seemed just to know more than I did. When the guys asked questions, they submitted this and they submitted that and the lingo was unfamiliar to me. I went to law school back in the day when we were all required to dress up. You know, the men wore coats and ties, the few women there wore suits and heels and we were expected to look like lawyers and it was very intimidating initially.

One professor reassured Faye by saying, “You know, some of these people have grown up around dinner tables where the conversation has been different from yours and that’s just a fact of life, but it doesn’t really make you any less worthy to be here.” She felt that this intimidating atmosphere had initially hurt her confidence level but that overcoming this atmosphere had left her very confident. Faye’s first position was as an appellate court law clerk for a former law school faculty member who had recruited her for this position. She continued as his law clerk when he was elected to a higher appellate court. After the clerking positions, Faye decided to apply for a statelevel position where she had heard they were looking for women. Here she did litigation work, which she felt was a great experience. Faye was married by now and, after two years, she left this position because she was pregnant and her husband wanted her to come into practice with

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him. She decided to give it a try and later felt it was a great decision. Like other interviewees who went into practice, her caseload became largely domestic relations work. It was not her favorite thing to do, and she decided to try to get one of the part-time district attorney slots. Faye did get the position after initial repeated rejections by the District Attorney and combined that part-time position with continued practice with her husband. Much as Donna had benefited from an industry decision she had nothing to do with, Faye benefited from a particularly attention-getting homicide which she prosecuted. She saw the case through to sentencing and the trial judge said to her, “You know, you should really run (for judge).” A vacancy occurred soon after and she did run and won. Faye found that she was very happy being a judge, “I loved being the arbiter, I loved sitting back and seeing both sides and making the rulings on evidentiary matters. I felt very much at home.” She served on the court approximately ten years and was then appointed to another court, her present position. The decision points for Faye owed something to timing but the most important decision point was undoubtedly the decision to attend law school. She had gone to college intending to become an English teacher. The influence of the friend who became her role model and the political science course that introduced her to the principles of law made the rest of her career possible. Like Donna, she was short on financial resources for law school, but managed to cobble together fellowships and jobs to make it possible. Unlike the three women discussed so far, she had not originally expected to go beyond college and had no previous contact with law or lawyers. It really was a new path for her. Faye was dependent on financial aid for both college and law school. Had she been ten years older, like Donna, she would have found little support. The law school’s willingness to give Faye a full scholarship and arrange for a job that covered room and board made a law degree a possibility. She is one of a number of women in the study for whom law school served as a social-mobility ladder. Faye has had a satisfying career that would not have been possible without the change in how women were seen and her decision to take on this new occupational role. Each of Faye’s first three career decision points was fairly easy to make although it should be kept in mind that her outstanding performance in law school brought these opportunities about. She was recruited for the first, stayed on with the change in venue for the second, and learned of an opportunity that existed because the attitudes toward women were changing. It was the decision to return to her home

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community and go into practice with her husband that seemed most difficult. She was very happy in the litigation position and not initially that happy in the practice. Her husband’s eagerness to have her practice with him and the pregnancy seemed to be her reasons for the decision. Her career ladder could have ended there, as was characteristic of many of the women in the Pioneer groups, in a small practice consisting mainly of domestic relations cases. Faye, motivated by missing the litigation position she had had, convinced the District Attorney to hire her despite repeated rejections and, through that decision, became the prosecutor in a very attentiongetting case. Because of the exposure, Faye ended up becoming very well known in her community, which led to being elected judge. Timing was important in her career: timing in when the judicial vacancy occurred (after she had become well known through the trial for the high-profile case), timing in the generally positive outcomes of women running for office in Eastern State, and timing in being appointed to another court when being female was probably also helpful. Both Donna and Faye were helped by the public perception that “It’s time for a woman.” One advantage for Faye was having family childcare and back-up. Since she had returned to her home community, all four grandparents were available and eager to be involved. As she said, “I had tons of help; I had tons of help from family and from friends, so that’s one of the nice things about having lived in the same place your whole life.” As in this quote, Faye emphasizes the positive, mentioning only in passing the negatives of running without the party endorsement and finding some difference in treatment on the basis of gender even after she was elected. She said at the end of the interview, I think I made it sound easier than it was. It was not always easy. . . . Running for judge as a woman when no woman had ever run before [in that county]. Believe me, there were a lot of people that would just look at you and try to make you feel bad and you just have to move on to the people who weren’t feeling that. In ways that I think didn’t happen to men, so it wasn’t always easy.

When I asked for an example, Faye gave me the following quotes from when she was campaigning, “Well, what do you mean you’re running for judge? Aren’t you married? Don’t you have a child?” Although attitudes were changing toward women, this was by no means a completed process and campaigning made that very evident.

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Although Faye benefited from the changing attitudes towards women, it is important to emphasize in the fourth and fifth career decisions, becoming an assistant district attorney and running for election as judge, that it was her initiative that brought this about. Becoming an assistant district attorney meant dealing with someone who had to be convinced to hire her and that convincing took some time. In terms of running for judge, it meant an enormous amount of work campaigning and the willingness to invest money and effort into this challenge. Faye pointed out how she campaigned differently from the male model of what campaigning had been in the following quote. “I went to every meeting, garden clubs, and senior citizens. I did all those things. There were many people who told me after the election, I voted for you, because you’re the only one I ever met.” In addition to the initiative Faye showed in her career, she had the advantage of doing well in law school, which led to her first and second positions. Her background had not given her the familiarity that some other students had with law or a professional career but her high rank in law school gave her the confidence she needed to compete thereafter. Much of the literature on building a career has concentrated on attaining partnership status. In the biographies of the Pioneer and Transition group members, much of the information is not applicable to these women since they were not in a partnership track in a firm. Donna came closest to this model in working in group settings where someone was evaluating her for the next step. But even here, she held a variety of positions of which only two fit this model. The credentials of high law school rank applied for Catherine, Beth, and Faye. Catherine also graduated from an elite law school. These are the women who would have been hired by the large firms had that been an option at that stage. Catherine, Donna, and Faye were hired by people with whom they had worked or studied, often repeatedly. The next section describes a partnership track for Gail and a similar upward path in a corporation for Margaret. In both cases there are examples of mentoring, in which a more senior and influential person helps a junior person rise in the organization (Kay and Wallace 2010). The Modern Group

This section discusses four individuals who graduated between 1973 and 1975. These are the women who benefited from the changes in law school admissions, who went into law expecting to have a professional career, and who might be expected to make the most progress in a legal world that was being challenged on the discrimination that still existed.

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It is apparent that women in this group generally got good first positions. How well did their careers develop from that point? This sections looks at: Harriet, who worked in public interest law; Rebecca, a sole practitioner; Gail who worked in a large firm; and Margaret, a corporate lawyer. How did each woman make the decisions that led to these placements and what advantages or disadvantages did she bring with her? How did personal choices affect the course of each career? Harriet

Harriet’s middle class background made it possible for her to receive her undergraduate degree from a well-known liberal arts college. After college graduation, she worked for two years at a nonprofit focused on social change. After being discouraged from applying for a higher position at the nonprofit for reasons other than her competency, Harriet decided that it was futile to try to advance with only a liberal arts degree and, convinced that she needed a more professionally directed graduate degree, chose law school. Harriet found law school extremely conservative and explained, “There was only a very, very small liberal/radical fringe, which I immediately gravitated towards.” She found only one course and faculty member who gave her hope in her first year. If it had not been for that, she might have left law school. Harriet said, It was so straight, it was so corporate mentality. It was so businessoriented and I just thought, “What am I doing here?” I had no ambitions in that direction at all. It was all becoming a lawyer in order to participate and contribute to social change. That’s what it was all about for me.

As seen in the last chapter, Harriet’s first position was at Legal Aid, not surprising in terms of her change-oriented outlook. Since she had worked there in the summers during law school, it was not a problem to get a position. Harriet stayed there for a year. When she ran into resistance from her boss for a move she wanted to make within the agency which she had thought was all set, she left and went to work at a state agency focusing on some of the same social issues. Harriet stayed there three years. She said, “I did some really nice cases over there, it was a nice [place].” She left the agency to join a firm with friends from law school. She explained the decision in terms of what the firm was doing.

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They were doing all this great progressive law, right. . . . and they hired me, I think because I was doing the civil rights stuff and I was going to do plaintiff civil rights stuff, which I did. And we got a number of pretty good [cases]. But then what happened is, you’re a woman lawyer, you start getting family work, so I started doing a lot of family law. . . . and the next thing I know, I’m doing, instead of plaintiff civil rights and a little bit of family, I’m doing family and a little bit of plaintiff civil rights and unemployment comp and just a whole lot of stuff. It was good, they were great guys and I liked the work, but it was hard. It was hard because we were a small firm and we had to make money. . . . I was able to contribute to the firm, but I always felt under a lot of stress because of that.

Harriet stayed at the firm through having her first child and continued to work full-time. After her second child was born, she switched to working part-time and found it difficult. In her words, They were happy with me doing whatever it was I was going to do, but the work wants you to [work more], the work expands. I remember having a friend who said there is no such thing as part-time work. All there is is part-time pay, but you end up working more than you’re ever paid and that certainly happened to me.

At this point several things happened at once. Harriet’s mother became very ill, she lost her childcare, and she felt that working parttime was no longer working. The combination was overwhelming and she stopped practicing. This helped in terms of all the pressures on her, but she had to go back to full-time work three years later when she got divorced. When she went back to work, Harriet negotiated a position in a medium size firm with someone she knew from their handling of similar types of cases in the past. This was a difficult negotiation because her potential employer felt that she needed to work evenings and weekends. She was unwilling to do this as a divorced mother with elementary school age children that she felt needed her home at those times. Finally they reached agreement that she would not work evenings or weekends or travel. It meant earning a good deal less than other associates but she felt it was important to be home nights and weekends with her children. Harriet stayed in this position for three years. Then someone from the state agency she had worked at before going into private practice called and urged her to come back. Although Harriet liked what she was doing at the firm, she realized that she needed to be practical and go back to the agency so that she could get her pension.

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Harriet had found the bureaucracy frustrating when she had worked there before but decided that she would just have to live with it this time. Luckily the work was good and very interesting. Harriet stayed the twelve years she needed to retire at a certain level of pension benefit and health insurance and left. Unlike some of the other women described who wanted to continue practicing law as they reached retirement age and beyond, Harriet was relieved to be retired. She said, “The fact of the matter is I was tired of practicing law. I was tired of the adversariness of it. I was tired of being in conflict all of the time. That was a very, very hard thing for me.” It was not a good fit with how she described her personality, as the following quotation demonstrates: I’m a peacemaker. I’m a conciliator and I love to teach. I was probably best suited to be an elementary school teacher or something like that. I think that would have been fun, but I never would have made that kind of money. . . . I never made a lot of money as a lawyer, I made a mediocre living on the scale of lawyer’s income. [But] I made a hell of a lot more money than I could have ever made in some kind of social work, teacher, helping kind of profession.

Although she was relieved to be retired and felt that practicing law had not fit her personality, Harriet did not regret her choice of law. She explained, It was very fortuitous for me, because in many ways it was an impulsive decision, but it turned out to be intellectually suited to me. I think a legal education is extremely valuable for any woman. It empowered me as a citizen, as a consumer, as a woman. I think that I am a stronger, braver person because of having learned to think like a lawyer, having been on the barricades if you will, especially in legal services. It made me a stronger and a braver person. You know, nobody messes with me and I’m not afraid of things and I’m not afraid to find out things. I’m not afraid to make decisions. I can negotiate with my banker. My sister’s a doctor and I don’t think that she is nearly as effective as a citizen and as a consumer as I am. She can fix a broken arm and that’s a really great thing, and I can write a will and that’s a great thing. But I can deal with an insurance agent. I can understand business transactions. I am not afraid of policemen, because I’m a lawyer. So I think that’s a great thing for a woman, and I’m really happy for my daughter about that, too. I think she’s stronger, more powerful as a person and I think that’s good. As a lawyer, you have to find out a lot of things and people ask you questions that you don’t

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know the answers to and you have to find out the answers. So those skills end up being helpful in your own life.

Looking at Harriet’s quotes in close proximity reminds us of the complexity found in looking at individuals qualitatively that is often lost in quantitative work. Most of the women interviewed had both good and bad feelings about their careers. Sometimes it will sound as if things were all good or all bad with regard to a particular topic. However, looking at a fuller picture of the individual is a reminder that making one choice often means giving up another. This will become particularly evident when looking at attempts to “have it all.” What does Harriet’s career demonstrate? Some of her decision points regarding career show the impact of her political and social values. She was already working in a non-profit, social-change oriented area before law school. Her disillusion with law school was in terms of how business-oriented it was and her first position as well as summer work was again in a non-profit, change-oriented setting. She continued to seek out this kind of setting with another position in a state agency that fit this description and then a position in private practice where she could argue cases that would bring about social change. Her second position in private practice, prompted by the need for income, did not fall into this category but did address victim’s rights. She returned to the state agency position, which did fit the category of a non-profit, change-oriented setting, but she returned for the very practical reason of securing a pension and health insurance. Harriet’s values determined the course of her career and this shows up in her choice of positions and in her response to whether law was a good choice for her. More than many of the women in the study, Harriet’s family concerns affected her choice of positions and what conditions she was willing to accept in them. She worked part-time with a second child, a choice not seen in the previous narratives. Harriet clearly refused to accept the legal world norms that “work must come first, other things must accommodate it” in several work decisions. She stopped practicing in response to illness and childcare concerns and she refused to take her second private practice position until her employer agreed to her conditions which were centered around her perceptions of her children’s needs. Harriet’s social and political concerns clearly shaped her career. She did well in law school (upper quarter) but did not use this rank to look for a position in a for-profit setting. Instead she worked for a legal assistance group. These values continued to determine the positions she

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sought. Her good work in these positions and her growing reputation allowed her to structure what she was willing to do in terms of family concerns. The first firm was willing to accept her part-time schedule, the second firm was willing (after much negotiation) to agree to her conditions of “no nights, no weekends, no travel” if that was the only way they could get her. She was able to be rehired by the agency she had left years earlier. Financially, there were costs to these decisions. For the two family-related decisions, she incurred the cost of a part-time salary in the first firm and made less than the other associates in the second firm because of the conditions she negotiated. These were the bargains she made. Marriage meant that Harriet could work part-time and also that she could stop practicing for three years but it did not mean that the other spouse carried out the main parenting role as happened in some other cases. Instead she seemed to carry the main parenting role. All of the narratives so far have involved married women with children and this may affect the work role. Only four of the married women did not have children. However, twenty per cent of the women did not marry. How does the narrative change when the woman remains single? The next narrative is about Rebecca who never married and who is still practicing as a sole practitioner. Rebecca

Rebecca was the woman who wanted to become a lawyer after she had read some of her father’s law texts from the three semesters he had been able to attend law school. Her father died while she was still a child and a big part of her motivation for law school involved wanting to fulfill his dream. Perhaps because of her father’s ill health, she and her brother were raised in a very nontraditional way with both learning how to cook, being active in sports, etc. Rebecca majored in science in college and supported herself by working full-time in this field through four years of a night law school program. She spoke of this as being a rough time but lived with her mother who was very supportive. Rebecca said after she passed the bar, “I think I never carried my business card because my mother was handing them out constantly.” Rebecca opened her practice in the neighborhood she had grown up in and chose family law as her area. As she explained, it was only possible to keep up in so many fields and she wanted to keep up in the area for which she had the most clients. This may have affected her financial outcome since family law is generally not that profitable. She did not want to do criminal work because she did not like the idea of

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having someone’s life in her hands. She was also happy that family work did not involve jury trials since she did not like the “public performance” aspect of jury trials. Rebecca has been a sole practitioner throughout her years of practice. When I asked if this was what she intended, she said, Nope. I sort of hoped to get a job in a real firm and make money and help mom and everybody else in the family. . . . but I was not in the top of my class. You know, you’re still where your class rating was. Even ten, twenty years later when I applied for jobs again, they still wanted to know where you were in your class.

This was frustrating for Rebecca who had attended law school while working full-time, the only way she could have attended law school. She also had no contacts in the legal world. I had no one, they asked who your mentor would be, and I had no one who was my mentor. I had no person that I could go to his law office and say…. The first time I walked inside a courtroom was when we got sworn in in the Supreme Court. That was the first time I’d ever seen a courtroom.

Rebecca has not done very well financially in her practice. A former law school faculty member had said, “All you have to do is put out your shingle.” According to Rebecca, “It doesn’t really work quite that way.” She admits that she’s “too much of a soft touch for my clients.” She sums up her present status by saying, “I never was in it to make a fortune. I just thought I’d be better off.” She joked, Right now, if I could hit the lottery and have a monthly pay, I’d be happy. I mean, just put enough aside so you could give the people who you’d like to be able to give free advice to more free advice. You can’t do it all.

Rebecca has shared space with other lawyers over the years and has also done some teaching but still struggles to make the practice pay. When she was asked about what was satisfying about this somewhat precarious career, she mentioned the times when “people are really happy with what you do.” Rebecca feels that she is honest with her clients, letting them know when their expectations are unrealistic instead of just “running up the bill.” She feels that she practices law ethically and even talked with her priest before starting to handle divorces.

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When asked about her achievements, Rebecca mentioned the good relationships with clients and the things she has been able to accomplish for them. She has also been able to do things for her brother’s children and to travel a good deal despite her struggling practice. One of the outside recognitions that meant a good deal to her was an alumni award from her law school. When asked if she thought things would go differently when she graduated from law school, Rebecca said, I always thought that I would have a practice that would be more thriving financially, but I’m not sitting here cooling my thumbs even yet. I’m still getting new clients and I enjoy what I do. Truthfully, if I didn’t, I would have probably switched tacks again.

Rebecca is an example of someone who started out with few advantages in terms of financial resources and legal contacts. It is impossible to know how much of an effect working full-time had on her law school rank but it is likely that it had at least some negative effect. That low rank decreased her chances of getting more remunerative work, even up to the present. Having no contacts to suggest her for positions or guide clients her way has also kept her locked in her present position. Some of her policies such as allowing clients to pay over time and trying to keep her charges moderate have also worsened her financial outlook. Rebecca is someone who has found non-financial rewards in client responses and relationships and in her relationships with family and the law school alumni council. She is typical of some of the women from earlier groups who were sole practitioners who did not do very well financially but she is less typical of those who graduated in the Modern group. Most members of this group were able to find better positions and have had more financially remunerative careers. So far these narratives have not looked at anyone whose career took place in a large firm. The next narrative will look at Gail who worked in large firms for all of her career except for her clerkship experience. In many ways, Gail’s experience typifies the hopes of many women going into law, being on the partnership track in a large, well-respected law firm. Gail

As seen in Chapter Three, Gail started out in a very prestigious clerkship, went on to a large and prestigious firm and then had to find a position when she moved to Eastern City with her husband. Gail was the

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person who had wanted to be a college English professor. She was told that there would be few positions and little money in such a career and decided to go to law school. This turned out to be a good decision for her. I honestly had a rather inept sense of what it was that lawyers did though. I didn’t realize quite how much fun it could be. I mean, it really was a great way to spend your life. It was inspired to have gone to law school, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

When Gail moved to Eastern City, she was surprised at how differently women were treated in Eastern City compared to the larger city in which she had been working. She described Eastern City as still struggling in its attitudes toward women lawyers. In the larger city she had worked for a firm after her appellate clerkship and they had been very anxious to keep her. When she came here, she was offered several positions. But, as mentioned in the last chapter, she found that a number of the firms who had been very welcoming when she applied, were no longer welcoming when they found out she was female (her unisex name had prompted them to think she was male). Some of the interview offers were actually withdrawn. However, Gail did interview with seven or eight firms and got offers from two of them. She accepted the offer from one of the large firms and ended up staying there the rest of her career. Gail moved quickly through the partnership track and became an equity partner, even getting credit for the clerkship year. The large firm she accepted turned out to be a very good place for her. She went into litigation and found people in the firm very helpful. Gail said, “All these obstacles you think were going to exist, . . . they really didn’t.” Surprisingly, in view of the obstacles that other women had mentioned in terms of doing litigation, Gail found her firm very accepting. She became pregnant approximately five years after joining the firm and said, Another woman tried a bunch of cases when she was quite pregnant. I did not, but I did go into court. I argued motions and stuff like that, and it was almost like, I guess I would call it a spirit of chivalry or something, everybody was so chivalrous. . . . [T]hey’d go out of their way to be extra nice and people would be polite and . . . I’d rather be treated politely than not. I just think people should be polite and that has a lot to do with the way we practice law (in Eastern City). . . . [Y]ou just get a lot more flies with honey than with vinegar. And that doesn’t mean you don’t litigate hard, but you can certainly be polite about it.

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Gail had the firm’s first maternity leave and took four months off. She did little work from home during this period. She did, however, make very careful plans for all of her work before leaving and for having people cover for her. When she came back, she was unhappy to find that this had not happened. When I asked Gail if she had been working long hours before and during the pregnancy, she answered, There were several periods in my life where my hours were insane, but over the course of thirty-five years, it was not typical for me to work lots of nights and weekends. I would do it when needed, but it wasn’t [my norm]. I didn’t make that choice. I never made a big deal about it. I just did what I needed to do and I was really, really fast. There came a point in time when I could take stuff home and get [my child] to bed and then work on things, but I don’t recall, other than these couple of times when. . . . I worked so hard.

Gail pointed out that some of the other women in the firm did choose to work consistently long hours and other women did not, but explained why they would not be there. She felt that her combination of working fast and not making a big deal of when she would or would not be there worked well. Gail said that if she worked like a maniac, she would get sick. She explained that these periods of long hours were in terms of particular cases and she didn’t feel it was the firm imposing these hours on her. She explained, “I didn’t feel like anybody else was abusing me, these were all my cases where I had this much to do and there were just no other resources I could depend on to get the damn stuff done, so. . .” Luckily, as she pointed out, she worked fast. Gail divorced when her child was two. This meant that if any childcare problems came up, it was her problem to deal with although she had a good deal of family backup and some help from her exhusband. Through a church bulletin, she found a nanny who stayed until Gail moved to be closer to her child’s school. After she moved, she found a couple who came in and took care of much of the household work as well as afterschool childcare. This situation lasted until she remarried when her child was older. Reliable childcare was very important as Gail began to travel more, including cases where she would have to be away for a week or more. For these trips, she relied on her family backup since she would be gone so long. This worked until a case which involved her being away for three weeks without being able to come home occurred after her backup had mostly moved away and her ex-husband was going to be away. Gail said of that time,

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It was the most anxious I think I’ve ever been about work. Now you can look at me and say, ‘Oh, you’re so calm,’ and stuff like that. Believe me, I wasn’t at the time. I mean [I] was frantic. . . . I had all these backups and it always worked out. . . . but, oh, it was terrible.

Gail solved this problem but it reminded her of the precariousness of being a single parent even though her child was now older. Gail felt well treated by her firm. She explained, I don’t want to suggest that I wasn’t competent, because I surely was, but there are things that happen in your life where it’s nice to have a little help. When I was young, there were ladders there, and, there were instructions on which ladder was the best ladder to take and there were older people who were mentors and who wanted to help, but it wasn’t just me, or the women, it was everybody who was helped. It was really a much more welcoming [atmosphere], I mean, law is not making widgets. It is a series of intellectual exercises that teach you how to advocate on behalf of a client. And you can’t learn how to do that without a human being that shows you the ropes and helps you to think like a lawyer and guides you [so] that you don’t hide mistakes. . . . [E]very mistake you make is a learning opportunity and every time you lose something it’s a learning opportunity.

What Gail described was a mentoring process that she found extremely helpful. According to Kay and Wallace’s 2010 study, a young lawyer was twice as likely to be mentored if the first position was in a firm of over twenty lawyers rather than a firm of fewer than ten lawyers. So Gail was ideally situated to receive mentoring. She was also helped by having multiple mentors since Kay and Wallace found that having multiple mentors had the largest effect on extrinsic rewards (earning and perceived career success). Lawyers working in firms of fifty or more lawyers are 81% more likely than lawyers in firms of ten lawyers or fewer to have experienced multiple mentors across the course of their careers. Gail’s description shows that she was in this enviable situation in her large firm. One of the reasons for Gail’s good treatment by her firm may have been her success in bringing business to the firm. She worked on litigation where clients were not local so that meant finding her clients at national meetings. This was actually easier to arrange as a single parent than if she had had to put in a lot of hours socializing with clients outside of work hours at home. Gail found the national meetings a good way to network as well. CLE’s and a big meeting of everyone in the particular industry she dealt with were also good ways of finding clients. This worked well for a number of years until the firm changed some of

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its requirements for bonuses and some legislation was passed that reduced the need for the litigation that Gail had been doing. Her reaction to this was to reinvent herself and build up a new area of expertise and clients. As she explained, Every time I would get a leg kicked out from underneath me, I didn’t just sit and do nothing. Learn something new. Just go make yourself the expert in something, so I reinvented myself several times, you know, just learn something new, write a bunch of articles. You have to learn something new. I did all kinds of things over the years to reinvent myself.

Kay and Wallace’s mentoring study found that individuals who scored high on career salience (having law as a full-time and central occupation) and locus of control (feeling you control outcomes by your own actions) were more likely to be mentored. Gail’s emphasis on reinventing herself and finding new areas of expertise was undoubtedly attractive to potential mentors in the firm. Gail’s personality was a likely asset in being mentored and seeking this mentoring. She responded enthusiastically when asked what was good about her work, First of all, what was good about it was, I love learning new things, I love it, love it, love it. For the last five years I have been paid money to learn everything I can about [health issues]. It has been like the biggest joy of my life to go around and sit at the feet of these experts and work them up and make them into good trial experts and good experts for deposition. So I love learning new things.

For Gail, going into law was the right decision, “It was the best thing I could ever have done. And you know, it isn’t just medical stuff I like to learn, I even like learning HIPPA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act].” According to Gail, being paid and paid well for doing something she loved was a wonderful career. Working in a large firm was a good career decision for her and she was one of the highest paid women in the study. Changes in how law is practiced now make her feel that she would not enjoy it as much. “There are all kinds of things about the way the law business has changed over thirty-five years, that have made it way less fun to practice law. It just isn’t that much fun anymore.” Much of the politeness she valued is gone. Gail feels that most firms are less supportive now and sees particular problems for young women. She stated,

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I think it’s very, very, very difficult to become a good lawyer under the circumstances that exist right now, and it probably exists both for men and for women, but women get a couple of additional rocks to put on their chest that are very hard to overcome and that’s the pregnancy and the childcare thing and the “I have to be home to let the babysitter leave, or I’m going to have to pay a fine at the daycare center.” Travel is another one. Yeah, whatever the things are, it seems like women potentially and actually have more of them than men do.

Gail started out with some big advantages in terms of career. Her law degree was from a prestigious law school and she was selected for a top clerkship. Although having to relocate to a more traditional setting such as Eastern City led to rejection by some firms, she still found an excellent position and moved up rapidly. Her firm seems to have been very supportive and she benefited from the mentoring available. Certainly her boundless enthusiasm and willingness to take on new areas in the law were important influences in her successful career. Although being a single mother with a young child imposed some costs, she managed to rise rapidly in her firm, enjoy her work, and be financially very successful. Another very successful woman who shared some of Gail’s characteristics was Margaret who ended up in a corporate setting for much of her career. Margaret

Margaret is the last of the modern group to be described and is a very successful woman who worked in a corporate setting for much of her career. She had chosen law school because law seemed closest to her interests. Margaret was awarded a full scholarship to law school and would not have been able to attend without it, since her family had little money. She had also gone through undergraduate school on loans and scholarships and part-time jobs. She did well in law school, finishing in the top third of her class. After law school, Margaret ended up in Washington, D.C. in the legislative department, a division of a government legal department. As mentioned earlier, she became unenthusiastic when she realized that Washington was still very traditional in gender expectations. Margaret got herself transferred to the litigation division because she felt that she could learn bankruptcy law there. Since she wasn’t sure she and her husband would stay in Washington, D.C., she wanted to learn a skill that she could take with her. Instead, she ended up handling discrimination cases. Margaret had not wanted to do that at first because she felt it was where “they would put a woman” versus the bankruptcy skill she could carry with her. But

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she took the first case and won it. More flooded in, and she became the expert. Margaret ended up really enjoying these kinds of cases and, when a position as an employment lawyer with a corporation came up, she applied and got it. In this position she was dealing with strong unions, a very demanding boss, and routinely putting in twelve-hour days. She said, “That’s where I learned how to be a lawyer. Great outside counsel who helped me a lot, and that was really exciting.” At this point, Margaret and her husband decided to move back to Eastern City. Although she could have stayed at her position with the corporation, she realized that her boss there would have wanted her in Washington much of the time. Instead she found that the corporation where she had done her internship while in law school had a position open for an employment lawyer. Margaret liked the people in the corporation and felt as if she was coming back to a nice company and a slower pace than in her previous position. One of the good things about her new job was that every major decision had something to do with employees and that meant that she had a lot of contact with the vice chairman and the chairman. It was a huge advantage because, as Margaret explained, “They saw what I could do immediately and I worked with all the department heads, and they ultimately became the new chairmen and CEO’s . . . so it was really an amazing opportunity.” This visibility was invaluable as Margaret progressed within the corporation. As a result of new legislation that was passed, Margaret took on new responsibilities working with the community. Her position kept expanding as further legislation affecting corporations within her industry brought responsibilities in new areas. As her company changed, she was asked to start a new department. She explained, “You never say no, you say ‘Of course!’” The outcome of this was another step upward, “a huge promotion for me.” The slower pace of the new position vanished as Margaret took on more and more responsibilities including managing another department. After seven years of this, she was asked to take on three more departments and agreed. She continued to be promoted within the corporation as she took on new areas of responsibility. During this time, a number of things had happened in her personal life as well. Margaret wanted to take six months off when she and her husband adopted a baby. Margaret had explained to her boss that she would not be able to work five days a week and had offered to train someone else before she left. Her boss’s reaction was that they would prefer to keep her, even if she worked fewer days. Margaret continued to carry her full work load while being in the office three half days a week.

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She did much of her work at home and on the phone. Her boss said that she would still get her previous full-time salary since he knew she would get it all done. Margaret did this for two years and then began to increase her time in the office as her child increased his time in preschool and then school. Margaret was divorced by the time her child was eight so, just as Harriet and Gail had done, she balanced career and single motherhood. In Margaret’s case, she also worked full-time through two serious illnesses. In analyzing Margaret’s ability to keep all of this going, several key strategies are apparent. She was very bright, as evidenced by her law school record. She worked very hard. She worked very efficiently. She never said no to new responsibilities. By the time Margaret was juggling single parenthood, her employer knew she would always get her work done. Also, she built a very stable support system at home by hiring two women who stayed for over twenty years. Establishing a stable childcare routine was an important support for Margaret. Those women who did not find a lasting child care person or persons found it much harder to put in the career time. Even when Margaret decided that she wanted to work part-time with her newly adopted child, the reputation and relationships she had built allowed her to keep her position. She had established a routine where “everything got done” which allowed people to count on her. Clearly her boss valued her enough to want not to lose her. For many women, this was not an option. Several women in the study found that their employers were not willing to allow part-time work for any period of time even though they had established good reputations in their place of employment. Margaret felt in many ways that she became more efficient by working at home. By the time she was back in the office full-time, she was still able to leave early to pick her child up from school. When she took on a new role, her boss said that she needed to give up leaving early. By this time, thanks to the support system and her child’s longer school hours, Margaret was able to do this. But she said, Sometimes I would sit at meetings at 6 p.m. and it was clear to me that these guys. . . . didn’t want to go home. And I would just say to them, “I’m sorry, I have to go home,” and I’d leave. And I always thought that this would hurt my career. In fact, I think they respected me for it. Because they kept giving me more to do.

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Margaret did go in on weekends when her child was at Sunday school or other times when her child was involved in an activity. Margaret said, “If you want to get it done, you get it done.” Margaret continued to take on new responsibilities for the corporation and has now moved into managing a particular area of the corporation which takes her away from practicing law but allows her to do work very suited to her interests. As she says, “It’s my reward.” She sees the goals of her new work as helping the community, something she has been involved with since her early days with the corporation. Margaret is very satisfied with this new position. When I asked if there was anything she would have changed in her career, her response was, There are certainly things that happened along the way that were not the way I wanted them to happen, but you’re in a big company and you have to learn along the way. You have to learn the politics; you have to learn everything.

Certainly the outcome has been very positive for Margaret. But it has not been an entirely rosy picture. As she pointed out, I’ve had lots of battles along the way, and it’s always been interesting to me that I’m short and I speak softly, I really hardly ever raise my voice. . . . I could tell when I’d walk into a meeting, they’d think, “Oh this is going to be easy, I’ll just run roughshod over her.” They learned pretty quickly, they weren’t going to do that. But you had to fight a lot of battles. In some ways, it gives you an advantage, because they drop their guard, they underrate you. But you have to learn and then you have to really be able to stand your ground and not be afraid to do that. It’s more of an art than a science. [You have to learn] which battles and when you fight the battles and how you fight the battles and how you get the ear of the people at the top and make sure that your position is protected. You have to do that. It’s a big company. You know there are lots of people who want good jobs, who want your job and so it’s [not always easy].

In giving advice to young law students, Margaret says to them, Your career is going to go in ways that you never anticipated. And sometimes the best way is not the way you planned and so you have to be open to opportunities. You have to really be able to seize opportunities and not be afraid to change courses.

Margaret had planned to go into private practice but ended up first in Washington, D.C. in a federal agency, then in a corporate setting in

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D.C., and then in Eastern City in the corporation where she has spent much of her career. She could not have anticipated her present position or many of the steps in between. For Margaret, the career decision points are not as obvious as for some of the other women in the chapter. The first position for her led to the desire to learn a particular legal skill, bankruptcy; instead she became an employment lawyer, which led to her next position with a corporation. Moving back to Eastern City and taking a position with the corporation she had worked for during a law school summer led her to her present position within that corporation through the many intervening positions. The clearest guide to how she made the career decisions within the corporation was her statement, “You never turn down new responsibilities.” She also benefited from coming in as an employment lawyer since it meant lots of exposure to the various department heads who ended up being the new Chairmen and CEO’s. The combination of people at the top getting to know her, to know how well and how responsibly she did things and her willingness always to take on new areas has made her very successful. Discussion

These eight narratives have given us a picture of very distinct individuals and the choices they faced. While they cannot be seen as showing every woman’s choices and situation, they do answer some of our earlier questions. This chapter has shown us eight women, who graduated in different years, come from different class backgrounds, have ended up in different placements, and have attained different levels of success. One of the commonalities was that all eight women spent most of their life after law school performing some kind of legal work. They might have taken off some time from full-time work but all had careers spanning at least twenty years. This would be true for most of the other fifty-seven women, too. Only a few of the women practiced for a short time or left the practice of law. Thus the answer to the question “Why are you going to law school?” that a number of the women were asked in law school was simply “To have a career in law.” Although some of these eight women and the other fifty-seven met with some skepticism and derision, they were not derailed by it. Most went on to have satisfying legal careers. The second question was what factors were important in building a career. The first factor was performing well in law school. Although high class rank had little payoff for the women in the Pioneer group, it had a definite payoff for women in the other two groups. It led to prestigious clerkships and positions with big firms and corporations. It

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continued to define the women for years afterwards, as demonstrated by Rebecca’s lament that people still want to know how you did in law school when you are applying for employment years later. A second factor was performing well in each position. A number of the women found that colleagues or employers or faculty members suggested them to others for positions or recruited them for positions with themselves. Impressing people with your competency was not just helpful in the present position but often led to new, better positions. This often went with the fact that women had not been in these positions before, so the uneasiness about putting them in the position was often eased by a personal recommendation. This can be seen particularly with Donna, who built a reputation in an area where women were rare and was often suggested for her next position by those who had been exposed to her good work. Beth is also a good example of this, as her growing reputation led to cases in new areas of the law instead of being restricted to the personal injury cases with which the firm had started. For Margaret, the favorable impression she made on those who were to become the big decision-makers in the corporation gave her many new opportunities. A third factor was the connections that the women were able to bring to the table. Whether these were law school connections such as the ones that led Catherine to several of her positions, the connections formed through national meetings that brought much of her business to Gail, or the connections that Harriet had with people of similar values that led to several of her positions, connections often made the difference in finding the position one wanted. Several of the eight women spoke of being without connections and the toll that this exacted when searching for a position. Connections were particularly helpful when they were supported by the second factor, good job performance. A fourth factor, less under the woman’s control, was timing. Several women benefited from the desire of employers to hire the first woman in a particular post. This applied in Donna’s case when she ended up on the fact-finding panel and again when she was selected for the opportunity in Washington. Faye also benefited in terms of being appointed to a court that was concerned with diversity. Gail and a number of others in the Modern group benefited from the change that had come about in hiring by at least some of the big firms. The changing attitudes towards women benefited a number of women in the Transition and Modern groups but this was sometimes a very temporary benefit. For example, it was better to be a little earlier on the market for big firms and corporations, to graduate in 1973 rather than 1975, since the “one woman” rule was mentioned a number of times. When looking for a

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position, one might find that big firms and corporations had their one woman and did not need any more, thank you. The fifth factor was the effect of marriage and children. Only one of the eight women was unmarried and childless. This was in line with the statistic that 80% of the women were married and all but four of those had children. The impact of this factor differed depending not only on the presence or absence of children but also on the attitudes of the woman toward family and career. Most felt they gave their families priority, but this took different forms. Harriet felt that, as a single parent, she needed to be there each night. Others, such as Gail, felt that they needed to travel for their careers but either had or built support systems for their absences. Margaret found unexpected flexibility from her employer when she suggested leaving to take care of her newly adopted child. Others, like Gail, felt that it was best not to say too much about needing to be away. Some, like Donna, felt that sometimes family was sacrificed to career and sometimes career was sacrificed to family. Donna mentioned the guilt that she occasionally felt. This probably could have been echoed by each of the women in terms of the very demanding way that mothering is defined in our society. For Beth, it was hard to tell where family began and the work ended in terms of her husband’s expectations for a legal partner. Unfortunately, this did not carry over into the home where it was her responsibility, which meant a very heavy load on her. Faye was lucky in having a lot of child care support by living near family, while others found their support systems melting away as family moved or aged. Several women, especially Harriet, mentioned the needs of family other than husband and children and how this might impact their responsibilities. These five factors were important in how well the women’s careers progressed. Of much less importance was the first position held, something that is often thought to be critical. A good first position usually but not always meant a step up. Donna went into her husband’s practice after her clerkship. This did not work out that well since they were now splitting the cases that he had previously handled. She was rescued from this by being chosen for the fact-finding panel which was really the start of her very successful career. So, in this case, it was her third position that had the big impact on her career. Gail found that her first position as a law clerk on a very prestigious court helped as long as she stayed in the larger city. It did not help that much when, as part of a marital decision, she came to Eastern City and ran into the “one woman” rule. Her credentials did help when she applied to firms, but an ascribed characteristic, gender, negated some of that positive response. Although

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Margaret returned to Eastern City as part of a marital decision, she was happy to return to the corporation where she had enjoyed an internship before going to Washington. Her first position in Washington, D.C. turned out to be disappointing and it was her second position in Washington that really shaped her career as an employment lawyer. Rebecca failed to find a position of the kind she had hoped for and became a sole practitioner, a career decision that has not been very rewarding financially. So the first position may have had an impact but it is the performance and the career decisions after that first position that seemed to be more decisive for many of the women in the study. Generally the important choice points were when a new employment possibility came up. It could have been as a result of the woman’s own actions such as sending out applications or spreading the word that she was looking, or it could have come out of the blue, as when a woman was suggested for a position without having made any effort to secure it. Donna was the best example of this although Margaret also kept being asked to take on new responsibilities leading to promotions and changes in title and area. Sometimes the lines were a little more blurred, as when Faye found out that a vacancy for Judge would be occurring and she had to decide whether to run for it. Unexpected success could also present a woman with a choice point, as with Catherine and her discrimination case. Gail kept reinventing herself and becoming an expert in a new area as areas of litigation flourished and wilted. For some of the women, new possibilities came up as a result of their gender. These decision points were sometimes confusing and difficult because they involved more than just “Will this be good for my career?” In some cases the decision required sacrifice. Faye returned home to practice with her husband although she very much enjoyed her litigation position in Eastern City. Donna returned home to be with her husband when the last child left home even though she loved the Washington position. Beth got to teach a course but sacrificed a night’s sleep each week. Generally but not always the decision was made to take the new position, try the new area, or invest in the new learning or task. Donna did take the Washington position for five years, Faye did run for public office, Gail did keep developing new areas. These were competitive, high-achieving women. They would not have had these choices if they were not already demonstrating competence and high quality work. In most cases they were not likely to turn these opportunities down. The eight women achieved different levels of prominence and income. Most of them did quite well. Gail found that being in a big firm paid off in terms of income and also in interesting and exciting work.

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Beth did well in a small firm setting, steadily building her reputation and taking on important and complex cases. Donna impressed faculty enough in law school to be recommended later for the position that led to a high level career. Faye became a prominent judge. Margaret ended up in a very high level corporate position, well paid and respected. Harriet and Catherine, who put more limits on the priority they would give work, still ended up with long careers, interesting work, and earnings greater than they would have had in most other careers. They worked in ways that fit their concerns about family even though this curtailed their earnings. Both ended up feeling that this had been a good bargain. Rebecca, the sole practitioner, did not do as well financially but felt she practiced ethically and had good relationships with her clients. Overall, the eight women followed their priorities, were able to take advantage of opportunities, and generally felt happy with the outcome. Conclusion

Chapter Four looks at eight women’s careers. Two are from the Pioneer group, two from the Transition group and four from the Modern group. They were chosen to show a variety of placements. Almost all of the women in the study practiced for at least twenty years and these eight did as well. The main question was what was important in building a career. Doing well in law school, performing well on the job, the connections one had before and developed over time, the timing or context of one’s career and the effect of marriage and children were the major factors in building the career. The impact of the first job was not as great as anticipated. Some women were able to overcome a bad first position and other women did not find that a good first position assured success in the career. The Pioneer group had the greatest difficulty in finding good first positions. They also found it hard to move into more profitable settings. Decisions and choice points were also a focus of the study. Generally a new opportunity presented a choice point. These differed in terms of being sought or appearing without the woman having to make an effort (e.g., the woman had been recommended by someone). These were often difficult decisions, sometimes requiring a sacrifice of family time or togetherness. In some cases, the woman had to live at a distance from her family. Other choices were determined by family needs or problems. The eight women illustrated the process and outcome of career building and show the rewards and difficulties of their careers with their individual talents and contexts as part of that process.

5 Was Law a Good Choice?

Oh, yes, I’ve enjoyed it, not only professionally, but also because it’s something that gives you a way of thinking, that helps in anything you do, in organization, in realizing what’s up. People can’t put anything over on you because you really know what the law is.—Catherine, Pioneer group I was 40 years old when I graduated from law school. I really have been so blessed, having made this decision to do this and the way it worked for me. I think that luck was a tremendous part of what happened in my life. All I ever wanted was to be financially independent and not to have to worry about banging on a typewriter for the rest of my life. That all worked out for me.—Diane, Transition group I’d say on the whole, yes, because I really like it. I really enjoy what I do. I think, in terms of my own personal life, it probably wasn’t [a good choice] because it’s taken up a huge chunk of my [life]. It’s really been a huge chunk of me, probably larger than it should have been. Potentially, if I’d gone into teaching, I think it would have been enjoyable, but certainly not as overwhelming as this has been. —Teresa, Modern group

The comments above give us a taste of the differences among women who would all say that going into law was a good choice. The first woman emphasizes the skills she has learned and the second emphasizes the financial security she has gained. Both are very positive about their choice of law. The third woman gives a more mixed answer and mentions some of the personal disadvantages of this career choice. This chapter looks first at how the women in the study did as far as income and whether they would have been seen as successful in the Eastern City legal community. The chapter then examines some alternate definitions of success drawing on the work of O’DonovanPolten (2001) and compares these to the answers of the three groups in the study to the questions of expectations, achievements, and whether 105

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law was a good choice for them. The answers to these questions will also show how satisfied or dissatisfied these women are. Finally, the literature on lawyer satisfaction and the paradox of the contented female lawyer provides more context for the conclusions about the women in this study. When women were asked if law had been a good decision for them, most felt that it had. But when looking at how successful they were in terms of income, the picture becomes more complicated. What were the incomes of our participants? How would our group of women be categorized by other members of the Eastern City legal community? Would they have been seen as successful? TABLE 5.1: Incomes of Study Participants INCOME

PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN