Ruth Bader Ginsburg reminds all of us how far women in the law have come. It’s good to take a look back and see how much things have improved in just a few decades; it also serves as inspiration to keep pushing forward, and to refuse to accept the status quo as “good enough.”
Ginsburg chose to give her audience a history lesson, recalling the struggles that women have endured to practice law and work as judges in the United States.
Men, she said, often argued against allowing women into law schools or state bar associations, for such nonsensical reasons as they didn’t have a bathroom for them.
Ginsburg noted, however, that women’s role in law can be traced back to ancient times when the Greeks worshipped a goddess of justice named Athena and the Book of Judges in the Bible tells of Deborah, a prophet, judge and military leader.
Yet, the first woman was not admitted into a U.S. law school until 1869. And after graduation, women found states unwilling to admit women to the bar. Even when this battle was won, the number of women going into law remained small.
Ginsburg noted the president of Harvard Law School answered a question on declining enrollment during World War II by saying, “Not as bad as we thought, we still have 75 students and we haven’t had to admit any women.”
In the 1960s, 3 percent of law students were women. My class at NYU is 45 percent, and overall women’s enrollment numbers in all schools average at or above 50 percent. Women are 23 percent of tenured law professors, and 35 percent of teaching staff. Nine women head state bar associations.
These numbers are good, and the represent huge improvements. I don’t want to rain on the parade, but it’s worth pointing out that while women are now studying law in equal numbers to men, they haven’t yet broken into the profession in nearly the same numbers — nine female heads of state bar associations is pretty good, but last time I checked there were 50 states. Likewise, 23 percent of tenured law professors is good, but when you consider that women are 50 percent of the population it doesn’t look quite so sunny. Of course, this is in large part a product of the fact that 30 years ago, women weren’t attending law schools in large numbers, and so obviously there’s a smaller pool of established female lawyers and legal academics to draw from. I’m crossing my fingers that 10 years from now, we’ll be caught up.
Via How Appealing. Thanks to Dad for the link.
I think medicine is moving in the same direction. I’m a sociologist, and well over half of sociology PhDs are awarded to women, although it’s overwhelmingly White women. The real problem is still the most elite positions–the best universities, most prestigous firms, or the highest paid positions.
I wonder how it breaks down by area of specialization. I bet you don’t see very many women corporate lawyers, but I suspect family courts and public defenders include many more women.
Ten years is a bit soon, I think. Did women start graduating law schools in proportionate numbers in the early 1970s?
136 years? Weren’t we riding around in horse-drawn carriages back then?
What is the point of this statement?
By that measure, we should be caught up. After all, the usual rule in law firms was seven years up or out, so there should be all kinds of female partners in their late 50s by now.
But there aren’t.
I worked for a woman who was absolutely batshit crazy, but she was quite smart and a good lawyer on substance (her work methods were, shall we say, highly idiosyncratic due to the batshit craziness). She’d graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School in the early 60s, and the only job she could get was as a calendar clerk, from which she had to work her way up to associate.
Sandra Day O’Connor, editor in chief of the Stanford Law Review around the same time, could only find work as a legal secretary (at William Rehnquist’s firm). That’s just unthinkable today.
One reason I don’t subscribe to the Harriet-Miers-must-be-gay rumors is that I know that women of her generation often had to choose between family and career. One of the few exceptions I knew was Batshit Crazy, and she was able to swing it because she went into practice with her husband.
It was 1923 before women could get admitted to the bar in all of the then states. It was the early 1980s before women were admitted to law schools in substantial numbers. Great progress has been made, but there are still a lot of obstacles to anything resembling parity.