SISTERS IN LAW

Vol. 8 No. 4 (April 1998) pp. 210-212.

SISTERS IN LAW: WOMEN LAWYERS IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY by Virginia G. Drachman. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 334 pp. Cloth $35.00. ISBN: 0674809912.

Reviewed by Beverly B. Cook, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Emeritus. E-mail: bcook [at] slonet.org.

The March 1998 celebration by Boalt Hall of their 3000+ living women graduates provides a dramatic contrast to Drachman's story of women lawyers between 1860 and 1940. More than the women law school deans and professors, state supreme court justices and corporate counsel of the 1990s, the possibility of humor proves the new legitimacy of women in law -- Joanie Caucus, Doonesbury's feminist lawyer and Boalt Hall graduate, and the ubiquitous woman on the bench in the New Yorker and National Law Journal cartoons.

The early women lawyers were objects of disdain and fear rather than humor; they worked as outsiders in a male world, watching their hats and dress, calculating their relative acceptability in office or courtroom, balancing the value of husband and children against professional opportunity.

The collection of letters of Equity Club members found in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, sparked Virginia Drachman's interest in the entry and early experiences of women lawyers. Her first book on women lawyers - WOMEN LAWYERS AND THE ORIGINS OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY IN AMERICA (1993) - plumbed those letters for the interplay of their personal and professional lives. Originally she intended to compare her lawyer subjects to women doctors, but she concluded that the situation of women lawyers was unique. The legal profession had tighter boundaries and more masculine mores than the medical profession and the very law it served separated the sexes and legitimated male dominance.

The primary contribution of SISTERS IN LAW is to the field of women's history. Drachman follows the historian's precepts of intensive archival research and careful conservative analysis. She used the papers of prominent women lawyers located at UCLA, Harvard, Radcliffe, Smith, Syracuse, NYU, and American and searched the women's and mainstream law journals, court opinions, statutes, and biographical directories of the period. Her central questions are: to what extent were women lawyers integrated into the legal profession by 1940? What were the barriers to integration? She finds her answers in the individual stories reported in the letters and papers and articles. What she offers is rich description; there is no theory that offers an explanation for her conclusion that women's place in law remained grossly unequal and that women continued to suffer from the conflict between cultural expectations for their feminine role and their personal ambitions for professional success. One might conclude from the collective story of the first American women lawyers that the next period would also bring painfully slow incremental gains. Certainly the pace of integration changed little until the feminist movement of the 1960s gave new spirit and determination to women in the law and led to dramatic new pictures of law school classes, faculties, law firms, and benches.

How does this book serve the political scientist as teacher and scholar? To the extent that post-modern political scientists are using "stories" for research and teaching, this book fits their approach. It provides background for lectures in the basic course on "Women and Law" and would be a good source for a student's term paper. Since most courses on gender and constitutional law begin with the BRADWELL case, Drachman's report on the course of that litigation and of similar cases in Massachusetts and Wisconsin fill out the stories in fascinating detail. The author provides a more thorough examination of the early women's law school experiences in the traditional schools and the short-lived women's schools and classes than can be found in the available texts that focus primarily on the more recent conditions of legal education. What the book offers most strongly, if it could be interpreted to a class by the teacher, is the sense of the personal struggles of the women who wanted professional work other than traditional school teaching and social welfare. The barriers created by the male lawyers to the elite law schools and to the courtrooms were high enough but the most painful barriers were in their minds where the cultural expectations for feminine subordination and domesticity clashed with the professional norms of aggression and career focus.

For the behavioralists the tables in the appendices provide data on the number of women lawyers by decades, on the urban locations of women in practice, on the law schools most accommodating to women, and on their specialties and marital and maternal statuses. Although useful for a broad picture of women lawyers, the sources of these statistics -- the US census, Martindale-Hubbell, and the 1939 and 1949 biographical directories -- do not suggest that they would be appropriate for testing propositions. The most interesting data comes from the questionnaires distributed in 1920 by the Bureau of Vocational Information, a private women's organization in New York City. The author reanalyzed the surviving questionnaires and provides information on women lawyers' opinions on the 19th amendment, on their opportunities in various branches of law, their reasons for dropping out of practice, and their concerns about discrimination and income. The most useful data for political scientists is the list of first women admitted to practice by state and date (from Iowa in 1869 to Delaware in 1923). The table also provides the mode of admission -- by court or statute -- with citation. The list of first women judges by state is less useful since the first positions held by women were not comparable, ranging from JP to general jurisdiction. At least one entry is not accurate, since Georgia Bullock in 1914-1916 served as "woman judge" only de facto; she served as assistant to the de jure male judge who wanted to experiment with a "woman's court." Bullock was first appointed to a police court vacancy in 1925 (the following year the police court became the Los Angeles municipal court).

With our social science emphasis on contemporary issues, the utility of the book may lie in the opportunity to make comparisons. What problems faced by women law students and practitioners before 1940 still exist? Drachman's discussions of the tensions between responsibilities to husband and children and work are pertinent. How have the problems been redefined? The current expectation of fathers to share in raising their children affects the structure of legal institutions. Where Drachman offers rich details about access to the bar and eventually access to bureaucratic positions, women's present concerns stretch to the glass ceiling. What are the new issues for women in law? The early women could think only in terms of penetrating the walls but the contemporary women are working on feminist philosophies that will change the law as an institution. The early women with few exceptions were barely surviving economically but the contemporary women have their representatives among the scholars of elite legal precincts with resources for rethinking and reshaping the law to create a new society that suits women as well as men. This is a lively book, rooted in wonderful individual cases, and worth your reading time.

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