Woman Lawyer

Woman Lawyer
Author: Barbara Babcock
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 624
Release: 2011-01-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 080477935X

Woman Lawyer tells the story of Clara Foltz, the first woman admitted to the California Bar. Famous in her time as a public intellectual, leader of the women's movement, and legal reformer, Foltz faced terrific prejudice and well-organized opposition to women lawyers as she tried cases in front of all-male juries, raised five children as a single mother, and stumped for political candidates. She was the first to propose the creation of a public defender to balance the public prosecutor. Woman Lawyer uncovers the legal reforms and societal contributions of a woman celebrated in her day, but lost to history until now. It casts new light on the turbulent history and politics of California in a period of phenomenal growth and highlights the interconnection of the suffragists and other movements for civil rights and legal reforms.

Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers

Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers
Author: Jill Norgren
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2020-11-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1479805998

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

The First Women Lawyers

The First Women Lawyers
Author: Mary Jane Mossman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2006-05-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1847310958

This comparative study explores the lives of some of the women who first initiated challenges to male exclusivity in the legal professions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their challenges took place at a time of considerable optimism about progressive societal change, including new and expanding opportunities for women, as well as a variety of proposals for reforming law, legal education, and standards of legal professionalism. By situating women's claims for admission to the bar within this reformist context in different jurisdictions, the study examines the intersection of historical ideas about gender and about legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. In exploring these systemic issues, the study also provides detailed examinations of the lives of some of the first women lawyers in six jurisdictions: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, India, and western Europe. In exploring how individual women adopted different legal arguments in litigated cases, or devised particular strategies to overcome barriers to professional work, the study assesses how shifting and contested ideas about gender and about legal professionalism shaped women's opportunities and choices, as well as both support for and opposition to their claims. As a comparative study of the first women lawyers in several different jurisdictions, the book reveals how a number of quite different women engaged with ideas of gender and legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Rebels at the Bar

Rebels at the Bar
Author: Jill Norgren
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1479835528

In Rebels at the Bar, prize-winning legal historian Jill Norgren recounts the life stories of a small group of nineteenth century women who were among the first female attorneys in the United States. Beginning in the late 1860s, these determined rebels pursued the radical ambition of entering the then all-male profession of law. They were motivated by a love of learning. They believed in fair play and equal opportunity. They desired recognition as professionals and the ability to earn a good living. Rebels at the Bar expands our understanding of both women's rights and the history of the legal profession in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the female renegades who trained in law and then, like men, fought considerable odds to create successful professional lives. In this engaging and beautifully written book, Norgren shares her subjects' faith in the art of the possible. In so doing, she ensures their place in history.

Rough Road to Justice

Rough Road to Justice
Author: Betty Trapp Chapman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2008-01-01
Genre: Sex discrimination against women
ISBN: 9781892542465

Pioneering Women Lawyers

Pioneering Women Lawyers
Author: Patricia E. Salkin
Publisher: American Bar Association
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781590319840

Albany Law School has hosted an annual Kate Stoneman Day since 1994 to celebrate the first woman admitted to the Bar in New York, who was also the first woman to attend Albany Law School. This important book shares the inspiration, advice and experiences of pioneering women in the legal profession who continue to pave the way for others. Their speeches, delivered at Kate Stoneman Day and published here, are from our leading women lawyers-many of them active members of the American Bar Association as well as judges, professors and partners in major law firms. Book jacket.

Sisters in Law

Sisters in Law
Author: Virginia G. Drachman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674006942

Ranging from the 1860s when women first sought entrance into law to the 1930s when most institutional barriers had crumbled, this book defines the contours of women's integration into the most rigidly gendered profession.

America's First Woman Lawyer

America's First Woman Lawyer
Author: Jane M. Friedman
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010-06-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1615924388

During her lifetime, Myra Bradwell (1831-1894) - America's first woman lawyer as well as publisher and editor-in-chief of a prestigious legal newspaper - did more to establish and aid the rights of women and other legally handicapped people than any other woman of her day. Her female contemporaries - Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone - are known to all. Now it is time for Myra Bradwell to assume her rightful place among women's rights leaders of the nineteenth century. With author Jane Friedman's discovery of previously unpublished letters and valuable documents, Bradwell's fascinating story can at last be told.In a 1982 opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor cited Myra Bradwell's hard-fought, successful campaign (culminating in 1869) to practice law, but few who read that opinion recognized Bradwell's name. In this work, Friedman reintroduces Bradwell, a feminist and long-term editor/publisher of the weekly Chicago Legal News. Friedman's accounts of Bradwell's fight to secure Mary Todd Lincoln's release from an asylum and her efforts on behalf of women's equality in various occupations are thoroughly absorbing, as are discussions of Bradwell's controversies concerning Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This book restores an important figure to her rightful place in American history and indicates that even an imperfect human being can be a splendid role model. Highly recommended. -Library Journal[This] biography of Myra Bradwell contributes to a new and growing interest in the history of women in the legal profession . . . Although she lost in the Superme Court in 1873, the agitation her case provoked led to important reforms, and several states, including Illinois, passed legislation allowing women to practice law . . . Friedman has uncovered some interesting letters from Susan B. Anthony to Bradwell that help to place Bradwell at the center of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement and that reveal the strained relationship between these two influential women. -American History ReviewExcellent reading for those who wish to learn more about a woman who struggled to open up the legal profession to women. -Women & Criminal Justice