Women Lawyers and the Women's Rights Movement

he degree to which the early women lawyers were part of the more general movement for women’s rights has been a subject of discussion and debate. In reviewing Drachman’s SISTERS IN THE LAW, for instance, I argued for more emphasis on the connection between the women’s rights movement generally and the efforts of women to become lawyers. Feminist Lawyers, 50 STAN.L.REV.1689 (1998), available at WLH Website. Indeed, as to most of the first women lawyers, my research and that of my students (see Pioneer data base at the WLH Website) has revealed an active women’s rights advocate in virtually all of the women. Indeed, many, if not most, were suffragists.

Mossman, WOMEN lAWYERS, on the other hand, urges that Drachman draws too close a connection between the movement for legal and political equality and that for access to the legal profession, in particular in placing the women lawyers at the center of the women’s movement. She calls for a more nuanced assessment of the relationship, and posits that studying individual lives reveals that “women lawyers identities as professionals may have weakened the ties” between the lawyers and other activists, at 62-63.

On the need to study individuals, Mossman approvingly refers to Carol Sanger’s Curriculum Vitae (Feminae): Biography and Early American Women Lawyers, 46 STAN. L. REV. 1245 (1993) which challenges women biographers to “present and accept early women subjects on their own complex terms.” (Professor Sanger was reviewing JANE M. FRIEDMAN, AMERICA'S FIRST WOMAN LAWYER: THE BIOGRAPHY OF MYRA BRADWELL (1993). I do not disagree with this approach, indeed I applaud it and engage in it myself. But my research of individual lives reveals that any weakening of the ties between women lawyers and activist women generally happened in the twentieth century, after women had won suffrage, and it failed to change their political or professional situations as drastically as they had thought and hoped it would.

Excerpt from Feminist Lawyers

Here is a three paragraph summary of the relationship between women lawyers and the larger women's rights movement, especially that for suffrage. Babcock, Feminist Lawyers at 1702-03:

“[M]ost] women lawyers believed that the vote would almost instantly change their professional status. In 1920, the year of the federal amendment, survey responses of 190 women lawyers revealed only 12 percent who thought suffrage inconsequential to their professional efforts. Citing Drachman, Sisters at 183 (12 percent of 1, 738 total women lawyers according to the 1920 census). "Some among the optimistic majority focused on the intangible benefits of suffrage, they viewed the vote as empowering women lawyers and as therefore enhancing their status and respect. Others ...tied suffrage to their desire to run for public office or to win appointments to positions in the courts.”

“All such hopes were quickly dashed as political equality, so closely tied to jury service and women's professional advancement, had little impact on either. From these disappointments was born the first real divergence between feminism and professionalism. Professor Nancy Cott in The Grounding of Modern Feminism explains that once suffrage was achieved, women professionals put aside the special concern for women that defines feminism, and focused instead on the "neutral and meritocratic ideology" of the professions to mark their progress.” [See Nancy Cott, THE GROUNDING OF MODERN FEMINISM 1987) 233-234. Professor Cott conceptualizes the conflict between feminism and professionalism as being masked during the struggle for the vote, but always having an appeal with its "potent" promise "to judge practitioners on individual merit as persons (not as men or women) in the dispassionate search for truth and usefulness. Id., at 237.]”

“Not that women, especially women lawyers, had any real choice in the matter; they were so few, and once assimilated to the ethos of individual merit, so removed from each other. As Professor Cott observes: "Without the meritocratic pretensions of the professions women had no warrant for advancement or power within them at all." Thus did women take up "the professional credo that individual merit would be judged according to objective and verifiable standards, and clung to it "even when they saw it travestied in practice." Id., at 234.

As indicated in the passage above, this is less a serious disagreement than a matter of interpretation of a history whose particulars are still being uncovered. I don’t think the discussion has been much forwarded by the associated debate over whether the nineteenth century women lawyers can properly be called “feminists.” My view is that a woman who became a lawyer in the nineteenth century was directly challenging male supremacy and putting herself on the line to overcome it. That made her, by definition, a feminist even if the word did not come into general usage until early in the next century. See Introductory Note, supra: Feminism and Women’s Rights: Nomenclature.

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