Foot Soldiers of the Law

The paramount mission and destiny of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.

It was also the doctrine of the Supreme Court in 1873, when Justice Joseph Bradley wrote those words in a decision upholding the right of Illinois to deny a license to practice law to the first woman applicant, Myra Bradwell. Women, the court in effect ruled, could be barred from becoming lawyers.

Nothing dramatizes the changes that have taken place in the past 108 years more than the nomination of Sandra O'Connor to the bench where Bradley once sat. Today some 50,000 women are going beyond their "paramount mission and destiny" by pursuing careers as lawyers. They represent about 10% of the profession, and the proportion is growing: one out of three students now graduating from law school is a woman. Female attorneys are no longer considered "a bizarre thing," as Shirley Hufstedler, Secretary of Education under Jimmy Carter, recalls they Eleanor Holmes Norton were when she was one of two women graduating from Stanford University's law school in 1949 ("It was a bumper crop that year"). Nor do law firms now tell female applicants that "we just don't hire women; the secretaries might resent it," as one informed Orinda Evans, 38, now a federal district judge in Georgia, as recently as 1968. In addition, women no longer restrict themselves to the genteel specializations of real estate and probate law, as they did when former Watergate Prosecutor Jill Wine Banks finished Columbia Law School in 1968.

Yet women are still "the foot soldiers of the profession," says Eleanor Holmes Norton, former chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "You don't find many in the upper reaches of bench or bar." Recent studies have shown that women account for only 2% of the partners in the 50 largest U.S. law firms, 5% of the nation's full professors of law, and about 5% of all judges. Nor has a woman ever served as president of a state bar association or on the powerful 23-member board of governors of the American

Bar Association, though one is expected to be elected next month.

The main difficulty, most female attorneys agree, is that the boom in women law graduates has essentially come about since 1970, when women accounted for only 2.8% of the profession. Thus there has not been enough time to yield a sufficient pool of experienced practitioners. "You can't appoint women judges if you don't have a large number of women lawyers who are trained," says Carla Hills, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Ford. Until 1977, only ten women had been named to the federal bench. During the Carter Administration, partly because of the establishment of 152 new judgeships, 41 women were named. "That," says Brooksley Landau, chairman of the A.B.A. federal judiciary committee, "was a real revolution."

A key step in women's progress toward top legal posts is attaining partnership in the large, traditional law firms that dominate lucrative corporate practice and carry considerable prestige within the profession. Susan Getzendanner, 42, a former partner in the Chicago firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt, who last December became the first woman U.S. district court judge in Illinois, notes that some major law firms are currently hiring 40% to 50% women. But, she cautions, "their clients haven't changed. The business world is still male-dominated. It will be very interesting to see when women in law firms become the client controllers."

Women lawyers and judges greeted the O'Connor nomination last week with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism. "If she is superior, she will help the next generation of women," says Banks, "but she will be judged more harshly than men." As Hufstedler sees it, having a woman on the highest court has "significant symbolic importance." But she too is wary: "There can be such a thing as a token woman on the Supreme Court to avoid addressing women's issues." For most observers, the real test is whether Ronald Reagan is about to depart from his early appointments pattern by naming women to a number of other important posts. On that point, the jury is awaiting the evidence.

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