case in the United States Supreme Court in 1873. Justice Bradley had rejected Myra Bradwell’s application on the basis that The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman…. The harmony [of family life] is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband…. Clearly, the fact that Bradwell was an American precedent that it was more than thirty years old – and that French was unmarried – did not persuade the New Brunswick court to distinguish this US decision, issues that arguably reveal the ideology of (male) professionalism. Moreover, a decade later, Justice Saint-Pierre similarly rejected Annie Macdonald Langstaff’s application for admission to the bar in Quebec in 1915. Noting the exceptional contributions being made by women to World War I, he nonetheless suggested that to admit a woman to the bar: … that is to say, as a person who pleads cases at the bar before judges or juries in open court and in the presence of the public, would be nothing short of a direct infringement upon public order and a manifest violation of the law of good morals and public decency. Yet, in spite of this prevalent ideology about male professionalism, some women did succeed in gaining admission to the bar, often as a result of statutes enacted by male legislators. How did these first women lawyers respond to their admission to the legal professions? One American response is particularly telling, in my view. In her letter to other women lawyers in the United States in 1887, Lelia Robinson (a member of the bar in Boston, Massachusetts) stated bluntly: Do not take sex into the practice. Don’t be ‘lady lawyers.’ Simply be lawyers, and recognize no distinction – no existence of any distinction between yourselves and other members of the bar. Such advice suggests that early women lawyers sought to blend in with the traditional ideology of law as a ‘gentleman’s profession,’ ignoring their female gender in the hope that they could achieve acceptance as
for such aspirations on the part of individual women often remain a puzzle. In relation to France, for example, James Albisetti concluded that ‘the best explanation for the opening of the French bar to women was that it served the interests of one person, Jeanne Chauvin.’ But why did Chauvin want to become an avocat? And for the women who never succeeded in gaining admission to the bar, how did they experience failure and rejection? Even for those who succeeded in becoming members of the legal professions, were their public expressions about equality as ‘lawyers’ (ungendered) different from their ‘private sorrows’ when they experienced exclusion, discrimination and unequal treatment because of their gender? Yet, while ‘we all want stories,’ the answers to these questions may be elusive: as Paula Backscheider argued, while ‘the great questions of biography are the essential questions about human experience in the world,’ biographers must often engage ‘with the “puzzles” that remain unsolved.’ Moreover, telling the stories of the first women lawyers presents challenges because they are women. As Jill Ker Conway explained, biographies of men have traditionally adopted the ‘quest plot’: ‘the story of the epic hero in classical antiquity … [whose] achievement comes about through his own agency, and [whose] successful rite of passage leaves him master of his fortunes.’ By contrast, even when women’s access to education and the professions ‘provided a new social territory’ in the 19th century, Ker Conway argued that women’s societal power remained somewhat muted and that they tended to veil their ambitions and successes: Like the frontiers-women silent about their physical strength and courage, pioneer women professionals were silent about their ambitions and recounted their lives as though their successes just happened to them, rather like the soprano’s chance meeting with the tenor in the first act of an opera. So the woman professional, actually a new and potentially revolutionary social type, told her story as a … romance…. What are we to make of such silences? Ker Conway’s emphasis on silences in women’s biographies focused on how they explained their success as ‘just happening.’ Yet, as Judith Woolf argued, ‘Silence can simply be omission, but it can also be a powerful unspoken presence in the text.’ Indeed, such ‘silences’ often seem to be present but invisible in
Women and the Professions in Early Twentieth Century Britain Professor Pat Thane, Institute of Contemporary British History, King’s College London This paper is designed to briefly survey the background to the entry of women to the legal profession in Britain in 1919 and their experiences in the early years. By the early nineteenth century women had always been excluded from the professions in Britain. From the middle of the century some of them began to demand access to equal education with males as both desirable in itself and the route to independent careers. Secondary education for girls- private high schools providing high quality education potentially fitting them for access to university or other further training - expanded through the second half of the century and access to universities slowly expanded also, initially in female-only institutions. In the 1840s two university colleges were founded for women in London, Bedford and Westfield Colleges. In 1873 the first women’s college was founded in Oxford or Cambridge, Girton College. Emily Davies who founded Girton was very explicit that she believed that females and males should have identical education and career opportunities. By 1919 there were two women’s colleges in Cambridge, four in Oxford. Women were allowed to study many subjects, to attend lectures and take exams, but not actually to receive degrees or appointments to academic posts from these august institution, until 1920 in Oxford, in Cambridge not until 1948. Not until the nineteen seventies, following the Sex Discrimination Act, 1975, did Oxbridge colleges begin to be co-educational. In 1878 University College London became the first co-educational institution, admitting women to most of its courses and to degrees, though not to medicine until 1917. Through the remainder of the century more universities were founded and most admitted women, though not always to all courses. By 1900 women were 16 per cent of all
most distasteful to him, observed 'the current development of events have plainly so proceeded to produce, whether we wish it or whether we do not wish it, a complete revolution in the position of women'. Calling Time at the Bar: Helena Normanton Dr. Judith Bourne, Barrister (non-practising), LL.B (Hons), LL.M, Ph.D, SFHEA, Lecturer St. Mary’s University, Twickenham. “…only exceptional women will be admitted.” This was written by Holford Knight in 1913. Knight was a barrister and an MP, but most importantly a leading proponent of women’s admission to the bar. Did he write this to placate opponents to women’s entry to the bar or did he genuinely mean it? And if he did mean it, what exactly did it mean? Were only exceptional men practising as barristers in 1913? Knight proposed motions to the General Council of the Bar’s AGM asking for women to be admitted to the bar, and on each occasion was overwhelmingly rejected. If we take his words at face value we can see that even supporters of women’s entry were of the opinion that women were not up to the job; his statement is loaded with prejudice and pre-conceived ideas about women. Those prejudices and pre-conceptions remain today as can be seen in recent newspaper headlines: “Equal Pay for Men and Women Lawyers forecast for 2021” 16 June 2015 Solicitors Journal (women should reach pay parity by 2021 – the gap is shrinking by 4% each year). “Female Lawyers Paid Significantly Less than Male Counterparts” 31 July 2015 Herald Scotland “O’Loan: ‘Unacceptable’ Lack of Senior Women Judges” 24 August 2015 The Irish News