Abstract
This paper initially examines the historical precedents established by some of the first women who entered the “gentleman’s profession” of law in different jurisdictions, as well as the biographical patterns that shaped some women’s ambitions to enter the legal professions. The paper then uses feminist methods and theories to interpret “puzzles that remain unsolved” about early women lawyers, focusing especially on two issues. One puzzle is the repeated claims on the part of many of these early women lawyers that they were “lawyers”, and not “women lawyers”, even as they experienced exclusionary practices and discrimination on the part of male lawyers and judges—a puzzle that suggests how professional culture required women lawyers to conform to existing patterns in order to succeed. A second puzzle relates to the public voices of early women lawyers, which tended to suppress disappointments, difficulties and discriminatory practices. In this context, feminist theories suggest a need to be attentive to the “silences” in women’s stories, including the stories of the lives of early women lawyers. Moreover, these insights may have continuing relevance for contemporary women lawyers because it is at least arguable that, while there have been changes in women’s experiences, there has been very little transformation in their work status in relation to men.
Highlights
Feminist Insights about Early Women LawyersMethods and Theories [F]eminist objectives emphasize understanding rather than controlling the material or information generated and conceptualize the interpretive task as one of opening rather than closure...[T]he problematic for feminists resides...in the fundamental concepts underlying the framing of questions...([1], pp. 170–71)
This paper initially examines the historical precedents established by some of the first women who entered the “gentleman’s profession” of law in different jurisdictions, as well as the biographical patterns that shaped some women’s ambitions to enter the legal professions
Barbara Babcock’s assertion that stories of nineteenth-century women lawyers revealed “a self-conscious feminist in virtually every early woman lawyer” risks interpreting their lives from a modern perspective, and because the word “feminism” may not have entered the English language until almost the turn of the twentieth century: see ([2], p. 119)
Summary
Methods and Theories [F]eminist objectives emphasize understanding rather than controlling the material or information generated and conceptualize the interpretive task as one of opening rather than closure...[T]he problematic for feminists resides...in the fundamental concepts underlying the framing of questions...([1], pp. 170–71). Geiger’s comments about feminist research methods have particular resonance for my efforts to study the experiences of early women lawyers, and to interpret the significance of their legal precedents and life patterns in the context of their individual stories.. Geiger’s comments about feminist research methods have particular resonance for my efforts to study the experiences of early women lawyers, and to interpret the significance of their legal precedents and life patterns in the context of their individual stories.1 Her comments suggest how a careful assessment of available evidence is necessary. Laws 2016, 5, 39 to fully understand the specific challenges and historical constraints faced by early women lawyers, recognizing that their opportunities for professional legal work occurred in contexts very different from those experienced by women lawyers in more recent decades While their stories often reveal important relationships between broader social structures and women’s agency, they suggest a need to attend to nuances in women’s differing approaches to their own understanding of their lives. The paper engages with Berenice Fisher’s challenge that feminist stories must provide a “radical social analysis that shows the objective constraints under which individual women...achieved what they have achieved, as well as how [they were] able to cope with, test, or challenge those constraints” ([10], p. 111)
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