Women in Law? A Review of Cynthia Fuchs Epstein'sWomen in Law

Abstract

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein has written a sociological account of the number, locations, occupational categories, family histories, and attitudes of some women in the law, circa 1980.' The study is useful, informative, and thought provoking, and it raises a number of larger issues that deserve our interest and that I address here. A study about women in law concerns itself with gender differences, with deviance, with professionalism and occupational and organizational behavior, and finally with law. The questions put to us in this book all turn on issues of why women are or should be in law and what difference it makes if they are. To put it another way: we are informed that the numbers of women entering legal practice has increased dramatically in the past ten years. Women constitute close to 35% of the law student population (approximately 40,000 women students) and 12% of the legal profession (approximately 62,000 women lawyers) (pp. 4, 5, 21, 53). One is tempted to ask, so what? What difference does it make that there are now many more women law students, lawyers, law professors, and judges? What difference for the profession, what difference for women, what difference for the practice of law (in terms of how law is practiced and what law is practiced), and what difference for society? There are many ways to ask these questions and to answer them, and the choice of questions and the answers supplied may tell us more about the inquirer than about the subject. For Epstein the dependent variable is women. How have women been affected by their entry into the profession? How did they come to choose a career path that is difficult, full of head winds? How have women's lives changed as they have become lawyers? How have they coped with the demands of work life, family life, and individual fulfillment? One could ask these same questions of men who have chosen the demanding rigors of the legal profession. But Epstein finds women lawyers in-