Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers

History told through the words of one hundred groundbreaking female lawyers: “Their stories are both a window into the past and a beacon for the future.” —Virginia G. Drachman, author of Sisters in Law

In 1950, Harvard Law School began to admit women. But for those wanting to enter the profession, the terms of engagement were clear: Only a few women would be admitted each year to American law schools, and after graduation their opportunities would never equal those open to similarly qualified men. At many law schools, well into the 1970s, men told female students that they were taking a place that might be better used by a male student who would have a career, not babies.

In 2005, the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession initiated a national oral history project named Women Trailblazers in the Law: One hundred outstanding senior women lawyers—among them such famed figures as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Janet Reno, Norma Shapiro, and Catherine Roraback—were asked to give their personal and professional histories in interviews conducted by younger colleagues. The interviews, made available to the author, permit these women to be written into history in their words, words that evoke pain as well as celebration, humor, and somber reflection. These are women attorneys who, in courtrooms, classrooms, government agencies, and NGOs, have rattled the world with insistent and successful demands to reshape their profession and their society. They are women who brought nothing short of a revolution to the profession of law.

In this book, award-winning legal historian Jill Norgren curates these compelling stories, using them to describe the profound changes that began in the late 1960s and interweaving social and legal history with the women’s individual experiences.

“An inspirational story of individual successes and even more important, a historical analysis of the march toward improved gender equality in America.” ―Trial Magazine