Toward Equality
(1968)
For a woman who wanted to become an American lawyer, the time before 1968 was a time of inequality. If you entered Harvard Law School before 1950, for example, you were male. Although some American law schools had admitted a trickle of women for decades, prior to 1950 Harvard practiced perfect discrimination: no women need apply.
By 1967, the proportion of women in the nation’s law schools had reached only about 5 percent. 1968 changed American law. The U.S. government announced plans to take away men’s draft exemptions for attending law school. Harvard feared the worst. Testifying before Congress to oppose the change, President Nathan Pusey of Harvard predicted that his law school’s entering class of 540 would be “reduced by close to a half.” Harvard Law might stay full only by compromising on “quality or something.” Moments later, Congressman John Erlenborn tried to help Harvard’s president spell out that compromise. Graduate programs like Harvard’s, the congressman said, seemed pushed toward “a policy of admitting women, the halt, and the lame.”
To that list, Harvard’s president added “the foreign born.” The congressman repeated: “And the foreign.” Half of Harvard Law would need filling, they seemed to predict with a sniff of xenophobia, by women and others they viewed as outsiders.
The prediction to Congress proved partly true. Low on men, law schools opened the gates of the law to women. In 1968, the number of women entering American law schools jumped by 50 percent. Within a decade, the number of women entering law schools increased 1,000 percent, from fewer than 1,200 in 1967 to almost 12,000 in 1977. In 2001, law schools admitted 22,000 women, more than 49 percent of all entering law students. Women made the fastest advance in the history of America’s elite professions.
As women entered the law, the law resisted. Judges would not hire women. Law firms asserted a right to discriminate against women. Judges permitted discrimination against pregnant women. Courts viewed workplace harassment as, one judge said, “a game played by the male superiors.”
Young women lawyers, armed with new degrees, began to tackle the old ways of male-shaped law. The law began to change as law sometimes does—one story at a time, one case at a time, and one precedent at a time. Women lawyers went to court to tell the stories of Paula Wiesenfeld in 1972 (constitutional discrimination), Sally Armendariz in 1972 (pregnancy discrimination), Diane Blank in 1975 (employment discrimination), Mechelle Vinson in 1978 (sexual harassment), Christy Brzonkala in 1994 (violence against women), and many other women along the way. This book, drawing on interviews with and documents from participants in those cases, tells the stories behind the cases that propelled American law toward equality. And it tells tales of resistance from on high.