| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Virginia G. Drachman. Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 334. $35.00.

Among the many issues confronting a female litigator in the 1880s was whether or not to wear a hat in the courtroom. Because male attorneys removed their hats when addressing the court while ladies customarily wore bonnets in public places, female attorneys were divided between following the example of their male colleagues or adhering to the proprieties of Victorian womanhood. As Virginia G. Drachman indicates in this revealing example of the difficulties facing the first generation of women lawyers, the debate over appropriate attire in the courtroom was far from frivolous. Pivoting as it did on the problem of how to be at once a lawyer and a lady, it exemplifies the equality/difference dilemma that plagued women lawyers and goes to the heart of Drachman's account of their troubled entry into the profession. Conflicted between speaking out or sitting demurely in law classes, between doing battle in court or retreating to the privacy of an office, and between satisfying professional demands and meeting the requirements of marriage and motherhood, women lawyers struggled to reconcile their professional identities with the precepts of the reigning gender system. Measured against medicine, which women could approach as "natural" healers and caregivers, and in comparison to other professions, law, Drachman argues, was "the most engendered and closed to women" (p. 2). . . .

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