Book Review

Beginning with women's efforts to enter the practice of law in the 1860s, this engaging history of women lawyers' professional and private lives ends in the 1930s when, representing 2.4 percent of the legal profession, they had achieved access to education, state bars and the federal bar, and judgeships at both levels. Historian Virginia Drachman's previous study of American women physicians has provided a perspective that enables her to identify women's unique experiences in penetrating the legal profession, where they faced a much tougher challenge than did women in other professions. The law itself—created and interpreted by men—denied women such fundamental privileges of citizenship as the right to vote, which in turn served as a basis for women's exclusion from the occupation. Moreover, in contrast to the female medical schools and women's hospitals that enabled many women to practice medicine in the nineteenth century, law schools, bar associations, and courts were under the exclusive control of men.	1
Drachman also finds lawyers unique among professional women in the extent to which they linked their efforts to practice law to the campaign for woman suffrage. She describes a women lawyers movement, a much smaller version of the suffrage movement but similar in their common ideas about reform, advocacy of equal citizenship, efforts at local and national organization, exposure of and litigation against sex discrimination, and above all in their shared goal of winning a public, equal role for women independent of their family relationships.	2
Beginning in 1869 in Iowa, women won the right to practice law state by state either by court decision or by legislative action until 1923 when Delaware became the last to admit women to the bar. Drachman deftly analyzes the arguments on both sides, posing a "jurisprudence of separate spheres" against a "jurisprudence of integration," which she claims was dominant by 1900. She provides brief, lively biographies of the indomitable women who felled barriers to the practice of law as well as to admission into law schools. In both cases, women opened these doors sooner and more easily in western states and territories than in the East and South, with the most prestigious law schools resisting women the longest (Harvard did not admit women until 1950).	3
Women's entrance into the legal profession coincided with the growth of new law schools, and Drachman provides enlightening detail about women's legal education. Up to 1940, New York University trained the most female students, as part of its commitment to enrolling a diverse student body, to offering evening classes, and to providing a separate women's law class to those who preferred single-sex education and who typically went on to earn LL.B. degrees from the regular law school. Second only to New York University in preparing women for legal careers after 1900 were two women's schools, the Washington College of Law, founded by two women in 1898, and Portia Law School, founded in Boston by a male lawyer in 1908. Stressing the importance of the opportunity these women's schools provided for women across ethnic and economic lines and the success of many of the graduates, Drachman notes that they nonetheless practiced racial discrimination and had lower academic standards than most of the mainstream law schools.	4
Drachman uses the concept of "double consciousness" to discuss the conflict women lawyers experienced between the culture and values of their gender and those of their male-defined profession. While some women asserted that members of their sex brought particular, feminine, characteristics that would improve the practice of law, others insisted on acknowledging no distinctions between male and female lawyers, emphasizing professional identity over femininity. Yet they could not escape the impact of their gendered personal lives on their professional careers, an issue that Drachman examines in considerable detail. While the majority of women lawyers remained single, substantial numbers of them married, and those who wed lawyers found it easiest to combine marriage with a career.	5
Sisters in Law is strongest in its first six chapters, which take the reader up to the 1910s. Thereafter, while the book continues to explore the themes of legal education, law practice, "double consciousness," marriage-career conflicts, and differences between white and black women lawyers, its focus becomes weaker and its content more source driven and more about what women lawyers thought than what they did. The book provides valuable statistical data in the text as well as in an extensive appendix, but its utility is sometimes compromised by a failure to compare women with men. For example, we learn that a majority of women conducted general office practices, but we do not know how many men did so. Drachman informs readers that 15 percent of the women listed in Martindale-Hubbell received a ranking, but we are unable to compare that with the proportion of men so ranked.	6
Drachman's strategy of concluding the book with a second-to-last chapter on women lawyers successes and a final one on the limited nature of their gains gives the book a schizophrenic cast and tends to exaggerate their actual achievements. The penultimate chapter claims that an elite few "reached the very top of the professional hierarchy" and "were also true partners with their husbands" (214). Yet even these elite women fell short of the very highest positions in the federal court system, the American Bar Association, or the leading law schools. In the chapter on successes Drachman argues that lawyer Madeleine Doty and Roger Baldwin had an "ideal companionate marriage" (213); yet in the final chapter we learn that the marriage ended in divorce. Combining analysis of the achievements with the limitations would have left readers with a more integrated understanding of women's status within the legal profession. Drachman concludes her study with the 1930s, because what women had achieved in the legal profession by then changed little until the next big upheaval in the 1970s.	7
Susan M. Hartmann Ohio State University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.