ABSTRACT
These quotations reflect differing perspectives about the relative impact of ideas of “feminism” and “professionalism” for the women who first gained admission to the bar in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. For legal academic Barbara Allen Babcock, early women lawyers were closely connected to feminism, although, as she also notes, they sometimes suffered discrimination on the basis of their sex. By contrast, as feminist historian Nancy Cott suggests in the second quotation, even though these early women lawyers were often engaged in lively debates about “the woman question,” ideas about legal professionalism were becoming increasingly “magnetic” for them; indeed, her comment suggests that women lawyers had to eschew gender to pursue professional success. In the context of these divergent views, this chapter explores relationships between ideas about feminism and about professionalism in law in the experiences of some nineteenth-century women lawyers in the United States. In doing so, the chapter suggests that an assessment of how early women lawyers negotiated between the demands of gender and of professionalism requires a more nuanced account of their circumstances and their strategies. Indeed, in the efforts on the part of these early women lawyers to overcome traditional barriers and to seize opportunities, it is possible to see the beginnings of the dilemma
facing modern women lawyers: the ongoing struggle to forge a “gendered professionalism.” As part of a larger project on the history of women lawyers (Mossman 2006,
2008, forthcoming), this chapter focuses on how ideas about gender and professionalism were manifested at different points in the twentieth century, how women lawyers negotiated these challenges in their work as lawyers, the extent to which gender shaped professional identities for women lawyers, and whether, if at all, women lawyers espoused ideas about “gendered professionalism.” The chapter begins by highlighting a recurring historical debate about whether early women lawyers in the United States were “feminists,” and it returns to the theme of my first presentation to the Feminism and Legal Theory Project more than 20 years ago (Mossman 1991). At that time, I focused on feminism and judicial decision making in law to reveal how “legal method” and legal reasoning may constrain or undermine the force of feminist arguments in the legal context. Here I explore similar issues with respect to feminism in the context of
the legal profession, using two examples. One example explores some aspects of the complicated relationships between women lawyers and suffrage activists in the United States in the late-nineteenth century; although individual women lawyers sometimes actively supported the suffrage cause, their legal arguments in cases about admission to the bar often tended to undermine suffrage goals. A second example focuses on the experiences of women lawyers who took part in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893; arguably, this event reveals how women lawyers were beginning to distance themselves from other women and to create a professional identity that reflected, at least to some extent, ideas about gendered professionalism. As both these examples reveal, the question whether women lawyers in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century were feminists presents important challenges for the history of women lawyers, as well as for our contemporary legal professions (Kay 2007).
