ABSTRACT
Pearl M. Hart practiced law in Chicago from 1914 to 1975 as an advocate for children, women, immigrants, and gay men and lesbians. One of the first female attorneys in the city to specialize in criminal law, she was remarkable for her commanding physical and intellectual presence. The size of her five-feet, eleven-and-a-halfinch and 200-pound frame was surpassed only by her generosity of spirit. Journalist I. F. Stone describe her affectionately as a “big benevolent Brunnhilde of a woman, six feet tall with gray hair, grandmotherly expression, and one of those round unmistakable Russian Jewish faces” who was “famous throughout the Midwest for a lifetime of devotion to the least lucrative and most oppressed kind of clients” (Stone, 1953, p. 31). Hart’s direct involvement with one of these groups, gay and lesbians, did not emerge until the final two decades of her life, although she early on had defended gay men.
