Reflections on Women Lawyers: Personal experiences and history

Editors Note: On July 27, 2005, retired Jenner & Block Partner Joan M. Hall addressed the Firm's Women's Forum including women summer associates. She spoke about her personal experiences as a women lawyer as well as her insights about women lawyers in history and at Jenner & Block. Her remarks and stories about the treatment of women in law and her research on this topic are of interest to all women lawyers. These comments help us understand how far we have come and the progress that remains to be achieved by and for women lawyers.

I am really pleased to be here today, mainly because I love being in a room full of women lawyers. That's because for the first 15 years of my practice, I rarely saw another woman lawyer anywhere I went. I want to begin by telling you a story. Those of you who have been here a long time have heard this story, so you can use this time to check your BlackBerrys, but I do want to share it with the rest of you.

In 1982, I was admitted to membership in the American College of Trial Lawyers. This is a prestigious organization of trial lawyers from all parts of the country. At the time of my admission, the College had 3,600 members, of whom three were women. I was the 4th woman admitted.

When I received the plaque memorializing my admission to the American College, I was about to hang it on my office wall when something on the face of the plaque caught my eye. The plaque bore the following legend: "The Regents of the American College of Trial Lawyers hereby certify to the admission of Joan M. Hall as a Fellow of the College, these letters being the testimonial that he possesses the necessary experience, skill and integrity to qualify for this Fellowship." The president of the American College who signed my plaque was a talented trial lawyer from Little Rock, Arkansas, who happened to be a good friend of mine. My secretary prepared a photocopy of the plaque. I circled the word "he," wrote in the margin "How long, oh Lord, how long" and mailed it to my friend who had signed it.

I received a response almost instantly. He wrote back and said, "When we in the American College make somebody a Fellow, we go whole hog."

I am pleased to report that this story has a happy ending. The American College now issues different plaques to its male and female members. In fact, I am told that the plaque which I have is a collector's item, because there won't be any more like it. You are welcome to stop by my office to check out the two plaques.

I also want to tell you a little bit about my own background. I grew up in Bassett, Nebraska, a town of 800 people in the Sandhills of Nebraska. Both of my parents were schoolteachers and my mother always worked. There were 24 students in my high school class.

I graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University, a small church school in Lincoln, Nebraska where we had to be in our dorm rooms by 9:00 p.m. and there was compulsory chapel every week.

I worked my way through college by holding down two jobs: working as secretary to the head of the English department and playing the organ at a Lutheran church in Lincoln.

There are no lawyers in my family and I didn't aspire to be a lawyer when I was growing up. After college, I married a young man who was determined to become a lawyer. He suggested to me that I go to law school and I responded that I had nothing better planned. We decided to attend the Yale Law School, having made that decision on a very scientific basis. We had never seen the school (or any other law school to which we applied) but Yale gave us the most money and that was the basis for our decision.

At the time I graduated from Yale in 1965, many law firms who came to the school advised the placement office in advance not to sign up any women for interviews because they did not hire women. We accepted that and didn't make any protest.

I had a very difficult time finding a job and I was enormously grateful to Jenner & Block for going out on a limb and offering me a position.

My assigned topic today is the history of women lawyers at Jenner & Block. But before I get to that, I would like to share with you a bit of the history of women lawyers in this country.

Historically, women were excluded from participating in or controlling any aspect of the legal system. Women could not be judges, jurors or litigants. For example, the common law rule was that juries were to consist of "12 good men." There was one lone exception: when a pregnant woman faced execution, a jury of 12 women was convened to decide whether she should be executed before or after giving birth to her child. The common law view of women is well summarized in one of the early cases which describes a woman as "a vessel, a chattel and a household drudge."

For the most part, women were also precluded from attending law school or practicing law. One of the most important early decisions was Bradwell v. Illinois, in which the Illinois Supreme Court denied a woman's application for a license to practice law solely because she was female.

The Illinois Supreme Court noted the following immutable principle of English common law: "That God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply and execute the laws."

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed. The majority opinion was brief and not particularly noteworthy. But the concurring opinion by Mr. Justice Bradley is notorious and you may be familiar with it. In case you are not, I'd like to read a brief passage from his opinion because I fear that any paraphrase might lose the true flavor:

Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex unfits it for many of the occupations of civil law. The domestic sphere is that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony of interests which belong to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.

Justice Bradley continues:

The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of women and mother. This is the law of the Creator.

He does not tell us how he received this word from the Creator.

Perhaps the most offensive part of the opinion is where Justice Bradley notes that it is within the province of the legislature to decide that certain professions "shall be filled and discharged by men, and shall receive the benefit of those energies and responsibilities, and that decision and firmness which predominate in the sterner sex."

Well, Mrs. Bradwell persevered. Having first applied for admission in 1869, she was finally admitted 21 years later at the age of 59. She died four years after her admission to practice.

About 20 years after the Bradwell case, the Supreme Court did it again. The State of Virginia had a statute allowing any "person" admitted to practice in another state to practice in Virginia. The Virginia court said the word "person" of course meant "male." The Supreme Court refused to issue a write of mandamus ordering the female applicant's admission to practice.

Another interesting bit of history involves the admissions policies of the law schools. For decades many of the nation's top law schools totally excluded women. The Dean of Columbia Law School came under suffragette pressure during World War I and he responded with the prediction that if women were admitted, his school "would soon be swarming with freaks and cranks."

The Harvard Law School held out until 1950. And even then I think they acted very reluctantly. One of the women admitted to Harvard in the 1950s tells the story of being invited, along with the eight other women in her class, to Dean Griswold's home for dinner. She was very pleased with the invitation, thinking the Dean wanted to make them feel welcome. Instead, after dinner, the Dean required each woman in turn to justify why she was occupying a place in the class that could be held by a man. Not until 1972 were women admitted to all law schools approved by the A.B.A.

Now I'd like to turn to a few statistics which I hope you will find interesting. What do the statistics reveal? They reveal that not all states were as obstinate as Illinois and Virginia. The first woman was admitted to practice in the U.S. in 1869. But the progress was unbelievably slow. For example, Rhode Island did not admit women to the bar until 1920. The total percentage of women lawyers remained low and showed very small growth. In 1948, women constituted only 1.8 percent of lawyers. Twenty years later, in 1968 (which was three years after I graduated from law school), this percentage had risen only to 2.8 percent

It is easier to see the dramatic change in this area if you look only at law school admissions, not at the total number of lawyers. Then you can highlight the sudden influx of women into the legal profession. When I graduated from law school in 1965, there were seven women in my class of 165. The national average at that time was around 4 percent-that is, about 4 percent of the law students in this country were women. By 1975, that number had jumped to 23 percent. Now I think in most law schools, about 50 percent of the students are women. The change has truly been revolutionary.

Let me tell you about some other statistics which I found astounding-the statistics relating to women judges. From the founding of the republic until 1968, only one woman ever served on the U.S. Court of Appeals. Florence Allen was appointed to the Sixth Circuit by President Roosevelt in 1934 and served until her retirement in 1954. Judge Allen wrote an interesting autobiography entitled To Do Justly. She describes her election to the Court of Common Pleas in Cleveland, running on a platform of improving the criminal courts. She was particularly interested in criminal cases. Much to her chagrin, as soon as she was elected, the other judges on the court created a divorce division and announced that Judge Allen would hear all the divorce cases. I'll read you her response: "Since I was unmarried, I thought these eleven men, most of them married, were better qualified than I to carry their share of this burden." Judge Allen issued a press release saying she wouldn't accept the assignment and the other judges retreated.

When Judge Allen went on the Sixth Circuit, she described the reaction of the three male judges on that court as follows: "None of the judges favored my appointment. I am told that when it was announced one of them went to bed for two days." One of her fellow judges so strongly disapproved of her appointment at first, he would not even look at her during the working sessions of the court. But eventually, she won them over.

Women now constitute 18 percent of the federal Circuit Court judges-a fairly low number. And, of course, the number of women on the U.S. Supreme Court has just decreased by 50 percent.

Another interesting group of statistics relates to women in large law firms. When I graduated from the Yale Law School in 1965, the 20 largest law firms in Chicago had a total of five women partners and 350 male partners. In 1983, the 20 largest firms had about 1,200 partners, of whom only 43 were women. This was indeed slow progress and of those 43 women, 12 were with Jenner & Block.

For many years, women were also notably absent from the ranks of the law school professors. When the great influx of women law students began to complain about this situation, the law schools started scrambling to find women faculty members. A 1972 report indicated that while women constituted 8 percent of all law faculty members, they constituted only 2.5 percent of the full professors. Many of the nation's leading law schools, including Stanford and Columbia, did not acquire their first woman full professor until the 1970s.

As an aside, I want to share with you some remarks made by Chief Justice Burger during the oral argument of a Title VII case. In commenting on the fact that 80 percent of the people the defendant hired for its assembly line were women, the Chief Justice said:

The reason you have 80 percent women is something that I would take judicial notice of, from many years of contact with industry, that women are manually much more adept than men and they do this kind of work better than men do it, and that's why you hire women. . . .

At a later point, the Chief Justice went on to say:

The Department of Justice, I am sure, doesn't have any male secretaries. That is an indication of it. They hire women secretaries because they are better and they hire women assembly people because they are better. . . ."

I don't want to be unfair to Chief Justice Burger. In an opinion he wrote at a later date, I came upon a sentence which I thought showed significant improvement. The Chief Justice said "No ordinary shareholder would have had to comply with the '33 Act registration requirements in order to sell his or her stock." That may not seem significant to you, but I want you to know that thousands of judicial opinions have been phrased on the assumption that the men own all the stock. I think the consciousness of the Chief Justice, or his law clerks, had been raised.

Now let's turn to the history of women lawyers at Jenner & Block. About 8 years ago Barb Steiner and I worked together to try to piece together some information on this subject. It was a very good thing that we did that because several of our sources are no longer with us.

In gathering evidence of the firm's history, it was not easy to separate myth from reality. For example, we cannot determine for sure who was the first woman lawyer at the firm.

One of the early women lawyers at the firm was Irene Zeisler. I am told that she attended John Marshall Law School and only did secretarial work at the firm, not legal work. Then in the early 1940's, Mr. Jenner hired a woman lawyer named Nan Britton to assist him in drafting the notes to the Illinois Civil Practice Act. But Barb Steiner's research revealed that Nan Britton was not listed in Sullivan's or on any firm letterhead or announcement.

The next woman lawyer at the firm was probably Charlotte Hornstein whom I talked with in 1997 when we were pulling together historical evidence. Charlotte attended the University of Chicago Law School and ultimately graduated from John Marshall Law School during the depression. She came to Jenner & Block on her 30th birthday in 1942. She told me it was very difficult for men or women to find jobs during the depression. She was a lawyer, but she was hired as a secretary and she told me that she was thrilled to have that job. Barb Steiner discovered that beginning in 1947, Charlotte had an individual listing in Sullivan's law directory which listed her office address as the Jenner & Block address and also listed the firm phone number as her phone number. Charlotte was secretary for a partner named Henry Brandt. Since my earliest days at the firm, I was led to believe that Henry Brandt had asked the firm to make her an associate and when the firm refused, Charlotte and Henry left the firm. When I asked Charlotte about that, she told me that she and Henry did leave the firm in 1958 to join another law firm where she worked as a lawyer.

So the first woman that I know for sure was hired here as a lawyer and who worked here for a substantial period of time was Marianna Cook who was here from 1963 to 1978. Marianna had been a trust officer at State National Bank in Evanston which was our client. She was hired to work in the probate department for Addis Hall, then head of that department. Addis, who is now deceased. remembered vividly that Marianna was hired the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963. He recalled taking Marianna to dinner that evening and offering her a position with the firm. She was a full-time lawyer with the firm. She withdrew from the firm at the end of 1978 and moved to Oregon because she was unhappy with her lack of progress at the firm.

When I was a young lawyer at the firm, I was frequently told that when Marianna Cook was hired, she was told that she would never be considered for partnership. As I mentioned, she was hired in 1963. She was elected to the partnership as of January 1, 1970. I do not know whether the story about what she was told when she was hired falls into the category of myth or reality.

In 1964, the firm hired a second woman, Diane Lunquist. She worked exclusively in the probate department. She was here only a short time and left soon after I joined the firm in the summer of 1965.

I joined the firm in the summer of 1965. Two other men were hired at the same time and we received the same treatment. In fact, we all three shared an office. I was not restricted to assignments from the probate and estate department.

I never experienced any discriminatory treatment from the other lawyers at the firm. I suspect that a few of them may not have been pleased with my presence, but I always received good assignments and had plenty of work to do. For my first 5 years, I worked almost exclusively for Sam Block, whose practice was a mixture of corporate and litigation. Sam was a very strong mentor for me. Sam died, very unexpectedly, at a very young age, after I had been with the firm for 5 years. I thought it was the end of the world.

I want you to know a little more about Sam Block. People around here talk a lot about Bert Jenner but you don't hear too many stories about Sam Block, a man I loved and respected.

Samuel W. Block was born in 1911 in St. Joseph, Missouri. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale in 1933 and his law degree from Harvard in 1936. He came to this firm when he graduated from law school in 1936 and he was admitted to partnership in 1948. His name was added to the firm in 1964, the year before I arrived here. He had tremendous expertise in anti-trust and securities matters. But he also handled litigated matters.

On the personal side, Sam was married, had three children and lived in Hyde Park. He and his family had a cottage in Wisconsin. There was a world of difference between the way Mr. Jenner lived his way and the way Mr. Block lived his life. Bert Jenner's idea of a vacation was to go to an American Bar Association convention. Sam Block lived a much more balanced life and did not work nearly as long hours as Jenner. I think Sam Block was a great example for all of us. You can learn from his example. You can lead a balanced life and still become a name partner in a major law firm.

When Sam died on October 28, 1970, I was extremely pregnant with my first child who was born three weeks after Sam's death. I think Sam was a little perplexed about working with a pregnant lawyer, as I was the firm's first pregnant lawyer. However, nobody said or did anything about it. One of my law school friends at another large Chicago firm was required to take a substantial maternity leave when she got pregnant. Nobody at our firm (including me) knew anything about maternity leave so I only took one week off with each of my two sons. My first son was born in 1970 and my second son in 1974.

In the summer of 1967, Leah Hamilton joined the firm. Bert Jenner was very much in favor of hiring Leah because she had attended the University of Illinois Law School, his alma mater. I was excited to have Leah join the firm, because we were about the same age. Leah eventually became a tax lawyer and she was brilliant. Leah left the firm in 1983, after she had married one of our tax partners, Herb Olson.

I was elected to partnership as of January 1, 1972. Marianna was still there, so the firm had two women partners.

Leah Hamilton was elected to partnership as of January 1, 1973. At that time, we had three women partners and two women associates.

No additional women were elected to partnership until 1976, when one woman was admitted. Then there was another four-year hiatus, until two more women were elected in 1980.

In the meantime, we began to make real progress in terms of the number of woman associates hired. I was named chairman of the Hiring Committee in 1976. We hired 16 new associates that year and seven were women.

I have a vivid memory of riding in a limousine with Bert Jenner on our way to a funeral service for a member of the firm. He knew that I was the chairman of the Hiring Committee and he was grilling me about the lawyers we had hired. He was particularly interested in knowing how many people we had hiring from the University of Illinois Law School. He also wanted to know how many women we had hired. When I told him that half of the incoming group were women, I thought he would fall off the car seat. But he didn't make any protest.

So where are we today in terms of women lawyers at Jenner & Block? I thought you might be interested to know that there are 35 women partners at Jenner & Block, out of a total of 199 partners. Therefore, approximately 18 percent of the partners at Jenner & Block are women. It is a matter of enormous interest to me that this number does not rise to become anything like the percentage of women in law school classes. I have some theories about that, and you probably do too- and perhaps we'll have an opportunity to discuss that together sometime.

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Joan M. Hall is a retired Partner at Jenner & Block. Ms. Hall was a founder of the Young Women Leadership Charter School of Chicago ("YWLCS"), a school dedicated to advancing young women in the areas of math, science and technology. She now serves as President of the YWLCS Board of Directors.