March is Women's History Month, an opportunity for the LRC to explore the significance of women in legal history. Check out the resources on this page for a sampling of the great resources about this topic online and in the LRC's collection.
Pictured left to right, top to bottom: Sandra Day O'Connor, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court; Belva Lockwood, first woman to practice before the US Supreme Court; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court; Janet Reno, US Attorney General; Deborah Enix-Ross, President-Elect of the ABA; Arabella Mansfield, first female lawyer in the US; Pauli Murray, civil rights activist and legal scholar; Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court; Kamala Harris, US Vice President.
Rebels in Law: Voices in History of Black Women Lawyers by
Black women lawyers are not new to the practice of law or to leadership in the fight for justice and quality. Black women formally entered the practice of American law in 1872, the year that Charlotte E. Ray became the first black woman to graduate from an American law school. Rebels in Lawintroduces some of these women and through their own writing tells a compelling story about the little-known involvement of black women in law and politics. Beginning with a short essay written in 1897, the writing collected by J. Clay Smith, Jr., tells us how black women came to the practice of law, the challenges they faced as women and as blacks in making a place for themselves in the legal profession, their fight to become legal educators, and their efforts to encourage other black women and black men to come to the practice of law. The essays demonstrate the involvement of black women lawyers in important public issues of our time and show them addressing the sensitive subjects of race, equality, justice and freedom. Drawing together many writings that have never been published or have been published in obscure journals or newspapers, Rebels in Law is a groundbreaking study. In addition, it offers historical background information on each writer and on the history of black women lawyers. Providing an opportunity to study the origins of black women as professionals, community leaders, wives, mothers, and feminists, it will be of interest to scholars in the fields of law, history, political science, sociology, black studies and women's studies. J. Clay Smith, Jr., is Professor of Law, Howard University Law School. He was formerly a member of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Dean of Howard University Law School, and President of the Washington Bar Association. He is the author of Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944 and numerous articles.
Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History by
More than any other profession women entered in the 19 century, law was the most rigidly engendered. Access to courts, bar associations, and law schools was controlled by men, while the very act of gaining admission to practice law demanded that women reinterpret the male-constructed jurisprudence that excluded them. This history of women lawyers from the 1860s to the 1930s, aims to define the contours of women's integration into the modern legal profession.
Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers by
The captivating story of how a diverse group of women, including Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, broke the glass ceiling and changed the modern legal profession In Stories from Trailblazing Women Lawyers, award-winning legal historian Jill Norgren curates the oral histories of one hundred extraordinary American women lawyers who changed the profession of law. Many of these stories are being told for the first time. As adults these women were on the front lines fighting for access to law schools and good legal careers. They challenged established rules and broke the law's glass ceiling.Norgren uses these interviews to describe the profound changes that began in the late 1960s, interweaving social and legal history with the women's individual experiences. In 1950, when many of the subjects of this book were children, the terms of engagement were clear: only a few women would be admitted each year to American law schools and after graduation their professional opportunities would never equal those open to similarly qualified men. Harvard Law School did not even begin to admit women until 1950. At many law schools, well into the 1970s, men told female students that they were taking a place that might be better used by a male student who would have a career, not babies. In 2005 the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession initiated a national oral history project named the Women Trailblazers in the Law initiative: One hundred outstanding senior women lawyers were asked to give their personal and professional histories in interviews conducted by younger colleagues. The interviews, made available to the author, permit these women to be written into history in their words, words that evoke pain as well as celebration, humor, and somber reflection. These are women attorneys who, in courtrooms, classrooms, government agencies, and NGOs have rattled the world with insistent and successful demands to reshape their profession and their society. They are women who brought nothing short of a revolution to the profession of law.
Women in American Law by 
Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World by
NPR Best Book of 2015 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER The author of the celebrated Victory tells the fascinating story of the intertwined lives of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first and second women to serve as Supreme Court justices. The relationship between Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg--Republican and Democrat, Christian and Jew, western rancher's daughter and Brooklyn girl--transcends party, religion, region, and culture. Strengthened by each other's presence, these groundbreaking judges, the first and second to serve on the highest court in the land, have transformed the Constitution and America itself, making it a more equal place for all women. Linda Hirshman's dual biography includes revealing stories of how these trailblazers fought for their own recognition in a male-dominated profession--battles that would ultimately benefit every American woman. She also makes clear how these two justices have shaped the legal framework of modern feminism, including employment discrimination, abortion, affirmative action, sexual harassment, and many other issues crucial to women's lives. Sisters-in-Law combines legal detail with warm personal anecdotes that bring these very different women into focus as never before. Meticulously researched and compellingly told, it is an authoritative account of our changing law and culture, and a moving story of a remarkable friendship.
The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a legal icon. In more than four decades as a lawyer, professor, appellate judge, and associate justice of the US Supreme Court, Ginsburg has influenced the law and society in real and permanent ways. This book chronicles and evaluates the remarkable achievements Ruth Bader Ginsburg has made over the past half century. Including chapters written by prominent court watchers and leading scholars from law, political science, and history, it offers diverse perspectives on an array of doctrinal areas and on different time periods in Ginsburg's career. Together, these perspectives document the impressive legacy of one of the most important figures in modern law.
First by
She was born in 1930 in El Paso and grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona. At a time when women were expected to be homemakers, she set her sights on Stanford University. When she graduated near the top of her class at law school in 1952, no firm would even interview her. But Sandra Day O'Connor's story is that of a woman who repeatedly shattered glass ceilings--doing so with a blend of grace, wisdom, humor, understatement, and cowgirl toughness. She became the first-ever female majority leader of a state senate. As a judge on the Arizona State Court of Appeals, she stood up to corrupt lawyers and humanized the law. When she arrived at the Supreme Court, appointed by Reagan in 1981, she began a quarter-century tenure on the court, hearing cases that ultimately shaped American law. Diagnosed with cancer at fifty-eight, and caring for a husband with Alzheimer's, O'Connor endured every difficulty with grit and poise. Women and men today will be inspired by how to be first in your own life, how to know when to fight and when to walk away, through O'Connor's example. This is a remarkably vivid and personal portrait of a woman who loved her family and believed in serving her country, who, when she became the most powerful woman in America, built a bridge forward for the women who followed her.
Framed: Women in Law and Film by
Some women attack and harm men who abuse them. Social norms, law, and films all participate in framing these occurrences, guiding us in understanding and judging them. How do social, legal, and cinematic conventions and mechanisms combine to lead us to condemn these women or exonerate them? What is it, exactly, that they teach us to find such women guilty or innocent of, and how do they do so? Through innovative readings of a dozen movies made between 1928 and 2001 in Europe, Japan, and the United States, Orit Kamir shows that in representing "gender crimes," feature films have constructed a cinematic jurisprudence, training audiences worldwide in patterns of judgment of women (and men) in such situations. Offering a novel formulation of the emerging field of law and film, Kamir combines basic legal concepts--murder, rape, provocation, insanity, and self-defense--with narratology, social science methodologies, and film studies. Framed not only offers a unique study of law and film but also points toward new directions in feminist thought. Shedding light on central feminist themes such as victimization and agency, multiculturalism, and postmodernism, Kamir outlines a feminist cinematic legal critique, a perspective from which to evaluate the "cinematic legalism" that indoctrinates and disciplines audiences around the world. Bringing an original perspective to feminist analysis, she demonstrates that the distinction between honor and dignity has crucial implications for how societies construct women, their social status, and their legal rights. In Framed, she outlines a dignity-oriented, honor-sensitive feminist approach to law and film.
From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World, Volume I by 
Constitutional Orphan: Gender Equality and the Nineteenth Amendment by
An account of the ramifications of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the divisions it created in the courts and Congress, and in the women's movement itself.Constitutional Orphan explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, theNational Woman's Party and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters, and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book then connects that pivot by bothgroups, to the emergence of a thin conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the Congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth, and connects that with the NWP's perceived need for southernCongressional votes for the ERA. It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election; and then evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were socialfeminists who opposed the ERA, and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation ofthe Nineteenth. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth could be used today to expand gender equality.
Beyond Portia: Women, Law, and Literature in the United States by
This pioneering anthology presents an interdisciplinary collage of women's experiences with the law by mixing creative and analytical writings in law and literature. Beyond Portia opens with grounding essays in both literary and legal theory, and offers two collections of essays, stories, and poems that focus in turn on law and literature on families, and law and literature on abuse of women. Drawing on the idea that literature by women can offer material richer than the typical case fact pattern used in traditional legal training, the editors show that both literature and literary methods of reading can help articulate otherwise unspoken premises in legal decision-making, bringing them into the open for examination.
