A Fighting Chance

The women’s movement was exploding around the country, but not in our quiet New Jersey suburb and certainly not in our little family. I wanted to be a good wife and mother, but I wanted to do something more. I felt deeply ashamed that I didn’t want to stay home full-time with my cheerful, adorable daughter.

My first choice was to go back to teaching, but I never even asked Jim. I knew he would say that a demanding full-time job was out of the question. So somewhere between diapers and breast-feeding, I hatched the idea of going to school. At first Jim resisted, but finally he agreed. School would be okay.

Suddenly the world opened up. It was kid-in-the-candy-store time. At first I thought about graduate school in speech pathology. I also got the applications for engineering school. And then I thought of law school. I knew next to nothing about being a lawyer, but on television lawyers were always fighting to defend good people who needed help. Besides, there was just a little wonderment in the notion that I could actually earn a law degree. I loved the thought that someday Amelia would be able to say that her mommy was a lawyer.

Telling my mother about my plan to go to law school was worse than telling her about college. She was sure something was wrong with me. I should stay home. I should have more children. I should count on Jim to support me. She cautioned me against becoming “one of those crazy women’s libbers” and warned me that they weren’t happy and never could be.

I loved my mother. I wanted her to smile, to believe that I was doing the right thing. But that wasn’t going to happen. So I ducked my head and kept on going.





Law School

For three years, Amelia and I bundled up in the mornings, strapped ourselves into our bright blue Volkswagen Beetle, and made our way in the world. Amelia stayed with a lady who looked after half a dozen other kids, and I went to classes at Rutgers Law School. Every afternoon, when I picked up Amelia, just after lunchtime, we’d tell each other stories about our days—about the boy who smeared pudding in his hair (Amelia) or the professor who couldn’t see very well and called on a coat hanging on a rack in the back of the room (me). We laughed and laughed.

I loved law school. I loved the intensity, the sharp interactions as teachers grilled us and we cross-examined one another. I loved the optimism of it all, the idea that we could argue our way to a better world.

About three weeks into law school, one of the professors was setting up a hypothetical problem, and he referred to “the guy’s secretary, a typical dumb blonde.” A woman a few seats over immediately started booing. For an instant she was by herself, but then the entire class picked it up. We booed and hissed. Someone hollered something. The professor looked up quickly and then actually staggered back as if he had been hit. One tiny collective action and his world had just shifted a bit. So had mine.

During my second year, I interviewed for jobs as a summer associate at Wall Street law firms. Women were relatively rare in law; only about one in ten lawyers was a woman. Stories still circulated about women who graduated and were offered jobs as legal secretaries or assistants—not as real lawyers.

My first interview was with one of the many firms that had plenty of women secretaries and clerks but hardly any women lawyers. I borrowed a dress, a black-and-red wool number that I thought looked very professional. I took the train from New Jersey to Wall Street and made my way to the towering building where the firm was located. The first couple of interviews went well, but the third partner to interview me leaned back in his chair, scowled at my résumé, and looked up at me with barely concealed contempt. “There’s a typographical error on your résumé. Should I take that as a sign of the quality of the work you do?”

I didn’t flinch. “You should take it as a sign that you’d better not hire me to type.”

He jumped. Then he leaned back and laughed. “You’ll do just fine.”

On the train on the way home, I went over every word on my résumé. There was no typo. I thought the guy was a jerk, but I smiled politely when I got the job offer.