PART THREE OF 'EQUAL': LAWYERING

PART THREE
LAWYERING (1968-1984)

9.A Problem in the Profession

NYU law students Diane Blank and Mary Kelly found at their summers at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft that the lawyers expected them to be secretaries. Women at NYU also found that Shearman & Sterling had passed over many women for interviews. Women who did manage to get hired at Shearman were relegated to trusts and estates because they would work well with widows and orphans, would not be allowed to travel and would not join the men at a Long Island country club.

This was not new, but Title VII had deemed it illegal to refuse to hire women. NYU's Women's Rights Committee conducted a study of 700 women practicing law in New York. Seventy seven answered and 26 of those heard some variation of “we don't like to hire [too many] women." They made less money, were excluded from firm events and treated in a humiliating fashion.

Attorney Eleanor Holmes Norton would soon play a crucial role in the effort to open New York law firms to women.

10.Taking Action

In April 1970 women from 17 law schools gathered at NYU and agreed on a set of resolutions, one of which was to participate in a Title VII action through the EEOC against New York law firms.”These aspiring lawyers planned to charge a handful of the nation's most powerful law firms with sex discrimination.” Norton met with the group.

Meanwhile, the Association of American Law Schools created a special committee on women in legal education and surveyed law schools. Of the 76 that responded, more than one-third reported complaints of discriminatory conduct that revealed discrimination in law firms nationwide (including Minnesota).

The NYU women surprised a meeting of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York when Gloria Steinem, who had been invited to speak, allowed them to speak about discrimination in New York law firms. After they got cut off, Betty Friedan and Norton stepped to the podium.

Three weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in Griggs v. Duke Power that the effects of employment practices, rather than their intent, would determine whether an employer was practicing illegal discrimination. Consequently, attorney Harriet Rabb began to lead an Employment Rights Project at Columbia Law, funded by the EEOC.

Women law students then discovered that they would be separated from their male classmates during the bar exam and that their group would be assigned ID numbers in a narrow range, allowing graders to guess at their sex. Also within that group would be men who had previously failed the exam and whose scores could be expected to be lower. The women did not want to be graded against each other, rather than the men, because statistically women performed better on the exam than men. The bar examiners caved, and although the test remained segregated, it was for the last time and grading safeguards were put in place.

The law students' complaints proceeded and Margaret Kohn, who had complained about Royall, Koegel & Wells, and Diane Blank, who had butted up against Sullivan & Cromwell, got EEOC right to sue letters.