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Iconoclasm, tolerance and diversity: times of change and women in the law in Europe

  • helenhall5
  • 22 hours ago
  • 5 min read

Professor Jane Ching, Nottingham Law School https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/law/jane-ching


Eliza Orme (Wikicommons)


I qualified as a solicitor in 1990. A couple of years later, the solicitors’ profession in England and Wales was 50% female for the first time (although even now, women only occupy 32% of senior roles). One of the women partners in my firm had at that time been practising for twenty years or so, and was very clear about the challenges and assumptions involved in obtaining a training contract in the 1960s. Michelson’s 2013 study suggested that there is a critical threshold of 2000 people per lawyer, before women attain more than 30% of the profession, but when they do, overall access to justice is increased. To some extent this is because of the fields that women lawyers have entered (or been confined to), which is a discussion for another day.


Michelson suggests the boom in women lawyers, worldwide, occurred in the 2000s. What I want to do in this post, however, is map the development of women lawyers, principally in Europe (for the USA and Canada in particular, see Kay, in the further reading below), against three key phases of political and social disruption: the Renaissance; the late Victorian period and the 1960s. These trends can be tracked on Wikipedia’s useful pages devoted to them (see further reading below), which extends to the rest of the world.


I will say at the outset that many of these pioneers were from privileged classes, where education and (possibly) tolerance for assertiveness and difference might have been different from that of the general population. And we have to be careful about what we mean by “lawyer”: some of the examples I have would, these days, be described as diplomats, or mediators or litigants in person. Some of course, were paralegals by default, working in legal services, as does Sally Brass in Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, because they could be nothing else. Eliza Orme (the first woman to gain a law degree in England in 1888), Reina Lawrence and Mary Richardson set up in partnership to do this in the late 1870s. Or, as we might say now, they provided unreserved legal services.


But back to the Renaissance. As its name indicates, that lengthy period from roughly the 14th to the 17th century was characterised by novelty and change.  Merchants were obtaining a degree of power when compared to the aristocracy.  Advances were being made in science and the arts. Humanism and Protestantism challenged Church hierarchies.  A number of European queens (amongst them Catherine de Medici and Isabella of Castile) exercised significant political and diplomatic power.  At least amongst families of artisans, women painters such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi and Lavinia Fontana had successful commercial careers. Christine de Pizan became a professional writer at least in part because she needed the money to support her family.  Most significant in our context, however, is Giustina Rocca (thought to be the model for Shakespeare’s Portia – please read more about her fascinating life in further reading) who acted as an arbitrator in the late 1400s; took great care to demand payment of her fees, and after whom one of the towers of the European Court of Justice is named. Some women, then, in some political and professional circles, were able to step outside the usual constraints for acceptable behaviour for women: iconoclasts at least temporarily. Rocca’s arbitration award may have been her only legal act.


By the later Victorian era, some women, from some families, were able to attend university, and studied law. As the transition from workplace apprenticeship to university -led legal education, especially in civil law countries, was not then complete, other women must have been working in family firms, or as assistants to male family members.  In a slightly later period, especially after losses of male articled clerks during the First World War, some of their younger sisters became able to translate these roles into formal articles, and so qualify. This was not an option for Eliza Orme and her colleagues, even though Orme had arranged an informal pupillage (what we might now perhaps call an internship, and almost certainly unpaid). But, like the Renaissance, the late Victorian period was one of seismic change: industrialisation; Darwinism, calls for women’s suffrage and other social reforms, increased literacy. And, in England, a period of “professionalisation” and formalisation of licensure. It was a period where women were at least visible as law students in the universities, even if, like Orme, deprived of their degrees. The earlier Concepción Arenal had been obliged to adopt male dress to study at the university of Madrid (albeit without completing her degree). While many of this group actually qualified after the turn of the century, when post-WWI changes opened up the professions to them, their initial education and workplace experience, may have been a product of the late Victorian expansion. 


Mirroring the ingenuity of some of her Renaissance cousins, the Italian, Teresa Labrioet, made it into the profession by exploiting other rules, in her case, that professors of law could obtain licences to practise. But the phenomenon of a licence given, whether openly or obtained by stealth, and then withdrawn was by no means unknown: Lidia Poët (albeit arguably a litigant in person), Elizaveta Fedoseevna Kozmina and possibly Bertha Cave seem to have experienced this in different countries. Nevertheless, barriers were being broken, and some stayed broken, or, having been reinstated, were broken again in what Schweitzer calls the “times of tolerance” (see further reading below).


By the 1960s then, when my late colleague was tackling assumptions that of course she would not need a secretary because of course she could type, women lawyers were, if not common, at least apparent, allowed to attend university, obtain degrees and teach law. This was another period of change, with feminism, civil rights, expansion of higher education, scientific development and counterculturalism all shaking up what had been regarded as conventional. Schweitzer notes a gradual increase in women lawyers in this period of “formal gender diversity”. Aside from the overall quantity, however, a review of the Wikipedia list suggests that a number of countries, especially those outside Europe, saw their first woman lawyer at around this time. The phenomenon was not just growing, but spreading, globally. Times of change; times when norms are challenged, times when education increases, correlates with women taking on formal roles as lawyers and judges.  We must not forget, however, that the wheel of change can, as in modern Afghanistan, reverse.  

 

Further Reading:










 
 
 

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