Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Long who wrote (142980)	10/14/2005 3:19:48 PM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 793931

Here is one random online account I just plucked into google and found. Interesting! law.georgetown.edu Ah, the 1960s. The Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, Kennedy, the counterculture, feminism. It was a heady time. Remember the women in law school in the 1960s had been raised in the 1950s, in the era of "Father Knows Best" and good girls get married and have children and support their husbands' careers and society's traditions. But these were the women who started breaking all the rules. Women who changed the role of women in our society permanently, many using law as a vehicle for that change. In the summer of 1964 I had just graduated from college, Wellesley, because women were not admitted to any of the Ivy League colleges. I had studied ancient history and was on an archeological dig with the University of Chicago on the Sea of Galilee in Israel. I had an epiphany. How could I devote my life to studying the cultures of past civilizations when so much was wrong in my own society? I decided to come back to and participate with a goal of nothing else than helping to change the world. How could I do that as a woman? I needed a pedigree that would give me credibility in a male society that diminished the opinions and efforts of women; so, I decided to go to law school. Using the law, changing the law, having the credibility of being a lawyer, was my plan. I did not know any lawyers, let alone women lawyers. Law school was scary - very competitive and very masculine. There were few women. I started at Harvard and was told with the other first-year women by the dean, the eminent Erwin Griswold, that we women were at Harvard Law School over his dead body. There was a 5 percent admission quota. No more than 5 percent of the class could be women, and "we were all taking the place of men who would run society, and legal education was wasted on women." I felt like I was in a fish bowl most of the time. Women were harassed - either not asked questions in class or singled out unmercifully. The women's bathrooms were miles away. That summer - 1965 - I married and my husband took a job at the Justice Department and I transferred to Georgetown where I did my second and third year. Georgetown had even fewer women. Although no one told me at Georgetown that there was a quota, the numbers speak for themselves. Nine women in my class of 291 or 3 percent. Seven women eventually graduated or 2.4 percent. Same atmosphere. The male students were, by and large, fine, but the faculty was not generally supportive. But, the times in D.C. were heady and idealistic. I marched and protested. I heard Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. I spent every spare minute in the Juvenile Court where I eventually became the law clerk to the three judges and worked to bring lawyers and legal rights into the juvenile justice system. During the riots in D.C. that followed Dr. King's assassination, I went through barriers and worked around the clock helping the court deal with hundreds of arrested juveniles. Many of us believed. We believed in the power of law to bring about social change and justice. We believed in ourselves and in our personal responsibility to make the world better. As women we were a generation of pioneers and of activists. We saw no reason why women could not do everything men did and we set out to show the world that we could. When I moved to Rochester I was at first told by the law firm I eventually joined, "the firm does not hire women…with your record we would have hired you if only you had been a man, but take advice from a woman!" Times were changing. They changed their minds and I worked hard to prove myself. So, here is to my sisters of the 1960s. You broke all the rules and you did help pave the way for change -- in society and in the role of women.