More than any other profession women entered in the nineteenth 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--defines the contours of women's integration into the modern legal profession.

Nineteenth-century women built a women lawyers' movement through which they fought to gain entrance to law schools and bar associations, joined the campaign for women suffrage, and sought to balance marriage and career. By the twentieth century, most institutional barriers crumbled and younger women entered the law confident that equal opportunity had replaced sexual discrimination. Their optimism was misplaced as many women lawyers continued to encounter discrimination, faced limited opportunities for professional advancement, and struggled to balance gender and professional identity.

Based on rich and diverse archival sources, this book is the landmark study of the history of women lawyers in America.

The first women lawyers in America, like many of their twentieth-century counterparts, had to reconcile the traditional roles assigned to women with their roles as lawyers. In 1886, a group of women students and recent alumnae of the University of Michigan Law School founded the Equity Club, a correspondence club for women lawyers and law students across the country who were trying to overcome geographic isolation. The Equity Club became the first organization in the United States to forge professional links between women lawyers, and its founding marks the origins of a collective identity among these new professionals. The letters reprinted in Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America reveal the challenges the first women lawyers faced and reflect the diverse opinions they held on the common issues confronting them. Some contended that women should be lawyers on the same terms as men, while others argued that they could bring something special to the profession—like morality, purity, ethics, and humanity—in contrast to the purely business and commercial qualities of law as practiced by men. The discovery and publication of these letters fill a void in the documentary history of the legal profession and the history of women in America. The introductory essay and the biographical information provided about the lives of the members of the Equity Club help to place the letters in the larger contexts of those histories. Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America will prove enlightening to practicing lawyers, who will find that even a hundred years later, many of the letters have remarkable relevance. Scholars and students in women's history, American studies, sociology, and legal history will also find it a valuable resource.