The inquiry recently posted by Nate Oman at Concurring Opinions and re-posted at Feminist Law Profs about part-time employment possibilities for lawyers made me think of the scene in A League of Their Own in which the manager of the team (played by Tom Hanks) tells a distraught player that”there’s no crying in baseball.” One could view the statement as suggesting that women do not belong in baseball, but being a baseball fan and a person who sees the glass half-full instead of half-empty, I always interpreted it as a description of what, for me, is the allure of baseball: despite the obstacles and difficulties that baseball players face, they never quit. As Yogi Berra said, the game”ain’t over until it’s over.”
My advice to law students who are about to graduate from law school, particularly female law students and law students of color, is to adopt a similar can-do attitude. You are about to enter a very select and privileged class that will open many doors for you. The fact is, despite all the lawyer jokes you hear, lawyers are respected members of society. Having a law degree means that you have the intelligence, knowledge, and skills to accomplish almost anything you set your mind to. If you want to become a partner in a large law firm, you can do it. If you want to work-part time and raise a family, you can do that too; it is up to you.
I don’t mean to suggest that achieving your goals will be easy. Like the boy in The Alchemist, you will face many obstacles that you must overcome before you achieve your goals. You will be required to constantly expand your knowledge of the law and your skill sets. You will have to learn to deal effectively with a variety of different personalities from co-workers, to clients, to judges. You will have to figure out how to deal with the stress that comes with having to solve the problems of others. As a woman who started practicing law in 1985, I know from experience that if you are a female attorney, you may experience overt discrimination or at least some form of undervaluation. None of these obstacles are insurmountable. More importantly, because you are a lawyer, you have the power to change the profession for the better.
If you need examples of what I am saying, or inspiration, you should read the profiles of attorneys posted at Ms. JD. These women faced many more obstacles than you, and they found success and fulfillment. In the process, they helped to transform the legal profession. You can do the same. If you do not think there are enough part-time employment opportunities in the legal profession, create them. Use the gift of analysis and reasoning that you have been given to convince the”powers-that-be” at your place of employment that there is value in offering part-time employment. If they don’t agree, find another place of employment. Start your own firm. In short, if you do not like the rules of the game that were established for the legal profession when there were few women or people of color in its ranks, make new rules. Re-design the legal profession.
Billy Jean King could have accepted the institution of tennis that existed when she was a young girl growing up in Southern California; an institution of the elite, white, upper-class that frowned upon tennis players who learned their skills on public tennis courts instead of at country clubs. She could have accepted the status quo and spent a lifetime lamenting the unfairness of her situation and wondering what might have been. Instead, she chose to use her gifts (her intelligence and tennis skills) to challenge the status quo and in the process she not only changed the institution of tennis, but she transformed the entire universe of women’s sports.
If Billie Jean King could transform tennis and women’s sports, just think what you as future lawyers can do. Billy Jean was (and is) talented, astute and tenacious; characteristics that all change agents seem to possess and that you will need if you want to achieve your goals. But what you as future lawyers have that she didn’t have is an education in the very subjects and skills that are needed to effect change. This ability to effect change is the very reason that lawyers are respected in society. We are trained to identify, analyze and solve problems. If you see problems with the legal profession or in society in general, you have the gifts needed to solve them; gifts that many other people in society do not have. That is why,”there’s no crying in law school.”
— Sharon K. Sandeen
Thanks Sharon, this is great!
Like Sharon and others, I hope that women can find comfortable niches in the legal profession, so that law has the benefits of our understandings at its core and in its practice. We need to keep working at it in multifarious ways in the hopes that we can find balance, fulfillment, creativity and ways not to damage our souls. I am a bit worried however about where this approach of Sharon’s, which I admire a lot, is going. I wonder if we should be cautious here. I see us moving back to a very individualized, personalized (and often inadequate) resolution of each woman’s worklife, completely dependent upon a woman’s ability to bargain, knowledge that she has to, and also sufficient economic freedom to just walk away at any time.
I too have been in this business a long time (even before 1985, I’m afraid) and I only see it getting worse for women, not better. I am very concerned for our current generation of feminist and, as I would say, “not-yet-feminist” lawyers and law students. Part-time work assumes part-time pay and no benefits in most cases, a kind of independent contracting, whatever they call it today. It isolates women in almost every way and really makes their days even longer, rather than shorter, with more demands, rather than fewer. Has anyone reading this been there? I see what has happened to my sister-in-law, who is a very professional woman and had a baby less than two years ago. She is often up all night getting her work done, because it doesn’t fit in the day with her other responsibilities. It may work for some women (and I actually doubt it even does for them) who are in relationships with others to support them or help support them, but what about the rest of us? Even if we are in such relationships at some points, we may not be at others. Why should women who are not partnered (or not partnered with someone who earns sufficient money to support her and children with the health care, shelter, food, educaiton, transportation, child care services, and more. they need) have to give up all the rights and privileges of employment (as it used to be, at least–health benefits, job security, pensions, paid vacations and sick days, intellectual and social collegiality, a sense of being included, instead of an outsider, etc.) and keep most of the detriments — the overwork, the stress, the frequent lack of cooperative working, the job/work insecurity, the primary responsibility for childcare (the “oh, you can do it, because you only work part-time or you work at home on your own hours” rationale for dumping everything in her lap) and more?
We are in the throes of a cultural shift about work that I’m afraid is going to hurt women the most, even though it is clearly also hurting men. At home, trying to balance work and family alone, each woman may get isolated and see her struggles as about her inabilities, rather than the systemic impossibility of doing everything and more. The opportunities for sisterhood and solidarity may become reduced instead of enhanced, even though there are less hours in the office. The possible benefits from collective worker action become diluted and dispersed. Being just one woman, we are not empowered to change the culture for others. At best we can change a little space in it for ourselves. But because we are so empowered as lawyers or academics to have a voice, don’t we also have the responsibility to change it for others, and others beside lawyers? I’m worried that that sense of collective responsibility and aeffective call for collective acction will evaporate as we each move into our individual lives and homes. Feminism helps us understand better our dependencies and interconnectedness, yet we are more and more holing up at home to work and do childcare. Does anyone else think this is worrisome?
We have to change the work culture itself for everyone. I would hope we can make collective workplaces welcoming to people with all sorts of other respnsibilities and with expectations. Why don’t we see that it is the duty of workplaces to accommodate their most valuable assets, the workers, rather than the duty of workers to twist ourselves into knots to accommodate the workplace as currently constructed? What happened to reasonable hours (didn’t our foremothers and fathers work to get us 8 hour workdays? and at least one day completely off a week, and hopefully two? I really don’t know lawyers who have 8 hour workdays, do you?) What is unhealthy for women is also, in this case at least, very unhealthy for men. Also, if more women are home and more men are at work, won’t we have the potential of falling back into a separate spheres kinde of mentality? I don’t mean feminists will, but will our culture? If everyone works at home, then what do we have? Is working in our pajamas or sweats (which I am the first to love to do) worth the loss of the energy for change that we create collectively? Just some questions on my mind. I’m happy to be shown I’m wrong here, so i can put these concerns to rest and move on to other projects. In solidarity, LB
Amen. Particularly on having to be tenacious. I am NOT a lawyer, but I am an academic in a historically MALE dominated field (just how boy-oriented?) that had quotas limiting the number of women who could be admitted to graduate programs. These did not cease until the late 1970s.
So, take a deep breath and realize you’re going to be head and shoulders smarter, faster, and flat out tenacious than your male counterparts to “get anywhere.” It’s far better to realize this going in to any male-dominated field, that discover this after you’re halfway through your career.
I do appreciate the optimism and sense of empowerment that this post is trying to engender.
The thing is I must point out that really, going to law school, graduating from law school, and even, graduating from law school with the kind of grades that gets you to an AMLAW 100 law firm (with all the nice pay and benefits and flexible work schedules- available at least officially) isn’t really that hard. It’s not superhero training school. You go to class four hours a day, study for maybe four or five more, and since you’re graded on a curve over half the class gets a B.
One’s sharpened analytical skills (assuming one really get this from a legal education, which I doubt) are a very wimpy tool against institutional sexism, corporate culture hostility to motherhood, and the fact that much legal work that pays enough to pay off the now-$80,000+ average loans we all have is horribly boring, demoralizing, and stressful.
It’s not necessarily because the industry doesn’t support women that women don’t stay in. People need to recognize the fact that the work itself may not be incentive enough for people to keep at it, once they’ve paid off their loans.
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