Overt and structural barriers excluded women from law until the late twentieth century

Evidence

The recent influx of lawyers also reflects the collapse of many barriers to admission for previously excluded groups. The largest increase has been in the number of female attorneys. In 1869, Arabella Mansfield of Iowa became the first woman admitted to the practice of law, but many states did not allow women to practice law for most of the nineteenth century; and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the exclusion of women did not violate their constitutional rights. By 1910, however, only Arkansas and Georgia persisted in excluding women, and by 1920 women constituted 1.4 percent of the legal profession. In 1918 Mary Florence Lathrop became the first woman member of the American Bar Association. Law schools also discriminated, either by denying women admission—Harvard Law School did not admit women until 1950; Washington and Lee Law School until 197223—or by capping female enrollments. The combination of overt discrimination and cultural and social barriers limited women’s presence in law school (the class of 1968 at the University of Virginia Law School included only three women24) and, because law school had become the only avenue of entry to the legal profession, in the profession itself. As of 1970, women made up less than 5 percent of the legal profession. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 663

Categorization

• XREF: The Supreme Court upholding women’s exclusion connects to constitutional-inequality case law and to the course’s treatment of equal protection doctrine over time. — connects to: Women were largely barred from law practice until the twentieth century. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 663; American law schools barred women through much of the twentieth century. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 663; The Napoleonic Code institutionalized women’s legal subordination for a century — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 252 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Women were largely barred from law practice until the twentieth century. #expands (0.95) — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 663
• American law schools barred women through much of the twentieth century. #exemplifies (0.95) — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 663
• Equal-rights law dates back barely fifty years against two centuries of exclusion #corroborates (0.88) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 53
• The Napoleonic Code institutionalized women’s legal subordination for a century #exemplifies (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 252
• French civil law kept married women legally subordinate well into the 1940s #corroborates (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 276
• Institutional barriers of gender and Jewish origin blockaded women in German academia #corroborates (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 167