The concern was that if a woman was doing gender equality, her chances of making it to tenure in the law school were diminished. It was considered frivolous.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Learning, while at school, that the charge for the education of girls was the same as that for boys, and that, when they became teachers, women received only half as much as men for their services, the injustice of this distinction was so apparent.
So many of us had hoped that the civil system might be an alternative for some women, where the burdens were a little bit less, and cases might be easier to prove.
I've had women come up to me and say I was the reason they went to law school.
At Swarthmore, the Dean of Women was very opposed to women going into science or engineering - so opposed that if she couldn't talk a girl out of it, she just never had anything more to do with her for the four years she was there.
My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady and the other was to be independent, and the law was something most unusual for those times because for most girls growing up in the '40s, the most important degree was not your B.A. but your M.R.S.
Away with that folly that her rights would be detrimental to her character - that if she were recognized as the equal to a man she would cease to be a woman!
Corporate governance is a huge issue too. We don't have women on these corporate boards. More than half of the students in law school are women, more than half of the women, I think, in medical school now are women.
Feminism was about making women's lives less constrained and giving them more choices.
When I graduated from law school in 1959, there wasn't a single woman on any federal bench. It wouldn't be a realistic ambition for a woman to want to become a federal judge. It wasn't realistic until Jimmy Carter became our president.
The school made it very clear that women were entitled to positions of authority. That sense of entitlement allowed us to feel that we have a natural place in leadership in the world. That gave me a mental and emotional confidence.