Women In Law

Based on both quantitative and qualitative analyses, this is the first comprehensive study of women in the world's legal professions.

This comparative study explores the lives of some of the women who first initiated challenges to male exclusivity in the legal professions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their challenges took place at a time of considerable optimism about progressive societal change, including new and expanding opportunities for women, as well as a variety of proposals for reforming law, legal education, and standards of legal professionalism. By situating women's claims for admission to the bar within this reformist context in different jurisdictions, the study examines the intersection of historical ideas about gender and about legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. In exploring these systemic issues, the study also provides detailed examinations of the lives of some of the first women lawyers in six jurisdictions: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, India, and western Europe. In exploring how individual women adopted different legal arguments in litigated cases, or devised particular strategies to overcome barriers to professional work, the study assesses how shifting and contested ideas about gender and about legal professionalism shaped women's opportunities and choices, as well as both support for and opposition to their claims. As a comparative study of the first women lawyers in several different jurisdictions, the book reveals how a number of quite different women engaged with ideas of gender and legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ranging from the 1860s when women first sought entrance into law to the 1930s when most institutional barriers had crumbled, this book defines the contours of women's integration into the most rigidly gendered profession.

An eyewitness account of the revolution in women’s rights under the law. Lawyer, activist, and former Chatelaine legal columnist Linda Silver Dranoff details her own trailblazing journey from a traditional 1950s childhood to the battlegrounds of the courts of law and the halls of power where she and a generation of women lawyers, supporting a larger feminist movement, championed the rights of Canadian women and families. Through a combination of memoir and social history, Dranoff brings to life the struggles around family law, pay and employment equity, violence against women, abortion rights, childcare, pension rights, political engagement, public policy, and access to legal justice. From backroom battles to public and private protest, the stories are inspiring. Fairly Equal reminds us of the importance of remaining vigilant about our rights. Knowing what Dranoff’s generation of women lawyers and activists achieved, and how easily it can be taken away, we are encouraged in sisterhood and solidarity to ensure that the many hard-won gains of the feminist movement are maintained and expanded for the women who follow.

At the University of Oslo the subject of women's law was recognized as an autonomous legal discipline since 1974. In this introduction a description is given of the subjects the institute is working on (discrimination and equality, sources and methods, women's right to money, housewives' law)