Bar Women

Law was one of the last of the learned professions to accept women practitioners. Traditionally it was felt that law and women had little in common. It was said: "Law is logical, women are intuitive"; "law is abstract; women deal best with the concrete"; "law requires long, sustained application; women excel in short spurts." It was in 1864 that an Iowa woman first sought admission to the bar. By 1910 there were only 558 women lawyers in the U. S. Now there are more than 4,500, of whom 1,000 are in New York City.

Admission to the bar is tantamount to election to State bar associations and even in such legal citadels as Philadelphia, Boston and Chicago, city bar groups accept women members. But at the florid marble building of the Bar Association of the City of New York at No. 42 West 44th Street, women lawyers have never been welcome. At one Bar Association reception for newly admitted lawyers, women were turned away. Although Manhattan women lawyers had met informally for nearly 15 years prior, it was this incident which served to solidify their organization into the New York Women's Bar Association in 1934.

Last week, without warning or explanation, the 68-year-old City Bar reversed many a previous vote, decided that the word "he" in its constitution was a generic term, hence applicable to women.*

Six years ago the City Bar decided that although women were not ineligible for membership, it was "inadvisable" to admit them because the Association had been founded when there were no women lawyers and it could not have been intended for them. During 45 minutes of debate on the subject last week it was pointed out that the Association might lose its tax-exempt privileges as an educational institution if the exclusion of women continued.

Day after the bars were let down at the Bar Association, the names of six women, lawyers were posted on the bulletin board at No. 42 West 44th Street to be voted en. One was Lawyer Susan Brandeis (Mrs. Jacob H. Gilbert), whose pet dislike is to be referred to as the daughter of Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis because she does not want to trade on her father's fame. Plump, fortyish. the mother of two boys and a girl, Mrs. Gilbert is a member of the New York State Board of Regents (educational overseers) and maintains a Manhattan law practice with her husband.

* Four days before in Albany the State Legislature passed a bill allowing women to sit on juries, making New York the 23rd State in which the privilege is granted (TIME, Jan. 25).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.