A recent legal history collection I have been reading includes an oral history built from interviews with 45 women lawyers, most of whom graduated from law school in Ontario in the 1970s.
These women have since become judges, academics, law firm partners, politicians, senior civil servants, benchers, even an ambassador.
Back then, they were law students - at a time when barely one law student in 10 was a woman. The story is how those women dealt with that.
The central event occurred at a class in the bar admission course at Osgoode Hall in November 1977. The topic was how to hire law office staff.
'The instructor, distinguished real estate lawyer Albert Strauss, was entertaining the class by handing out typical help-wanted ads: “Beautiful, young, and confidential secretary [wanted],” one read.
“Unless very beautiful, you should be able to take short-hand. . . . You should be a whiz at making good coffee.” Included were pointers on getting staff to work for free.
Some of the women going to the class had primed themselves for a confrontation. They peppered the instructor with denunciations of the sexist and exploitative course materials. They seized the microphone to protest. They demanded an apology. They walked out, throwing the course materials away.
The instructor and, apparently, most of the male students struck back. There was hissing and laughter. There were bra jokes. Words like “hysterical,” “destructive,” and “sarcastic” were flung out with dismissive contempt. “If these people are going to be lawyers, well, good luck to them.”
The essay is by Constance Backhouse, now a professor and a bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada, but also one of that class of 1977, and at this point she enters the story herself.
As protest and counterattack raged around the classroom, she writes, “Diana Majury and I decided to call the press.” The whole thing hit the front page of The Globe and Mail, and the women claimed a small victory.
Backhouse’s essay has the first-person vividness that eyewitness account, oral history, and memoir can provide. But it also has the stats to demonstrate the change those women were taking part in.
After being fewer than five per cent of Ontario law students for decades, women would increase their proportion to almost 30 per cent between 1970 and 1980. It was, Backhouse’s interviewees agree, “a revolution in numbers.”
In 1977, women students were still a minority in a sexist profession, but they were achieving “a critical mass.” Most of them had no, or few, lawyers in their families.
They came from less prosperous families than male law students. The opportunity for professional careers seemed entirely new. Most came to law school already holding feminist views. “We were the new wave.”
Backhouse calls them a “turbulent, insubordinate, ambitious, free-wheeling cohort of women.” What happened when they hit law school? “All of the interviewees, even those who came to law school a decade or more after the earliest entrants in the group, reported sexism, racism, and homophobia ran rampant.”
As one of them says, “Few women today have the same experience we did of sitting in a room with our mouths hanging open at the level of sexism being displayed.”
Some of this seems like a story from another age. Feminism, after all, was hardly new in 1977. Women, feminist messages, and anti-sexism were familiar aspects of university life a decade before this incident.
What is most startling, perhaps, from this and other accounts of women in law in the 1970s is how late and how retrograde the profession of law was in these matters.
Backhouse’s essay in just one in a new collection called, The Promise and Perils of Law. Jim Phillips studies embattled Halifax lawyers in the 1780s.
Susan Lewthwaite and Hamar Foster each look at the risks of “cause lawyering” almost a century ago. Eric Adams considers an establishment Toronto lawyer who campaigned for an American-style bill of rights - in reaction to big-government excesses in the Second World War.
The topic of Backhouse’s essay is one of the most recent in the anthology. Not all history has to happen a long time ago.
Christopher Moore’s most recent book is McCarthy Tétrault: Building Canada’s Premier Law Firm. His web site is www.christophermoore.ca.
