Women Lawyers
Rewriting the Rules
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The very presence of women in the law—normal as it may seem to us today—signals revolutionary change in a social order that for centuries entrusted control over its rules to men. Mona Harrington examines both the problems women meet when they claim equal authority as rule makers, and the impact of new perspectives and issues that women bring with them into the profession.
On the basis of more than one hundred interviews with women lawyers, judges, law school professors, and law students, and through the stories of their daily experiences, Harrington pinpoints and analyzes the key factors holding women back in a profession still dominated by males—among them the “men’s club” ambience, the focus on billable hours, sexual harassment and the inequality it perpetuates, lingering unequal division of labor at home, and hostile media images of women in positions of power.
She shows us what life is like for women lawyers in practice today and how their dilemmas reflect the social issues of our time. She gives us the voices of women who have adapted to the cultural codes of corporate law and women who have broken them; women who have successfully balanced their professional and private lives and women who feel trapped by the combination of long hours at the office and full responsibility at home. She introduces us to women in new and alternative firms, on the faculties of small public law schools, in in-house legal departments, in prosecutors’ offices and courtrooms—women who are devising new rules and legal theories to bring about change.
Women Lawyers is must reading for every woman in the midst of—or contemplating—a career in the law, and for the men who work with them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drawing on interviews with more than 100 female lawyers, most of them graduates of Harvard Law School, attorney Harrington (coauthor of Women of Academe ) presents an absorbing mosaic of the issues impeding advancement of her subjects. Women lawyers, she argues plausibly, ``are on dangerous ground,'' connected to both the male establishment and the majority of women, yet anchored by neither. She describes the professional, legal and social strictures that hamper women at corporate law firms. Her account of the tensions at law schools is interesting but brief, as is her survey of media representation of lawyers. More trenchant are her expositions of father/ daughter roles as they affect a woman lawyer, women's style of dress and the stresses of the competitive litigation ethos. She finds some progress on the periphery--women creating more collegial firms, or publicizing the pressures of law school on their personal lives. A few of her topics deserve further analysis, but Harrington provides much food for thought. Author tour.