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… only one? What a positive question, leading to such useful information sharing and greater knowledge in the warp and weft of who we are and where have stood, marched, written, and influenced and been influenced over the years.
… please pardon the Socratic interpretation for the answers you have made me so eager to share. After all, I challenge you, to realize and identify who has been or is a “historic leading lady” in your life at any key stage — the path that made you stronger, more confident, better educated, better prepared — as well as those who went before us and paved the way with blood sweat and tears. This is my 25th year in practice. I’m the 1st Native Southerner ever accepted to my 1st tier law school, the 1st to attend a Southern state university, the youngest women ever accepted at one of DC’s “Big Three” private clubs, the Club where the Supreme Ct justices are ACTIVE members, to be mentored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg at that Club and the Directors of corporations and executive offices who took me under their wing, to become, as I had with my law school and BigLaw employers, the recruiter who brought in the most members — good matches — per year. To use terms published by the AMA and then the ABA, I “put in my decade” in BigLaw, making me part of the “0.01%” of female attorneys “to ever survive to achieve that rank.” While I had a tenure track partnership agreement, I’d finished the build-out of my home office & library and my external office and library, my website, etc., and left my 10 yr meeting at the firm laughing, taking $500K portable business with me and being booked solid for the next 2 years already — my freedom, my terms, far more money and guaranteed stability — because I didn’t have to deal with the disruptions or uninformed grasping of others. To get to that place was so very hard. Below, here are the Iconic Leading Ladies of my Life who got me to living my dreams. Where available, citations provided:
1. My Mother, Elizabeth, … her mother (NB), her grandmother (N), and her great-grandmother (R). My great-great-grandmother & great-great-grandfather gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 1800s and at the turn of the century to ensure that the 2 nearest nascent colleges would be built into reputable colleges with all the schools needed to provide liberal arts college degrees to men AND WOMEN. These co-ed liberal arts (& music and theatre) colleges, LaGrange College, and Bowdon College (the latter which the family sold to the State to merge with Georgia A&M to become West Georgia College, now West Georgia University) are known by their current names and statuses but not as the forward-thinking, pioneering, intellectually rigorous co-ed colleges they began as. In law school in Boston, in addition to having to demonstrate that I did, in fact own shoes (hundred pairs, give or take!), I frequently had to speak up to correct these verifiable achievements of Southern women — in finding, building, furnishing these schools, in the courage it took to took to ride off by wagon to university. We created this and maintained this co-ed culture without crowing about it and its influence should not be forgotten.
(citations: The History of Bowdon College; The History of H. Julian Reeves; The History of the Lovverns, … etc. (Full walls of shelves in Georgia libraries)).
(2) From my brilliant & witty colleague Elizabeth (Beth) Graddy [now Esq.], with whom I had the impoverishing yet exciting honor to serve as an Academic Intern for U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, Chair of the Armed Services Committee, U.S. Liaison to Soviet President Gorbachev (1992): The following book & author will change your life:
(3) Harriet Goldher-Lerner, Ph.d., author of the best-selling, still in print: “The Dance of Anger,” and the subsequent follow-up books. This book is NOT about anger — to me it is misnamed. It is about identifying your boundaries — what you want and need and how to build and maintain them. How to break out of repetitive, useless, unproductive arguments. How, as a woman, to not force yourself to accept sadness and ultimately depression as your lot in relationships or in life just because we’ve been socialized that was women, to display anger — even physical boundaries — is unacceptable. There are all kinds of names and widespread shunning of “angry” women. Sad, or even depressed, women are accepted — its expected. They aren’t viewed as successful or as good company, but they are not “the troublemakers” like “angry women” are.
Reading prior to starting law school “The Dance of Anger” and the other life-altering, mind-shaping book I’ll mention next, prepared me better than any course, any advice, any experience I’d encountered before or since. … Thanks to what I learned from this book, which reads as if it is letters from your best friend, I was made an adjunct professor as a 1L and then for every year of law school thereafter — Loved it!
Because I learned how to build boundaries and patrol them, I was able to fend off and head-to-head fight the sexual and physical abuse that was open and rampant in BigLaw in my early years. Do I admire the female partners who KNEW and who turned me away when I begged for help, advising me, “Just endure it. Don’t cause trouble. Ideally, [that partner will] find someone new to harass in next year’s 1st year class, or, surely, by the one thereafter. He always does.” If that advice doesn’t make you sick; if you believe telling 1st year female attorneys being physically molested and emotionally harassed DAILY to “just take it,” “not make trouble,” and let the abuse be foisted onto the next young woman is reasonable advice — please get help. Get help through the Bar and through this site, and individual therapy.
For me, that last “bit of advice” of “endure bodily violations,” work disruptions, and … HOPE … hope to foist this virus and his protected illegal actions onto another person — That was the gasoline & my tinderbox. No I didn’ sue them — I solved the problem. And the 5 senior associate women came to me with gratitude. I’m not the only one who lived this way in BigLaw in the late 1990s, literally st the turn of the century, as we broke the barriers that required us to wear matching skirt suits & pantyhose EVERY DAY. No coordinated separates. When Casual Friday was tentatively introduced in 1999, we female attorneys were permitted to wear denim skirts that came at least 3” below our knees. Really. Skirts only for us.
… to young attorneys I meet today who think that that period was SO ANCIENT — I want to shake them to “ Wake up!” The paradigm still exists. Look how hard that the female partners you see in your workplace and in the field have come! Look what all we accomplished! Some day, 2 decades will mean little to you in viewing the expanse of time. WHAT have you done to rstanding the working
of any of your colleaguesthank you for? What have you done to help right the paradigm? You have time. he
(4) Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., “Talking from 9 to 5: Men and Women in Conversation” and, her award-winning debut, “You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation.”
(5) Dean DeLucca of Boston College Law School. Thank you for shepherding us — each one of us a people. May your next life be free of the excruciating pain that you cheerfully claimed gave you a better understanding of our needs and pains.
(6) Rosemarie Kelly, Esq., Deputy Dir. of EPA. Friend, mentor, wit — and woman of strength who protected her own. My devotion.