Abstract
Women Attorneys and the Changing Workplace: High Hopes, Mixed Outcomes considers the realities and limits of gendered social change in the United States. Based primarily on interviews with women who earned law degrees prior to 1976, the work explores the opportunities, experiences, and impact of women lawyers. Author Phyllis Kitzerow places interview participants into three cohorts—the pioneer, transition, and modern groups—based on year of graduation from law school. She then frames the analysis around the similarities and differences in opportunities, successes, and work–family issues across cohorts.
The book is organized around key themes in career development. Chapter two focuses on the decision to go into law and women’s experiences in law school, revealing the privileged nature of these women alongside the challenges they faced getting into and succeeding in their programs. The next two chapters detail these graduates’ first jobs following graduation (chapter three) and eventual long-term careers in law (chapter four). Chapter five assesses career success using a variety of measures, including income, standing in the local legal community, and self-assessments of meeting expectations and achievements. In a chapter sure to resonate with scholars studying contemporary challenges for employed mothers, work–family balance is the focus of chapter six. Springboarding from that discussion, participants reflect on how gender mattered in their lived experiences (chapter seven). In this seventh chapter, Kitzerow cleverly juxtaposes these reflections with current law students’ views on how gender matters today in law school and beyond. The book concludes with a thoughtful discussion of remaining barriers to gender equality, with particular attention to proposed solutions to building more equitable workplaces.
In order to capture these patterns, Kitzerow draws from two rounds of interviews. The first round, collected in 1975, consists of interviews with 77 women attorneys in a large eastern city who graduated from law school between 1925 and 1975. During the second round of data collection in 2010, Kitzerow follows up with 65 interviews of women attorneys meeting the same criteria (about half of which were in the original study). For analysis, she groups the interview participants into cohorts that graduated by 1963 (pioneer group), between 1964 and 1972 (transition group), and between 1973 and 1975 (modern group).
The cohort approach is an effective one, drawing out distinctions among women who helped integrate the legal field that may have been missed otherwise. This helps build a more comprehensive and complex analysis of how gender has mattered over time. The book achieves an appropriate balance in presenting unique opportunities afforded by structural changes during the second wave of the feminist movement (such as firms actively seeking to hire a first woman attorney) and persistent barriers (such as work–family conflicts). The addition of data from a focus group of 10 women attending law school in 2011 in the last few chapters considerably enhances the work. In this section, we see the lack of awareness of obstacles women lawyers entering the profession today will likely face. Considering these discussions alongside the experiences of the pioneering women attorneys could help foster valuable classroom discussion of historical and contemporary gender inequality.
In addition to concentrating on cohorts, the analytic approach is qualitative, centered on the presentation of individual narratives and drawing heavily from the participants’ own words. Drawing on the respondents’ stories alongside enumerating the broader patterns in the data makes the material accessible to a wide audience. The book is at its best when integrating the original analyses with past research findings. For example, in the section on balancing work and family, the discussion weaves participants’ experiences as part-time lawyers with findings from social science studies of part-time employment arrangements and their consequences for attorneys.
Given these strengths, the book is especially appropriate for undergraduate courses on gender, work, and work and family, as well as qualitative methodology. The easy to follow organization and straightforward presentation will appeal to students new to the subject matter, while the more complex patterns of opportunities and barriers will challenge the more experienced reader to think critically. As the book focuses on generally privileged, professional women, it would pair well with books or other readings on less privileged women navigating the worlds of work and family to provide a more comprehensive picture of the challenges facing women throughout the twentieth century and into present day.