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No Alternative. To duck such opposition, some women lawyers go into practice with their husbands. Others choose jobs with such organizations as the Legal Aid Society, where the pay is low but the work is varied and women are welcome. Some of the ablest go into politics or civil rights work—or both, as did Mrs. Constance Baker Motley, who has argued Supreme Court cases as Assistant Counsel for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and last month became the first Negro woman to be elected to the New York state senate.
Many women lawyers have found that Government service, both state and federal, has been by far the most accessible career. "If there's been any discrimination, nobody's told me about it," says Mrs. Mary Ellen Parks, one of four women among the 49 Assistant U.S. Attorneys for the District of Columbia. "Government attracts the competent women because they have no alternative," adds Bessie Margolin, herself formidably competent, with a doctorate in law from Yale, 31 years of Government experience, and a staff of 33 lawyers working for her as head of the Labor Department's litigation section. Other women have found several years of tax or labor law with the Government one means to force open the doors to private practice.
Troopers' Tongues. At the top of the profession, the law school professorships and law-firm partnerships are still largely closed to women. Yet Lawyer Soia Mentschikoff, 49, has achieved both. She was made a partner in a prominent Wall Street law firm in 1944, taught law at Harvard from 1947 to 1949, since 1950 has been at the University of Chicago Law School, teaching a range of topics from arbitration to an advanced course in "Law in the Behavioral Sciences." Her wise observation is that by acting naturally as a woman, "appealing to the emotional component present in the situation and using different techniques with different individuals," Portia often has an edge over the all-too-logical male.
The most newsworthy brand of law practice, trial work, is also for the most part closed to women, with such notable exceptions as the gaudy Gladys Towles Root, currently appearing (in four-foot cartwheel hats and purple dresses) for the defense in the Sinatra kidnaping case. To most men—laymen and lawmen alike—women are physically unfitted for the grueling ordeals of trial work, and emotionally "too kind and forgiving." In reaction to male prejudice, until fairly recently many women attorneys dressed mannishly, cussed like troopers—and thereby forfeited one of their most potent weapons: feminine intuition and charm.