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The Weaker Sex. Northwestern University Law Professor Jack Coons, who readily admits that he is personally prejudiced against women lawyers, suggests that such qualms today stem largely from the fact that men's egos are more easily bruised. Their resentment of female competition, he says, "might be fear of the embarrassment of being beaten by a woman in a toe-to-toe struggle. Men are the weaker sex in terms of pride. In medicine, everyone wants the same result. In the law, someone has to lose whenever a case goes to judgment." Women fare better in less strenuous appellate work, says Judge Harold R. Medina of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Despite male objections that an attractive woman has an "unfair" advantage in the courtroom, Medina recalls a case where the court was so absorbed in the legal aspects of a young woman attorney's case that the men accepted her simply as a lawyer. "When she was finished," says Medina, "she went right out and had a baby. We men hadn't even noticed she was pregnant."
Many Portias admit with a touch of asperity that they are often overpraised by men for a performance that would be regarded as merely competent in another male. "Women are not expected to have any sense," shrugs Jewel Rogers Lafontant, a statuesque, beautiful Chicago criminal lawyer whose father and grandfather were attorneys before her. As a Negro and a woman at the bar, Mrs. Lafontant—who has fought cases all the way to the Supreme Court—has probably faced more courtroom scowls in 18 years of trial work than almost any other U.S. attorney—male or female. Says she: "The law is an excellent profession for women. Perhaps they have more idealism than men." And, she smiles, they have one unbeatable advantage over the male: "We are naturally loquacious."