Adventures in Women’s Lib: I’d Rather Take Cash, Thank You

When I started practicing law eleven years ago, the profession was — I realize it now, in retrospect — on the crux of a major change.

The legal trade was one of the last holdouts against women’s encroachment on the “man’s world,” and litigation, in particular, was still decidedly a sausage fest. If I went to a deposition, I was usually the only woman in the conference room, apart from the stenographer and maybe the witness. If I entered a courthouse through the entrance reserved for attorneys, the court officer would often gruffly order me into the public line before I had a chance to display my court ID. In the courthouse, I was clearly a member of a small minority. There were still, at that time, old-school gentlemen-lawyers shuffling to and fro, cranky old men who started practicing back in the 1940’s, when some states still didn’t allow women to be admitted to the bar at all, or even to sit on juries. When they happened to be in a good mood, these men would patronize and condescend to you in truly quaint ways, that would seem tacky even in a plot for Mad Men. But most of the time, they were cross, loudly complaining about all these girls in the courthouse and bemoaning the death of law as a dignified profession.

How the world has changed, and how quickly!

On Child-Free Weddings

Over at Feministe, there is a discussion on whether banning children from weddings — which is becoming a trend, apparently — should be perceived as offensive to parents who are invited. Lots of virtual ink is spilled detailing children’s propensity for undecorous behavior, the poor parenting skills of people who reproduce (as oppose to the child-free, who frequently emerge in these discussions as the experts on proper parenting), and why whole classes of adults are not excluded from such events based on unacceptable behavior of certain of their members, while excluding children is okay.