The history of women's entrance into male-dominated professions such as law and medicine provides a unique and powerful framework for understanding the dynamics of professionalization and gender in society. While the profession of medicine has attracted much attention from historians and has resulted in several scholarly works, the history of women in the American legal profession has not been scientifically explored. This project will provide the first quantitative, historical analysis of women lawyers in modern American society. A profile of several generations of women lawyers will be compiled with the analysis focusing on long-term social, demographic, educational, family, and professional characteristics. In addition to aggregate census data, the primary data sets for the study include (1) a survey of approximately 300 women lawyers undertaken in 1920 by the Bureau of Vocational Information; (2) professional digests published in 1939 and 1949; and (3) the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directories of practicing women laywers. These sources will yield invaluable statistical information on the socio-economic characteristics, attitudes, and career patterns of these women. The emphasis in the analysis of the three data sets will be on generational and cohort effects. By utilizing data bases that examine individual women lawyers, the study is able to reconstruct generational cohorts of women lawyers, and analyze long-term social change in the legal profession. This study will contribute significantly to the growing body of scholarly knowledge of the history of the legal profession and the professionalization of women in America. It will move the history of women lawyers beyond the traditional focus on women lawyers and the obstacles imposed by legal doctrine to focus on women lawyers in society at large. In doing so, the study will expand the parameters of scientific work on legal history and the legal profession.
