ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE WOMEN AND LAW CONFERENCE FROM PIONEERS TO PRESIDENTS AND BEYOND
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE AT THE WOMEN AND LAW CONFERENCE FROM PIONEERS TO PRESIDENTS AND BEYOND WOMEN AND LAW
It was with great pleasure that I accepted the invitation to speak at this fascinating and timely Conference on Women and the Law. I particularly welcome the fact that this occasion brings together women lawyers from Britain and Ireland, North and South, at a time in our history when we are discovering how much we have to share with each other, to learn from each other, to achieve together. I would like to say a particular ‘Céad Míle Fáilte’ to those who have travelled long distances – or foregone large fees - to be with us today.
Looking around me at the quite exceptional level of talent and achievement at this Conference, I am struck by just how far women have come within the legal profession on these two islands over the past three decades.
When, as a teenager I first voiced the notion of studying law, our parish priest was quick to say emphatically: “Forget it! You have two impediments - no relatives in the law and you are a woman.” My mother, whose reverence for the clergy was matchless, nonetheless took him roundly to task and offered me the only career advice she ever offered, which was to ignore him. It was the best advice I ever got and I am glad I took it but in fairness to that kindly man who was generous and supportive when I entered Law School, his views were largely typical of the times and based on a fairly accurate analysis of the prevailing culture.
I began studying law in 1969, not exactly the dawn of the Ice Age, but at a time when probably fewer than 10% of the students in my year were female. Thirty years later the story is very different with female law students often equalling or outnumbering men. The change in demographic pattern is of course just one visible, outward sign of a remarkable revolution in attitudes and expectations. Looking back, I am amazed at the stubbornness, determination and sheer naivety that carried us through, despite the lack of role models, despite the pervasive less-than-encouraging attitudes of the time. Just how discouraging is probably best exemplified by this story from my own direct experience.
Shortly before commencing my undergraduate legal studies at The Queen’s University of Belfast I, like all my fellow and sister undergraduates, received a letter from the Faculty with strict instructions that we were to prepare ourselves for our studies by buying and reading the great Glanville Williams book “Learning the Law”. We descended like locusts on the bookshop and devoured his words, for given the importance attached to them by the Faculty we knew that this was Holy Writ, the key to our future, the gospel according to Glanville.
What message did his book send to that generation of young female students, hoping to embark on a career within the legal profession? For most of this legal bible, there is precious little mention either way of women, and practically no acknowledgement from the author that some of his readership might be anything other than white, middle class and male. And then, on page 192, women finally get a look in. This is how he begins the passage:
‘It is difficult to write this section without being ungallant. Parliament, it is said, can do everything except make a man a woman or a woman a man. In 1919, in the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, it went as far as it could to perform the second feat. The results so far have not been striking’.
So much for the exceptional talents and courage of women such as Georgie Frost, who helped blaze the trail of equal access to legal and public office from which so many of us have benefited. He continues:
‘Practice at the Bar, as has already been said, is difficult enough for a man: it is heartbreaking for a woman. She has a double prejudice to conquer: the prejudice of the solicitor and the prejudice of the solicitor’s lay client. Combined, these two prejudices are almost inexpugnable’. Lots of encouragement there, then, for the young, enthusiastic woman just starting off in law. On he goes:
‘It is not easy for a young man to get up and face the court; many women find it harder still. A woman’s voice, also, does not carry as well as a man’s.’ Clearly, he’d never met the women of North Belfast.Even in the case of the few successes grudgingly mentioned by Glanville Williams, their very rarity seemed to put them out of reach. He tells us:
‘A few women have established themselves at the criminal Bar. Miss Rose Heilbron, whose married name is Mrs Burnstein, is Britain’s only woman Recorder. There is also a woman County Court judge and a woman Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate. However, the technical Bar qualification is a good enough stepping stone to posts that do not demand actual practice at the Bar. Most women barristers, if they do not marry, take this way out’.
The exact nature of the link between marriage and practicing at the Bar remains a mystery and the reference to a way out creates the impression of women having wandered by accident into a place we should not be. More bad news was to come:
‘With solicitors, the tale is a little better, though not much. So far, comparatively few women have been admitted. Miss Maud Crofts, in an article that was not designed to frighten women from this Branch of the profession, admitted (1) that it is more difficult for a woman than for a man to obtain a salaried position in a firm, and (2) that, difficult as it normally is for a man to obtain a partnership in a successful firm of solicitors, it is harder still for a woman to do so, unless of course she has family connections or influence.‘Still, women are slowly making their way in the profession, In London, at least fifteen women solicitors are running their own practices, and a few firms are run jointly by husbands and wives. Some women solicitors are employed as managing clerks by large firms to deal with divorce and nullity work, since women clients frequently prefer to confide the details of their married lives to another woman. The Law Society has several women solicitors on its staff’.
All sound, valuable work, but hardly the picture of a crusading heroine that had attracted many of my generation of women to the law. And just when you thought the unremittingly bleak picture couldn’t be any worse, Glanville William continues:
‘In local Government, prospects are probably even worse than in private practice. Professional appointments in local government are the subject of keen competition, and a woman who is short-listed with four or five men does not stand much chance of appointment. It must be remembered that the duties of a Town Clerk or Clerk to a County Council may include advocacy, and local government bodies do not like to be represented by a woman’
No hope there then. But wait, there was to be light at the end of the tunnel:
‘It is different’, he tells us ‘with the Government Departments, where the work is purely administrative. Here there is not the same prejudice and a woman barrister stands a fair chance of appointment. Since 1946 married women are as eligible as single, and marriage after appointment is not a disqualification.’
In this part of Ireland, of course, married women had another 27 years to wait before the Marriage Bar was dismantled.
Even the most enthusiastic of female students would find it difficult to avoid the disheartening conclusion that the previous 191 pages of Glanville William’s guidance for law novices, had been directed exclusively at their male colleagues. His advice to women was loud and clear: you might, if lucky, get somewhere in the Civil Service, but leave the real legal bastions to the boys.
The most depressing thing about his description is its accuracy in depicting widely held attitudes of the time: he conveys the gloomy certainty that this is not just how things were; this is how they were always going to be. Who were we to argue with Glanville Williams, legal paragon?
Still we small band of women plodded on in spite of it all. In 1974 three of us had the temerity to seek call to the Northern Ireland Bar. No women were practising there at the time, though some had tried in the past and given up, so we could have been doing with a bit of encouragement. Without a trace of irony, the gift presented to each of us by the Benchers on the day of our call was a specially bound copy of – yes, you guessed it – ‘Learning the Law’.
Nevertheless, change was coming, slowly and sometimes painfully, but also irreversibly. And if today on re-reading Glanville Williams misogynistic words I am appalled at our then quiescence, I am also deeply relieved to know that this generation would likely frogmarch him to a special sitting of the Equal Opportunities Commission and only a Law school set on fomenting violence or researching the Dark Ages would ever direct students’ attention to such a book. Today it is an embarrassment but also an encouragement to believe in change, its possibilities, its inexorability.
Today, though still a relative rarity, the idea of a woman judge, whether in Britain or Ireland, no longer raises as much as an eyebrow, except to the extent that people are more likely to comment adversely on the gender imbalance. Even as regards the Presidency, having a female incumbent has long since lost its shock value, and indeed small boys are now rumoured to plaintively ask their mothers if men are eligible to apply for the position. Here in Ireland, this last decade has witnessed a wonderfully uplifting and long overdue explosion of women’s talents into every sphere of life, including the law. I look at young women of my daughters’ generation, and marvel at their self-confidence, their unselfconscious assumption that they are capable of competing and achieving in whatever walk of life they choose, irrespective of gender.
We are nearer than we have ever been to enabling the full genius of women to blossom. But we still have a distance to go. The proportion of women judges, senior counsel, and senior partners, remains low enough to suggest that the journey is only half over or half begun. We cannot leave its completion to chance. We still need champions, men and women who push out the boundaries, who work to achieve equal access at all levels of the law, not just because it is right, but because the law, no less than any other sphere, will be the richer for availing of all the talent, imagination and expertise at its disposal. The reverse also holds true that for as long as that full talent base is not used, for as long as talent lies untapped, we are individually and collectively impoverished.
Conferences such as this prove just how much talent we have on these islands. As we celebrate the achievements of women in the field of law to date, I believe that the best, the most exciting times are yet to come. I wish you well in your deliberations I hope you have a most enjoyable day and that out of this day will come a new set of friendships, a new network of endeavour, a new energy to help us reach the destination Georgie Frost would have been proud of.