BARRISTERS AND GENTLEMEN: A CRITICAL LOOK AT SEXISM IN THE LEGAL PROFESSION
| Published date | 01 July 1980 |
| Author | Rose Pearson,Albie Sachs |
| Date | 01 July 1980 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1980.tb01600.x |
BARRISTERS
AND GENTLEMEN: A
CRITICAL
LOOK
AT
SEXISM
IN
THE
LEGAL
PROFESSION
THE
legal emancipation
of
women is coming to be seen
as a
two-stage
process. The first, covering the period from approximately
1880
to
1920,
was marked by the struggle waged by women to be allowed to
take part in public and professional life-in concrete terms, to get
rid of the legal barriers which prevented them from voting, holding
public office, having access to higher education and entering the
professions.’ We are now witnessing the second stage of this move-
ment, which emerged in the late
1960s,
partly
as
an attack
on
the
remaining legal disabilities experienced by women, but more
crucially
as
an attempt to understand and remove those many
intangibles which have proved the greatest bar to the equality of
women-sexist attitudes rooted in tradition and manifested con-
tinuously in everyday life. In this article we are going to explore
some of those factors, both subtle and overt, which have ensured a
perpetuation
of
male predominance in the legal profession.
Significantly enough, the contemporary situation is not regarded
as at all problematic within the profession itself, thus demonstrating
that range
of
underlying attitudes which contributes to the continued
exclusion of women in anything like representative numbers from
powerful positions in the higher judiciary, or prestigious professional
work as barristers and solicitors.
It
is the taken-for-granted nature
of
this disproportion which makes it easy
to
disguise its blatant
nature; the public does not express amazement that most lawyers
are men, nor do the majority
of
legal professionals experience it as
even curious that
so
few of their colleagues are women. But the
coming into force
of
the Sex Discrimination Act at the beginning
of
1976,
the creation of the EquaI Opportunities Commission and
the recent increase in litigation under the Equal Pay
Act,
have
served notice that gender domination in important areas of public
life is no longer to be regarded as natural or inevitable.S Male
predominance might still be automatic, but it is no longer axio-
matic.
As
the principle of separate spheres slowly gives way to the
principle
of
equal opportunity, the legal profession and the judiciary
find themselves entrusted with a crucial role in the implementation
of
new concepts. This in turn raises the question of how free the
agencies charged with directing progress towards equality are
themselves of the very mischief they are called upon to eradicate.
If physicians are enjoined to heal themselves, there
is
no reason
why judges should not be called upon to judge themselves, or
1
Ray Strachey,
The Cause,
London, 1928; Sylvia Pankhurst,
The
Suflrugeffe.
London, 1911;
W.
Lyons Blease.
The Emnncipafion
of
English
Women,
London, 1913.
2
Our
use
of
this term is explained later.
J
Cj.
Jean Cousins.
The
Equality
Report,
N.C.C.L.
Rights for Women.
Unit
publication, London. December 1976.
400
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