“He asked that question, ‘Why are you here occupying the place of a man’ because he wanted to be armed with stories from the women themselves.”
When we started this project, our goal was to talk to as many of the women in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Harvard Law School class as possible. My colleague Molly Olmstead and I spent months tracking down the ones who are still alive, and interviewing family members in depth about the women who have passed. But then Justice Ginsburg agreed to speak to us, too.
Then some of the guys at the law school decided they would take up that idea, but they would use the women in the class instead of the Radcliffe girls.There was, in those years, the Harvard Law Wives’ Club. So most of the women I knew were married to men mostly in Marty’s class. And I got invited to the Law Wives Association because I was a law wife. But that was to help the wives be supportive of their husbands who were engaged in this intense education at the law school.
Can we talk about the famous Dean Erwin Griswold story, where the dean asked the women of Harvard Law School why they were there taking the place of a man? I only bring it up because Flora told us that she actually thought he was trying to be helpful to women., by Judy Hope. And she has as an appendix on the budget, on what it was going to cost for women to come to Harvard Law School. The cost was fixing up a bathroom in Austin Hall, which, by the way, was always overheated.
There was a story I heard from several of the women that … I have to say my jaw hit the floor. They described something called ladies’ day, where the women in the class had to answer all the questions, and even had to sing on the spot.I knew about [Leach] lining them up in the first row, and after ignoring them the whole semester, that one day concentrating all [the] attention [on them]. But I think my classmates were warned by the women in the class ahead, of what they could expect.
I think you get that sense from Judy Hope’s book too, that [the female students] benefited from the women in the class ahead of them. And in turn they wanted the women in the class behind them to have it easier. But most of this, it just came with the territory. We didn’t even question it. I don’t remember anyone asking to have a women’s bathroom put in, in Langdell Hall. We just accepted that’s the way it was.
Marty ended up having the best grades that he ever had in a semester. The semester was 15 weeks, I think he was in class for two weeks. But he had the best teachers, his classmates. I thought all along that Palmieri took a chance on me, because he had two daughters, and he was envisioning how he would want the world to be for his daughters. It was not the case. In later years, he did become a big champion of women’s opportunities. One of his daughters became a doctor, and he was very incensed about the discrimination that she was encountering, the uncompromising hours she had to work.
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