Mary Jane Mossman

“It’s a girl!” As the Ontario press announced, Canada’s first woman lawyer was called to the Ontario bar in February 1897. Quiet Rebels explores experiences of exclusion among the few women lawyers up to 1957, and how their experiences continue to shape gender issues in the contemporary legal profession. Author Mary Jane Mossman tells the stories of all 187 Ontario women lawyers 1897-1957, revealing the legal profession’s gendered patterns. As a small handful at the Law School, (sometimes the only woman), they were often ignored, and they faced discrimination in obtaining articling positions and legal employment. Most were Protestant, white, and middle-class, and a minority of Jewish, Catholic, and immigrant women lawyers faced even greater challenges. The book also explores some changes, as well as continuities, for the much larger numbers of Ontario women lawyers in recent decades. This longitudinal study of women lawyers’ gendered experiences in the profession during six decades of social, economic, and political change in early twentieth-century Ontario identifies factors that created – or foreclosed – women lawyers’ professional success. The book’s final section explores how some current women lawyers, in spite of their increased numbers, must remain “quiet rebels” to succeed.

In this first full-length account of Helena Normanton's life and career, Judith Bourne tells of her fight to join the Bar of England and Wales and open it up to women. The book describes how her ambition was forged as a child after seeing her mother patronised by a solicitor. It tells how the press were quick to pigeon-hole and harass her, leading to disciplinary proceedings for 'self-advertising'. Enmeshed in a world of men, Helena Normanton faced a constant struggle to establish herself against a backdrop of prejudice, misogyny and discrimination - as when solicitors, fearful of the unknown, were reluctant to instruct her, leaving her to take on poor person's cases, dock briefs and those 'deemed suitable for a woman'. But Helena Normanton was a force to be reckoned with. She was not just the first woman to be admitted to an Inn of Court, hold briefs in the High Court and Old Bailey, and (with Rose Heilbron) be made a King's Counsel, but a prolific author, leading feminist and speaker who entranced audiences at home and abroad. Along with the controversies that eternally surrounded her progress and her foibles, this is all contained in this captivating book.

This comparative study explores the lives of some of the women who first initiated challenges to male exclusivity in the legal professions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Their challenges took place at a time of considerable optimism about progressive societal change, including new and expanding opportunities for women, as well as a variety of proposals for reforming law, legal education, and standards of legal professionalism. By situating women's claims for admission to the bar within this reformist context in different jurisdictions, the study examines the intersection of historical ideas about gender and about legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. In exploring these systemic issues, the study also provides detailed examinations of the lives of some of the first women lawyers in six jurisdictions: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, India, and western Europe. In exploring how individual women adopted different legal arguments in litigated cases, or devised particular strategies to overcome barriers to professional work, the study assesses how shifting and contested ideas about gender and about legal professionalism shaped women's opportunities and choices, as well as both support for and opposition to their claims. As a comparative study of the first women lawyers in several different jurisdictions, the book reveals how a number of quite different women engaged with ideas of gender and legal professionalism at the turn of the twentieth century.