The First Women Lawyers (Mary Jane Mossman)

• Author: Nicole Bermbach
• Position: Is in her second year of law school at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law
• Pages: 90-94

90 n APPEAL VOLUME 13

BOOK REVIEW

THE FIRST WOMEN LAWYERS

BY MARY JANE MOSSMAN

Reviewed By Nicole Bermbach*

CITED: (2008) 13 Appeal 90-94

In 2006 there was an equal number of men and women in the f‌irst year class at the Faculty

of Law at the University of Victoria. This was notable as women had outnumbered men for

the previous few years. Aside from superf‌icial interest, I have never paid much attention to the

gender composition of any of my classes or programs. In deciding to go to law school, I wor-

ried about my academic performance and whether I would make a good lawyer. Gender never

entered the picture. This does not mean gender is no longer a basis of inequality in society in

general or the legal profession in particular or that I am unaffected by sex-specif‌ic attitudes and

behaviours. Gender remains a live issue; however, growing up in the late twentieth century,

there was nothing remarkable to me about women in university, just as there was nothing

unusual about having a female doctor or professor. It turns out I am wrong: there is much to

be remarked on.

The story of the entry of women into the legal professions is told in Mary Jane Mossman’s

book, The First Women Lawyers.1 Her book compares women’s experiences in North American,

Europe, India and Australasia from the later half of the nineteenth through the early twenti-

eth century. In chronicling women’s emergence as legal professionals the book also charts the

evolution of law as a profession, the increasing access for women to higher education, and the

movement of women out of the private sphere and into the public.

The First Women Lawyers is divided into eight chapters. An introduction and conclusion

serve as bookends for the six substantive chapters; each of these six chapters concentrates on

the entry of women into the legal professions in a different geographical location. The f‌irst two

chapters focus on North America and detail the admittance of women to the bar in the United

States and Canada. The next chapter describes women in the law in the United Kingdom and

the following two chapters deal with countries within the British Empire: New Zealand and

India. The focus of the penultimate chapter is women’s entry into the legal professions on the

European continent.

The author, Mary Jane Mossman, is a Professor of Law at Osgoode Hall Law School of York

University. The First Women Lawyers is the work of a scholar and not surprisingly the book is

thorough and well-researched. The author draws heavily on secondary sources as well as origi-

* Nicole Bermbach is in her second year of law school at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law.

1 Mary Jane Mossman, The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, the Law, and the Legal Professions (Port-

land, OR: Hart Publishing, 2006). The term “legal professions” ref‌lects Mossman’s adoption of “a wide ranging def‌inition

of the term ‘lawyer’ to encompass not only those women who gained formal admission to the legal professions, but also

others who were engaged in legal work without achieving the status of formal admission”, at 9.