Part Three: Lawyering (1968-1984)

Chapter 9: 
A Problem in the Profession

In 1968, Diane Blank wanted to be a lawyer, and her road ahead seemed clear.  She had won admission to New York University School of Law. 

            Blank arrived at NYU and in Bride's magazine at the same moment.  In the fall 1968 issue of Bride's, there she was, a recent graduate of Barnard College.  While her new husband-the-law-student beamed, she hugged him, with both their wedding bands prominent in the foreground.  While he sat at the kitchen table, in what a caption called their tiny apartment "furnished with castoffs," she stood at a stove.  While he showed her a typed page, she smiled with appreciation.  While he strode with briefcase and tweed jacket down the front steps of their apartment building, apparently off to a day at Fordham Law School, she reached to hold his hand; she stepped gingerly and looked — as shot from below by the Bride's photographer — like a very leggy blonde. 

            "SUCCESS AS A STUDENT'S WIFE" proclaimed the Bride's headline, larger than any of the article's photos.  Beneath it, Blank and a few other brides told stories of working so a husband could get a college degree, study full time, or become the lawyer that he had dreamed of being "since he was a little boy."  But small print in one caption revealed a challenging story not told by the headline:  Diane Blank told Bride's that she would "never be satisfied just being a housewife."  She wanted success as a lawyer.  She was starting on a path that would change the behavior of some of America's most powerful law firms.

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[This is the opening of Part Three of Fred Strebeigh, Equal: Women Reshape American Law (W. W. Norton, 2009), listed in the Norton catalog and also at Amazon.com.]