Cravath in '52: No Women, No Nonsense, No Personality, Just Work

If any young professional women would like a refresher course on the barriers to employment their grandmothers (or great-grandmothers!) faced, take a walk down memory lane at Law.com with Charles Reich as he Recalls Law Firm Life of Yesteryear . . . the year I was born -- 1952.

By 1952, the "second wave" women's movement was less than 20 years in the future. Reading this makes you wonder what took us so long.

Photo links to archived 1952 article on Spring hats. This would have been a distraction to the members of the Cravath boy's club of '52?

And before we give you your nostalgic view of class and privilege in mid-century America, let us not forget that, among the lawyers at any rate, there were also no Italians, no Catholics, no Jews, no African-Americans, no Puerto Ricans or Latinos of any national origin, no (out) gay men, and, no deaf or blind or physically challenged men of any color, religion or ethnicity.

Hence, the privileges bestowed upon the members of the club, who simply took them for granted or, worse, as quite rightly their own.

[T]here were only men at the Cravath of 1952. No women lawyers, no women secretaries or stenographers, no women in any capacity at all were allowed in the hallways of Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

"We are a place of business," it was explained to me. Ladies would be a "distraction."

Even the messengers, who carried documents from one office to another and sharpened our stacks of pencils every morning, were elderly men in gray office jackets, reputedly recruited from among the ranks of retired runners at the exchange. If I needed to dictate, a buzz quickly brought a male "steno" who was older than I was. There was a special midnight shift of stenos who would have any late-night work freshly typed and ready on a partner's desk first thing in the morning.

"Women wouldn't be safe in downtown New York during these night hours," it was explained.

In 1952 Harvard Law School did not accept women as students. Only a tiny percentage of the students at Yale Law School were women. When, as a third-year student at Yale, I was interviewed by a series of New York firms, I never met a woman lawyer. You must wonder why this was so. I can only speculate.

Obviously, male bigotry played a major role. But I think something else was involved -- an attempt to protect certain values that mattered greatly to the practitioners of that time. They wanted a workplace free of the messiness of male-female relations. They liked to say, "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," and be done with it. Women might bring distractions: flirtations, gossip, dating. No more male bonding.