Women Lawyers: Rewriting the Rules

Drawing on interviews with more than 100 female lawyers, most of them graduates of Harvard Law School, attorney Harrington (coauthor of Women of Academe ) presents an absorbing mosaic of the issues impeding advancement of her subjects. Women lawyers, she argues plausibly, ``are on dangerous ground,'' connected to both the male establishment and the majority of women, yet anchored by neither. She describes the professional, legal and social strictures that hamper women at corporate law firms. Her account of the tensions at law schools is interesting but brief, as is her survey of media representation of lawyers. More trenchant are her expositions of father/ daughter roles as they affect a woman lawyer, women's style of dress and the stresses of the competitive litigation ethos. She finds some progress on the periphery--women creating more collegial firms, or publicizing the pressures of law school on their personal lives. A few of her topics deserve further analysis, but Harrington provides much food for thought. Author tour. (Jan.)