Conversations with Peers
On Saturday afternoon, alumnae met in peer groups: "The First Fifteen," "The Middle Fifteen," and "The Recent Fifteen." Spouses, partners, and family attended, as did some current students curious about their predecessors’ Law School experiences.

The panelists talked about their careers and reminisced about the School—expressing a fascinating mix of shared frustrations, individual accomplishments, perseverance, isolation, camaraderie, lessons learned, hopes for the future, appreciation for how much the School has changed owing to the presence of women, and expectations for further progress.

Senior judge and thespian Frederica Brenneman '63 How I Learned to be Judge's Daughter Mom: I wake up at 3:30 a.m. in a panic: Amy has to bring [a] "snack" to Brownies tomorrow and I have precisely four hours to make it happen, before she leaves for school. I trundle downstairs, the dog wakes up with a start. I have nothing. No cookie mix, no cake mix—if I scrounge I can eke out Sour Cream Cake from what’s in my kitchen. I eke, and send Amy off with this cake which tastes, I admit it, a little — Amy: weird! Mom: —sophisticated, not weird, it’s an adult dessert, what can I say? It’s — Amy: weird! Mom: It was the best I could do, Ame. Amy: I knew that. I know that. That’s why when I saw the other Brownies (especially Kathleen) scrunch their faces up and say "this cake is weird!" I felt for all of us. I felt for the Brownies cuz they didn’t get a normal snack. I felt for me because everybody knew that I had brought the weird snack. And I felt for Mom because she got up at 3:30 and did the best she could. No other Brownie had a Mom-judge, they didn’t understand. There were no other Mom-judges. Then. From a play by Amy Brenneman, presented at Celebration 45.

Afterward, HLS Professor Martha Minow, a Yale graduate, led a wrap-up session featuring reports from all three eras. Former HLSA President Charlotte Armstrong ’53 was moderator of The First Fifteen. An experienced practitioner, and now a consultant in New York City, Armstrong said her group talked about "how we detached ourselves from the stereotype of women and began to redefine ourselves. We didn’t have mentors." While her peers had made a conscious choice to enter law, she said, they did not have a definite idea of what to do with their HLS degrees.

During The Middle Fifteen years, "the women’s movement hit," said Anne Libbin ’75, Pillsbury Madison & Sutro partner in San Francisco. "We felt we had more choices. We realized things were improving, but had the chutzpah to know it wasn’t good enough." Libbin’s era had the advantage of clinical legal education, she said. And despite the "pounding of the 1L year," and the women’s common feeling of not fitting in, HLS "taught us how to speak up—including asking for, and getting, a second women’s bathroom!"

Presenting The Recent Fifteen conclusions, Melanie Cook ’90, senior policy adviser to the Secretary, Department of Commerce, spoke of her peers’ higher expectations, debt worries, and desire for more practical training while studying at HLS, where they perceived a gap between theory-based studies and "what is happening in the world."

When asked by Minow about advice the women had been given, or not given, and the advice they would offer now, Armstrong said she and her peers enjoyed advising younger women, and did not resent at all that they had made it easier for others—"we’re delighting in it."

As for the future, Armstrong talked about the importance of giving back to society, and Cook emphasized the need for more formal mentoring for women and reduced law school debt. From the audience Suzanne Nossel ’96, coauthor with Elizabeth Westfall ’96 of Presumed Equal, which surveyed over 1,200 women lawyers in 77 firms, took up Susan Estrich’s earlier call for serious examination of HLS women’s progress in their professions.

Stories, Strategies, and Words of Wisdom
The Celebration 45 panel discussions took up the issues, challenges, problems, and satisfactions HLS women experience in a variety of evolving practice areas. The classrooms of Austin and Pound Halls filled with alumnae interested in the changing nature of criminal law practice, law firm work, government, entrepreneurship, alternative dispute resolution, public sector work, and other professional paths.

The final panel, on Sunday morning, was Professional Strategies for Women, a far-ranging discussion that drew graduates from 1953 onward, and, like all other Celebration events, attracted numerous male listeners too.

Dispensing professional advice, lessons learned, and candid personal accounts were N. Beth Emery ’77, vice president and general counsel of the California Independent System Operator Corp.; Jamie Gorelick ’75, vice chair, Fannie Mae Corporation; Andrea Zopp ’81, partner, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal; and Elizabeth Warren, Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at HLS. The discussion leader was Sara Holtz ’75, cofounder and partner of ClientFocus of Granite Bay, Calif., which helps women lawyers develop business opportunities.

When Holtz asked the panelists for their views on the most important elements contributing to women’s success, Gorelick emphasized the importance of having a vision of "what you want to be—not in terms of a specific job, but rather the things that are important to you." She added that being fun to work with is an "underappreciated aspect of success," and emphasized the importance of speaking, writing, "getting your name out there."

Like Gorelick, Zopp encouraged women listeners to take risks, to keep themselves open to serendipity. "Sara [Holtz] asked me if I have a plan for my career, and I said, ‘Please, don’t go there!’ But it is important to have self-awareness and to know what will make you happy." Zopp talked about making the tough decision to leave a job she loved in the U.S. Attorney’s office for private practice, because she felt her work was stagnating. Her first law firm experience was terrible but not a mistake, she emphasized, because it taught her what to look for when she made the jump to her current firm.

Emery talked about "staying on the message. I’m much more motivated by power and empowering others than by money, and when I got off-message was when I got into trouble." She has changed jobs many times to stick to her plan, "in a zigzag, not a ladder, career." Emery’s current work for the ISO of California puts her at the center of the state’s pioneering deregulation of the energy market. She got this job in part, she said, because she focused on developing energy clients while in private practice.

When Holtz raised the issue of weighing relocation to pursue work opportunities, Gorelick said, "It’s almost impossible to imagine a job good enough to bear the entire weight of my family’s happiness."

HLS Professor Warren said she had relocated frequently for professional reasons, which has entailed living in a different city from her husband, and, on one occasion, contending "with a child in junior high who threatened to shave her head if we moved again." However, Warren thinks it is unrealistic in some parts of the profession to expect to stay in one place and prosper professionally.

Several panelists said it was imperative to broaden notions of success for HLS students. While Emery thinks the School should increase student awareness of alternatives to private practice, such as work in government agencies, Gorelick believes that there is a "blizzard" of programs and information sources at HLS. Many students do not avail themselves of these resources, and opt for the corporate path out of "competition, inertia, and a failure to assess what they really want out of their work life."

Speaking up from the audience, Sondra Goldenfarb ’67, who worked as a part-time litigator while raising her children, said she had hoped that by now the full-time corporate lawyer model would have "broken down. But what I’m hearing from students indicates that they’re stuck in the same old mindset." Another listener, Sheila Kuehl, said that her experience in teaching at four law schools was that all 1Ls expressed "a great deal of anxiety" over their career prospects.

A 1980 graduate stressed the burden of law school debt: "Harvard needs to examine how finances affect career choices." A Class of 1997 alumna said, however, that she thought the School was doing more than ever, through the Office of Public Interest Advising and LIPP. "I have friends who plan on corporate law being a briefer chapter in their careers."

Holtz next raised career management tactics, and the importance of mentors. Warren said she had no single mentor, but throughout her education and career had found people "who were good at pieces of it. I’m very opportunistic. I’m willing to learn from anyone who will teach me."

"An important quality in getting a mentor or teacher is a lack of awe," said Gorelick. "If you are in awe of your environment, you might not approach" someone for guidance. "I see that awe factor more in young women than young men. Suspend awe and go for it."

Audience members and panelists agreed on the importance of getting more experienced people "invested" in one’s career, to prevent a woman lawyer’s potential isolation when a serious problem arises on the job.

Emery noted that law firms could benefit from the team model prevalent in the corporate world, which provides a supportive structure to help its members succeed. She added that the large size of each graduating HLS class represents a networking bonanza. "There are 500-plus of you in every class, and [collectively] you end up working just about everywhere."

Gorelick said that women have an extra advantage. "The sense of struggle that unites women is a very important bond." She recalled the day she was sworn in as deputy attorney general by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "Janet Reno put her arms around us and said: ‘Who would have thought when we graduated from law school that anyone would see this?’"

by Julia Collins