100 Years Ago, My Mother Went to Law School

One hundred years ago this month, my mother went to law school. A brilliant student who had sailed through school, she was not quite nineteen years old.

Brooklyn Law School, founded in 1901, was her alma mater. According to Wikipedia, "From its earliest days, Brooklyn Law School opened its door to minorities, women, and immigrants, and it offered night classes for those with full-time jobs." Columbia University Law School would not admit women until 1927, Harvard, 1950, and Yale, 1969. In any event, the Ivy League institutions were far beyond the means of a young Jewish woman from Hungary who had come through Ellis Island in 1906 at the age of four and was working during the day to support her recently widowed mother and younger sisters.

Brooklyn Law was exceptional in being receptive to populations that a hundred years later, as we have been appalled to see vividly demonstrated recently, are still struggling for equal treatment. Both my mother and the classmate who became my father would have encountered anti-Semitism if they had dared to approach the Ivies. According to Kimball & Coquillette in "History and Harvard Law School" (2018), Fordham Law Review 87 (3) p 897, "Red Scare hysteria... began in 1919"...leading to "spreading fear of foreign and left-wing influence." In the 1920s, the Law School "severely restricted the enrollment of nonwhite students at Harvard, absolutely forbade the enrollment of women, and sharply reduced the enrollment of Jewish students and employment of Jewish faculty."

Why did Mom go to law school? It certainly wasn't from any lofty notion of serving justice and protecting the weak and innocent. I have tapes of an interview with her that I made when I was getting my master's in social work in the 1980s—on cassette, alas, so I currently have no way to replay them—in which she says she simply needed to make a living. The obvious choice was to become a teacher, but that was out because a cousin she disliked was a teacher. (Brilliant yes, psychologically savvy no. One of my best known poems is titled, "My Mother Rejects the Unconscious.") I already knew why she couldn't be a doctor, because I inherited her squeamish gene. She was a Jewish intellectual who claimed to despise business, insisting it required mere shrewdness rather than intelligence. I suspect the roots of that belief were her father's failure and early death. He was a tailor who did poorly working for others. When he set up shop for himself, his high-quality skills were wasted on an immigrant clientele who couldn't afford to pay. So what was left but the law?

The Class of 1924 at Brooklyn Law Night School consisted of one hundred men and twelve women. Family tradition says my father fell in love with her at first sight in 1921. They never said if he waited the three years till graduation before proposing the first time. We know she turned him down, that time and again and again. Why didn't she marry him? She wanted a career. She didn't know how hard that was going to be for her and every other woman in her graduating class and in her law school sorority, whose members—all Jewish, because no other sorority would have them—became lifelong friends. Also, my father, hardworking, guileless, and incurably honest, made the mistake of telling her—I may have told this one before—"Judy, I'll never be rich." Oy, is that the wrong thing to say when you propose to an ambitious girl!

She finally gave in, and they were married in 1936. They had a long and happy marriage until his death at the age of 91. She lived till 1999. On her tombstone is the epitaph she wrote herself and tucked in among her papers where she knew we'd find it: "20th century feminist from start to finish." She told me how she would walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to work in Manhattan every day with cheese sandwiches for lunch in her pocket. She was a small woman, but I called the poem I wrote about that "Colossa." She still casts a long shadow, and I still miss her.