Extract
Women in The Florida Bar.
When Winifred Wentworth graduated from law school in 1951, the door to interviews at Florida's law firms slammed shut. One law firm partner told her bluntly: "We see no value in hiring a woman." Finally, the state Attorney General's office offered her a job, but only if she'd agree to do the typing for a half dozen male coworkers too.
"I told them I'd rather clean houses," Wentworth recalls. "I wouldn't mind doing typing, but I didn't want to do it for the whole damn crew!" Sixteen years later, even after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when Jeanne Crenshaw graduated from the University of Florida law school in 1967, law firms still tacked announcements of interview times on the bulletin board that included the loud-and-clear message: "No women." Rather than battling the good ol' boy system, she and her husband hung out their shingle with a third partner instead. And when Harvard Law School graduate Janet Reno tried to get a job at one of Miami's biggest law firms in 1963, she was turned down because she was a woman. Fourteen years later, that same firm would see fit...See the full content of this document
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