sigma nu and the girls

Sun 11.20.22,

I see the American Bar Association Is dropping the LSAT, the law school admission test as requirement for entrance into law school.  I took that test when I graduated from college.  A fluke; a few of us feminists at the University Women’s Forum thought a law degree might be a good move after a year of dealing with the politics of campus organizations maneuvering the power dynamics at play with the other groups.  Our nemesis were the fellows at Sigma Nu.  They were the big men on campus, and we were, the girls.  

We were invited by a feminist group at a Boston law school that offered advice about what law school entailed.  It was a lot of work we were told.  I remember one presenter in particular who spoke about the cases they had to study.  She liked the work, she told us, because the cases were stories about individuals whose fate it was to set a precedent in law.  I took the test, a long and arduous measurement of one’s logical and analytic skills.  I did reasonably well, not fantastic, but enough for Franklin Pierce Law School to put me on their waiting list.  There was also a school in Chicago.  Both of these schools were innovative in that their students were given on-the-job training, not just school work.  But I didn’t go to law school.  What I remember is that I was in one of the buildings at the University having now graduated, alone in a room filling out documents for law school.  It was a warm day and I went over to open a window and a piece of the glass panel dropped on my arm and I was bleeding, quite a bit, and I thought law school was not what I should be doing.

Very shortly afterward I was hired under a special federal program to train and work as a psychiatric social worker for a mental health center and hospital.  Thus my career now focused primarily on offering help to people in need of succor, not a societal resolution to their query or dispute.  You could say that the career I took on is women’s work, putting the metaphorical bandaid on society’s wounds, whereas I could have been battling the bad guys, setting things right for situations needing correction.  

I like the practice of law which I consider a forceful masculine pursuit, there is a winner and a loser. I have flirted with the courts a number of times.  Are we not possessors of both aspects of gender attributes?  Presently, I have some weeks ahead of me in my final response to opposing parties’ motion for summary judgment for a case I have brought against two corporations.  

I would want to pit one career choice against the other, the lawyer versus the healer, but essentially they are simply different ways of dealing with individuals’ challenging needs in society.  As a person psychically gifted I can assure you that that talent plays a major role in both court and and on the couch.