'That's What I'm Going To Do'

Michele Donato was the first woman to graduate from Rutgers College. She was also one of New Jersey’s first female land use attorneys, as well as the first female general counsel for New Jersey Planning Officials. In practice since 1977, Donato says she is happily surprised by the state of women in the law today.

“It used to be, in the early days, I’d go to a bar association function and there’s maybe three other women, and every male lawyer is trying to pick you up,” she says. “Recently, one of my colleagues was elected president of a federal bar association and I went to his dinner. When I walked into that place, I was astounded at how many women there were. I remember the days of having to have clothes made for me when I started because there were no suits for women. Now, I watch young women walk into courtrooms in these outfits. … They are so bold and fearless. It’s an incredible thing to have witnessed.”

Donato and the four other women lawyers who spoke to us have witnessed it all over the course of five decades. Here are their stories of change, progress—and where we still fall short.

Why Law?

Michele Donato, Michele R. Donato, PA, Lavallette; Rutgers School of Law – Newark, 1977; Land Use & Zoning: I wanted to be an architect. My mother’s banker, someone she thought was the end-all and be-all of knowledge, told me, “Michele, that’s a man’s job. You should be a teacher.” So that was that. I went through college with the intention of being a teacher. I graduated with high honors from Rutgers College. That summer, I took the battalion liner to Italy with other students. While I was there, a fellow student and I were talking about the future, and he said, “Why don’t you go to law school?” I said, “I can’t afford that.” He said, “They’ll figure it out. They want women.” So I went on to Rome, fell madly in love with an Italian, and with Italy, and stayed there … but couldn’t stop thinking about law school. So I came back to the U.S., took the law boards, and put in my applications. I got in everywhere that I applied.

Sandra Sherman, Sherman Atlas Sylvester & Stamelman, Florham Park; University of Illinois College of Law, 1979; Estate Planning & Probate: I was teaching school music in a small, rural community and I didn’t like it. I wanted to do something different, but I didn’t know what. I thought about going back to graduate school for music, and my younger brother said, “Why don’t you take the LSAT?” So I took it, did well, and decided, “I’m going to try this.” It’s a very different kind of discipline from a music education curriculum, obviously. Law teaches you how to think differently and to appreciate the fact that there are often not easy answers to problems. The intellectual pursuit was fascinating to me.

Jane Altman, Lepp, Mayrides & Eaton, Somerville; Rutgers School of Law – Camden, 1978; Family Law: My childhood taught me that I could be a teacher or a nurse, but I actually wanted to be a teacher. I got married during college, then I had children and stayed home with them for a few years. When they were starting school, I went to look for a job as an elementary teacher and I couldn’t get one. There were too many white middle-class women who wanted to teach. I thought, “Well, I’ve got to do something.” It wasn’t going to work for my personality to sit at home. So I took the LSAT to see how it might go. I took it in a room that was mostly white males, and you could have cut the tension with a knife. That should have been my first clue. The test went well. Had I not been influenced by the women’s movement, and been in consciousness-raising groups, we wouldn’t be talking, because I would have eventually become a teacher.

Karin Haber, Haber Silver Russoniello & Dunn, Florham Park; Temple University Beasley School of Law, 1977; Family Law: When I was in high school, one of my classmates’ mothers worked for the ACLU. She came to speak, and I went home and I said to my parents, “That’s what I’m going to do.” It was 1970.

Anna-Maria Pittella, Anna-Maria Pittella, Esq., Red Bank; Seton Hall University School of Law, 1978; Alternative Dispute Resolution, Family Law: I was very interested in social justice because of the Vietnam War, but didn’t know what to do with that. I thought I would get more direction if I went to law school.

The Law School Experience

Altman: My kids were 5 and 7 when I was in law school. There is this myth that you can do it all and no one’s going to suffer. I believe that’s nonsense. Everyone in my family suffered. But it was important that I did it. If I hadn’t, I would have been so frustrated. I would have been less of a wife and a mother. But my daughter, who was 7 when I was in law school, grew up and became a lawyer, and so did her daughter.

Pittella: There were a lot of Vietnam veterans in my class. They were extremely progressive and felt what was going on [in the country] had not been fair or compatible with what we thought were the ideals for this country. We had very interesting conversations, which continued to spark my interest in social justice. Some professors were very supportive [of women students], and others were miffed. Those professors expressed their discontent in ways so gruff that some women students reported it to the dean and created a situation where apologies were issued. We opened up the conversation, which was gratifying, although it seems we’re still having the same conversation.

Donato: I was extremely fortunate to get into Rutgers-Newark. It was one of the first law schools that had concentrated on the acceptance of women. We had about 40 percent in our class, very different from what I encountered when I went into the practice of law. Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught there; we had the women’s rights clinic. I had great hesitancy, because law school is not an enjoyable time. The process of really learning to be logical, detailed and accurate tightened up. I was a history major and I loved literature and art, so it was a much more rigorous thought process than I was accustomed to, but I was surrounded by very bright, courageous and adventurous women. I was selected for law review, and that helped to hone my free spirit.

Sherman: There was a meaningful number of women in my class. But there was also the realization that five, six years earlier, the female numbers were not good. It was wonderful to feel part of a pretty meaningful trajectory.

Landing the First Job

Pittella: I went to Legal Services for about seven years, and it was fabulous. I wound up being the manager for one of the local offices in Bergen County. Then I went through a divorce and moved, which is when I opened my own office. We were just making some inroads as women at the time. Legal Services allowed me to bring my daughter to the office so I could nurse her. But I’ll never forget when one of my friends from law school was asked in her job interview if she’d had a hysterectomy. Mine wasn’t nearly as bad: At an interview, a gentleman asked me, “How are you going to work long hours when you have to be home to make dinner?”

Haber: I wanted to be a public defender. I truly thought people who pleaded not guilty were not guilty. So I applied to the public defender’s office in New York. I didn’t get the job. Probably a good thing. When I did get a job, I only worked there for a few months. I worked for two partners. One would tell me to do something, I did it. The other one would say, “Don’t listen to him, listen to me.” I asked them for two weeks off to study for the bar and they said no, so I quit. After that, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer any more, so I worked in real estate. I eventually found a job with a sole practitioner who let me do everything. I was then just stupid enough to go out on my own. I’ve had my own practice ever since.

Altman: I went with a very small law firm in Princeton, and it was basically two guys and me. They were wonderful. I left that firm after four years and decided to start my own firm.

Sherman: My first job was teaching legal research and writing. Then I did a little bit of private practice: guardianship, wills, those kinds of things. I wasn’t in an actual firm for the first couple years. I wrote to a lot of firms and eventually found a job, but essentially as a clerk. It didn’t pay very well, but I think that was part of why they brought me in: “It’s not going to cost us very much money, and she’ll get some good work done for us.”

Donato: My mother was an active environmentalist. She would say to me, “You’re hanging out at the beach, take this clipboard and get people to sign to stop ocean dumping.” In law school, there was a visiting professor, Eva Hanks, and she wrote the only treatise that then existed in law schools for environmental law. I was fascinated by the topic and love nature. I then had the great advantage of working for a phenomenal judge. I clerked for the chief judge in Monmouth County, who specialized in land use. He was one of the first to have a woman clerk. On the strength of that clerkship, I was hired at a firm in Monmouth County that had 50 attorneys but never a woman. I was promised I would do the kind of work I wanted to do, but instead ended up in family law. I left after two years and was hired at an excellent little land use boutique in Middlesex County.

Being the Only Woman in the Room

Altman: It wasn’t until after I joined various legal committees that I was often the only woman. I was on the state Bar’s Family Law Executive Committee, and I’m still on it. For the first few years I was on that committee, I never said anything because I was so intimidated. I was a different person then—I was becoming who I am now. Those meetings were dominated by two white male attorneys with huge egos who did 80% of the talking. It took me a few years until I felt like maybe I had something to offer. Now, it’s filled with women. That stuff always takes a long time to change, but it changed in my lifetime, and I’m pleased to have seen it.

Pittella: I remember I signed up for a Legal Services program in law school. They weren’t taking first-years. But I went to the meeting, and the third-year student who was running it said, “Oh, I’m glad we have some girls here, because we need typing.”

Haber: I had civil trials where I’d go to court and there were 200 lawyers sitting in the courtroom. There were two women, and I was one of them.

Navigating Discrimination

Altman: There were sexist comments that nobody would put up with now that I ignored. I didn’t confront the men. I realize now, maybe I should have, but I didn’t have the ability or the confidence in myself and my place in the legal system. That all changed after a number of years, especially when I started my own practice. I’ll never forget Monday mornings. Let’s say I had a case and I was in court: It was always a male judge and typically a male adversary. And the conversation each and every Monday morning was about the football games that had happened on Sunday. I happened to have no interest in or knowledge of football. So I sat there with a pained smile on my face. Nobody had the sensitivity to think, “Are we excluding her from this conversation?”

Donato: In some instances with judges, they were hesitant: “What do we refer to you as?” They tried to be respectful, but they didn’t know how to treat me as they would another attorney. There were some judges, and even more lawyers, who rejected the idea that I could be as good a lawyer as they were. If I was aggressive, if I completely figured out the facts and asserted my position, I’m “emotional.” Now, if a man did that, boy, he really knows what he’s doing. I had more than one judge who was quite inappropriate with me in terms of touching. I navigated all of this by sticking to what I knew to be the correct thing. I was very purpose-driven. And when you have a purpose in life, a lot of things behind you can be blurred out.

Sherman: It was not until I saw the nuts and bolts of how firms were being run that I became somewhat disillusioned. There was not enough thinking about how to bring women into management. The idea of expanding the circle to include women at those higher levels just escaped people’s attention. I think it probably was a little bit that no one was prepared or even knew how to make those kinds of changes.

Haber: Once, when I was very young, I was in court on some case, and the judge, as I was walking out, said, “Young lady, is your lawyer here?” I said, “I’m the lawyer.” After I finished my case, the court officer came to me and said, “The judge needs to speak to you.” I said, “Oh, no, what did I do?” The judge said, “I want to apologize to you. It had nothing to do with the fact that you’re a woman, it’s just that you look so young.”

When Being a Woman Became a Super Power

Altman: It was not only being a woman that I eventually found to be so beneficial, it was being a woman with some life experience. I graduated from law school at 32. I had small children, a marriage. I came to feel that the fact that I’d had more life experience gave me an advantage, certainly with clients. They had no idea I was a baby lawyer: I was a woman in my early 30s.

Donato: It was easier for me to step outside of the box and say, “I’m going to take a brave and daring position.” I didn’t have to be worried about offending the good old boys because I was already on the outside. It was empowering.

Pittella: I felt things switch for me in the ’80s. The attorneys were more welcoming. I think, at the time, there were only maybe two female attorneys who were doing any consequential family law work in the area. So I got in on the ground floor, and I got into the bar association. I became a trustee, then a president, of the Ocean County Bar Association. It was a totally different atmosphere.

Big Cases

Donato: I was one of the first and only women doing this kind of land use work in the ’80s in New Jersey. The Township of Colts Neck hired me to fight the Navy. Multiple male lawyers said, “No, you can’t go after the Navy.” I said, “Why can’t I?” The Navy was planning to build housing at the Naval Weapons Station Earle in protected wetlands. I was able to get this injunction to stop the Navy until they followed all the right rules and protected the wetlands.

Altman: The cases I felt best about were the ones where I represented a parent who was being steamrolled by the other parent who had more money or clout. There is something called the “tender years presumption” which says if you have two equally good parents—which you never do—but if you have two good parents, and the child is under 7, automatically there’s a preference for the mother. I once represented a father who was just a fabulous parent. He was gentle, loving, caring. I had a father not so unlike him. The mother was just OK, but because he was the father, he was not given a fair shake. We went to court and had psychiatric evaluations and so forth, and he ended up getting the kids 50% of the time, which was a very big deal then. Now it’s built into the statute that there’s no presumption in favor of anybody.

Pitella: I can think of a particular client who was having a really hard time navigating her future because of the divorce. She’d always been very dependent on her husband. I turned out to be more of a cheerleader for her so that she could stand her own ground and look to the future and not feel so paralyzed by what had happened. I can still picture her. I hear from her from time to time, and she’s doing great. I think of her as sort of a North Star for people going through a divorce. They’re so shattered and entrenched in what’s happening that they don’t see possibility. And there is always possibility.

Haber: I tried a relocation case for a client. He got divorced and a few months later his ex-wife decided that she wanted to move to Boston. The court-appointed expert said she should be able to move. We hired our own expert who said that’s ridiculous. We won the trial, we lost in the appellate division, and the Supreme Court granted us certification and granted a stay, and we won [at] the Supreme Court. My client’s daughters were 6 and 4 at the time, and by the time we got to the Supreme Court they were probably 8 and 6. And my client had a baby who had just been born, he was a few months old. My client came to me about a year later, with his little boy, and said, “If it weren’t for you, George would never know his sisters.” I hadn’t seen him since then, which was probably 2011. He came two days ago to tell me how I changed his life and what I did for his children. They are now 27, 24 and 15, and all three of them have this unbelievably close relationship. To me, that is the most important case I ever had.

Advice for the Next Generation

Donato: Find a specific purpose in the law and follow whatever it is.

Altman: Well, my granddaughter didn’t take my advice. She listened, but she didn’t take it. That advice was: Don’t get caught up in “I have to get a job at a big, prestigious law firm where I will work a zillion hours, make a lot of money, and have no life whatsoever.” I advised her that the reason that I really like being a lawyer, and why I’m still doing it, is that I control my time. I’ve had my own law firm for years. I’m not answering to billable hours. I don’t take cases just because they walk in the door.

Pittella: Explore practice areas, even different areas of the country. I think sometimes we feel that it is about where we grow up, and maybe that’s not the thing we should do. We should move more and influence people different from ourselves. I would also encourage women to consider law as a career: The more we have of people who look like us, the better it’ll be for people who look like us.

Sherman: Keep up the good fight and do your work well. You have to become a player in the firm to have the strength to be able to change policy, which means build your practice, be a good lawyer, economically pull your weight. If you have families and children, that’s not necessarily that easy, but continue to advocate for your sex in the profession. Sometimes I feel like I could have advocated more; there’s still a lot of change that needs to be made. In terms of women being more involved in the management of law firms and their policies, that’s still a slow evolution, especially at the very top levels. I think maybe in the corporate in-house practice it’s been a little more encouraging. But there’s a long, long way to go before women are on an equal par with men in the practice of law.

Altman: I have a grandson, Danny. He’s 15. When he was 5, it was Take Your Child to Work Day, and his parents asked me to take Danny to court. I asked a friend of mine, the Hon. Catherine Fitzpatrick, if I could bring him to her courtroom. She’s still a sitting judge in Mercer County. She let him bang her gavel. From the time he was a little boy, he knew my friends who were judges. They came to holidays at our house, and one of them was the first female chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, Deborah T. Poritz, and the first female attorney general. I met them in law school. So he’s 5, and when we leave Fitzpatrick’s courtroom, he says, “Grandma, do you have to be a girl to be a judge?” That really brought it full circle for me.