‘You Need a Sense of Humor’

Early in her career, Mary Whitmer suggested to her firm that there weren’t enough women’s restrooms. One of the men’s rooms was obligingly repurposed.

“I’m in there one day, in my little stall,” says Whitmer, who today works at Whitmer & Ehrman in Cleveland. “The [restroom] door flings open, and I see the bottom of this guy’s pants—he’s so used to going there, he’s still going there!”

He didn’t see her, and Whitmer was stuck in her stall until he was, well, done with business.

“There was always awkwardness,” Whitmer recalls. “But you need a sense of humor.”

She and five other Ohio and Kentucky women who went into law in the 1970s have stories to tell. They recall the decade as a time of not only restroom awkwardness but potent discrimination.

It was also a decade that saw the very beginnings of gender parity in numbers. According to the ABA, from 1950 to 1970, 3% of lawyers were women; in 1980, that percentage jumped to 8%. Last year, 39% of lawyers were women—and many of the problems women faced in the ’70s have been resolved. But not all of them.

Why Law?

Ann Oldfather, Oldfather Law Firm, Louisville, Kentucky; Personal Injury and Medical Malpractice: Instead of continuing with some fine-arts classes at the University of Louisville, I took the LSAT on a whim and sent in my score and they accepted me. I’m a science person, not an English person. I was 100% swept off my feet in Torts 101. From then on, it’s been a love affair.

Taft McKinstry, Fowler Bell, Lexington, Kentucky; Commercial Law and Bankruptcy: I’m of the generation where mothers said you need to get a nursing degree or become a secretary or become a teacher so that you can marry some man and support him while he gets his career going; and then, of course, you’re going to retire and make babies the rest of your life. So I got my teaching certificate in math and did a semester of student teaching. But I decided I wasn’t going to do that the rest of my life, so I walked across campus and applied to law school.

Leslie Vose, Landrum & Shouse, Lexington, Kentucky; Alternative Dispute Resolution: I’ve always had a strong sense of fairness. I knew I wanted to do something past college, and what I knew of being a lawyer seemed to fit. And my parents would say I love to argue.

Anne Meyers, Meyers, Roman, Friedberg & Lewis, Cleveland; Business & Corporate: I graduated from Ohio State as an undergrad, and I worked for the state for a year and a half. The people who seemed to have the most interesting jobs—I worked for the Ohio Youth Commission—were the lawyers. So I thought, “Well, I’ll try that.”

Mary Whitmer, Whitmer & Ehrman, Cleveland; Bankruptcy: Business: My grandmother was a beat reporter for The Plain Dealer, back when you could only work on the women’s pages. When I was 13, she bought me Century of Struggle by Eleanor Flexner, about the women’s movement in America. I knew what she was trying to tell me: “You can do anything you want.” And I thought, “I want to be a lawyer.”

Phyllis Bossin, Phyllis G. Bossin Co. LPA, Cincinnati; Family Law: I wanted to be a lawyer since I was 12. It’s hard to know why I made that decision at that time, but I was very certain about it.

Women in Law School

Whitmer: My father, the lawyer, did not believe women should be lawyers. I went to my father, and he was reading the paper in a chair in the living room, and I said to the newspaper, “Dad, I just applied to law school, and I got in and I need money.” He said, “No daughter of mine is going to go to law school.” I said, “You know, I only remember saying I was going, I don’t remember asking you.” And the newspaper came down—because that was a lawyer’s answer. And he said, “No! No! No!” But he paid. So I got the better of the argument.

McKinstry: In the whole [law] school, the University of Kentucky, there were five women. That would’ve been the fall of 1969.

Whitmer: At [the University of] Akron, there were six. When I got to Case Western Reserve, there were more, but not many more.

Bossin: Somewhere between 10 and 15%. I graduated in ’77. When I started law school, we had no women professors, so we created an organization called the Women’s Law Caucus at Chase. We were very vocal about them hiring some women professors. At the time we graduated, there were two.

Meyers: First time in history that a third of the class were women. This was in ’74 at Capital in Columbus.

Oldfather: My entering class was ’73. We got to 40%, and the year before that was maybe 20%. There was just a quantum shift that year.

Vose: My law school class was the second class where there was a significant proportion of women. I didn’t really think anything of it until I went to my first motion hour in our civil circuit court and there were not any women lawyers in our whole courtroom.

Meyers: I had one professor who was really a jerk to the women. If they raised their hand, he either didn’t call on them or he managed to say something obnoxious. But he also taught me a lot. He taught me how full of themselves lawyers often are.

McKinstry: There was a women’s locker room and it had four lockers, but there were five of us. Naive me just walked down the hall to the locker room where the men had their lockers. I set up a locker and started putting materials in there. And there was a young man to my right who looked at me and said, “The only reason you’re here is to find a husband. You’re taking up the space of someone who needs this degree to support their family.” By the end of that semester, he and [another] man and I became best friends and a study group. He [eventually] had three daughters, and one of them went to law school. He’s changed his point of view.

Coping With Gender Discrimination

Meyers: When you grow up with three brothers and a father who told you forever that you could do anything you want to do … I was kind of trained to be in a man’s world.

Whitmer: I was completely pigheaded. I was going 100 miles an hour. If you didn’t like what I was doing, it was kind of your problem.

Vose: I was introduced to the circuit judge, and he said, “You’re too pretty for a handshake, how about a kiss?” You just can’t make this stuff up. I kissed the guy on his cheek. I wouldn’t do that now. But then it was all very new, and I don’t think any of us knew the best way to navigate it.

Oldfather: I went into [my managing partner]’s office and told him, “I’m going to leave and start my own firm.” He said, “You have a great future here, we don’t want to lose you.” I said, “Do you ever see me managing this firm?” He said, “Probably not,” and I said, “Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought, too.”

Meyers: From the state I went to Baker & Hostetler, and then Kahn Kleinman Yanowitz & Arnson, and by the time I’d been through those experiences, I had a client base of construction, surety, and business, so was able to start my own firm. When I did [in 1995], women were more likely to be practicing in areas other than business and construction. It became clear to me quickly that we would be better off if we put a couple more names [on the shingle]. It started with four lawyers, and now we’re over 40.

Vose: The criminal law professor, first semester, first lecture, made a big deal of how much penile penetration was necessary for rape. I don’t think that was accidental.

Early Job Experiences

Vose: When I was a law clerk, when the Fayette County Bar Association had its summer picnic, they always took the clerks, but they didn’t get a ticket for me, because they were drinking and playing poker—and they didn’t think I would want to do that! They were just little micro things that were reminding me maybe women didn’t belong.

Oldfather: One of my professors tells me [about a firm] interviewing candidates because “they have decided they are going to hire their first woman.” I went down there and interviewed. I had no doubt I was going to get this offer. The mail came and there was an envelope … “Thank you for coming in, we really enjoyed the interview, we have decided after all that our needs really do not require us to make a hire this year.” I thought, “That doesn’t make any sense, they interviewed 20 people, and it was all about ‘we’re finally ready to hire a woman because we’re so liberal and forward-thinking.’” I called the secretary to the managing partner. She said, “I’ll put you on Mr. Davidson’s book.” I came in and said, “I’m not here to complain, because I understand needs change, but I’m just really shocked.” He said, “You were great, you were the choice.” And he identified two other senior partners I hadn’t met. “They finally convinced the rest of us, when we hire our first woman, she needs to be from Yale or Harvard.” I said, “You find your gal from Yale or Harvard, and I’m going to beat the pants off her in court someday.” He said, “Yes, by god, I think you would.”

Bossin: I didn’t want to work for anyone else, and I certainly didn’t want to be the only woman anywhere, so I set up my own practice right after law school.

McKinstry: We had a jury trial in federal court the next morning and [a senior partner] wanted me to draft instructions for the jury. The next morning, jury’s empaneled, trial’s going on, break is taken. The men settled the case in the men’s room, and it irritated me to no end that I wasn’t a party to the settlement.

Standout Cases

Vose: I represented four female plaintiffs in a sexual harassment case, but the hospital administrators were all men represented by men. The federal magistrate said, “Gentlemen, blah, blah, blah …” He did it again and did it a third time. Well, my ladies didn’t think they could [get] justice in eastern Kentucky anyway. I looked at them and they were quite unhappy. I stood up and said, “Your honor, I’m not a man.” He fell all over himself being nice. I got a really nice settlement for my client.

Whitmer: We repossessed a Raytheon 800XP jet. I got a call from a large bank, which had a loan against the jet and wanted it repossessed. I called someone who I thought could help, and he wound up being my client for 25 years, and my office is in his warehouse now. He said you can repossess a jet aircraft by actually screwing a mechanism into the tarmac and tying it down. But [the bank] wanted it flown out—so he found pilots, went down to where it was at the Ohio State football field. He paid a guy $200 to tow it onto the runway, they filed their flight plan and took off and brought it back up here to Burke Lakefront Airport and put it in back of the hangar so [the loan defaulters] couldn’t do to us what we had just done to them.

Bossin: I was in a [custody] case and the husband wanted to take the children to live in Saudi Arabia, where, of course, women have no rights. He had hidden some money there. He had received a severance package and they were paying him the equivalent of two years’ salary, and he kept denying he had it. We found the severance agreement in [a] FedEx package. I sent that to his lawyer and captioned the email “the smoking gun.” This was a man who was fighting for custody of his children, and he left without saying goodbye to them. He loved the money more than he loved the children.

Where Things Stand

Bossin: In general, [for my practice area] we have good statutes in Ohio. People can get spousal support if they have been at home or if there’s a great disparity of income and they have an inability to get a job. But it’s still difficult because, if a woman stays out of the workforce for a number of years to raise children, if she goes back in, she’s never going to be where she was—ever. It’s really hard to compensate somebody for that.

McKinstry: I remember a woman who was an attorney in the late ’80s, when I came downtown, who was practicing with her husband. They had another female attorney in that office. Then there was a female attorney who was the juvenile judge, and that was it as far as female attorneys downtown. So when more women started the practice of law … here came the men, saying, “Taft, who’s that good-looking girl?” Today, we’re way past that.

Vose: It may be more difficult now. I found that, as long as the men in the profession were on a different level, they were a little bit easier to deal with than when I began to compete with them for money. Then they weren’t so nice. I have a daughter who’s a doctor, and when she was in medical school, she really thought I was overreacting about gender bias. But she’s now been through residency and fellowship and is in the school of medicine, and the discrimination is still there. It’s just much more subtle, and I think subtle may be harder to deal with. Women who think that it’s not there are not being honest with themselves.

Advice for Women in the Law

Oldfather: Follow your passion.

Meyers: When men discriminate against women, it’s not because they don’t like them. It’s because they think they’re “less than.” And the only way to convince somebody of your capability is quietly. You don’t have to be the brightest bulb in the room, you have to be the hardest-working.

McKinstry: Professionalism is the most important—their words and actions, their writings, their appearance.

Bossin: I became extremely involved in the family law section of the American Bar Association. They have wonderful programs and great training and networking opportunities.

Vose: Find a group of female colleagues they can be very honest with. We formed a group; we called ourselves the Lexington Journal Club. From 1985 forward, these women have been my friends. We could share experiences and realize we weren’t nuts.

Whitmer: Go for it. Find something you love and don’t let anybody say no to you.