Women

Women's History Finds a Home on the Web

by Leslie A. Gordon

Cyber Esq. / Winter 1999, p. 8

Four years ago, back when most legal educators were asking, "What's the Internet?" Professor Barbara Allen Babcock was already using it in her Women and the Law course at Stanford Law School.

Frustrated that she was an audience of one for her students' papers, Babcock teamed up with Stanford Law School librarians to create the Women's Legal History Biography Project at www.stanford.edu/group/WLHP These days, the site not only features more than 100 student-written biographies of pioneering women lawyers, but also seeks to teach visitors how the women's movement has shaped legal history. The site has a timeline, obituaries, photographs and links. It gets about 400 hits a month, according to Erika Wayne, one of the librarians who helps maintain the site.

"There are so many women in law school now. It's a revolution. It's a very important time to look back on history," Babcock says. For example, the current first-year class at Stanford Law School is more than 50 percent women for the first time in the university's history, she adds.

Babcock holds a Stanford record of her own -- when she joined the school in 1973, she was the first tenured woman law professor. She recently won the American Bar Association's Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, which recognizes professional excellent and work in advancing opportunities for other women lawyers. The award is named for Margaret Brent, the first female lawyer in the United States and the first entry on the Women's Legal History Biography Project's timeline.

"The students in my class wrote wonderful papers, but no one but the professor ever sees them," Babcock says about her impetus to start the site. So she got together with Wayne, librarian Paul Lomio and other law school librarians to build the site.

The Project's profile subjects include Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander, Pennsylvania's first black women lawyer; Laura De Force Gordon, the second woman admitted to the California Bar and the first woman to ague a murder trial before a jury; and Edith Sampson, a Chicago-based lawyer who was the first black woman elected judge in the country.

Each student in Babcock's class picks a deceased female lawyer to profile. The 30- to 40-page biography forms the basis of the student's grade for the course.

In choosing a woman to profile, students tend to look for someone like themselves, perhaps a woman from their home state or maybe someone with similar interests, says Babcock, who is writing a full-length book about Clara Shortridge Foltz. Foltz was the first woman lawyer on the West Coast, and Babcock was drawn to her because Foltz, like Babcock, worked as a public defender.

In writing the papers about pioneering women lawyers, Babcock's students look at original sources, including newspaper articles, bar reports and court records. Babcock hopes someday to collate all of the students' papers into a book.

"The students here are very resourceful," librarian Lomio says about their research methods. Lomio and other librarians periodically give seminars to Babcock's students about how to submit their chapters to the site."

"For us as librarians it's very exciting to see students get wedded to their topics," Wayne adds. "it's like they're friends with the woman. They're not just cite-checking some paper on a distant topic. They're on a first-name basis with the women. They're like classmates."

The librarians supplement the students' papers by posting original content, including articles on microfilm. They've even enhanced old photos so well that the fabric of a lawyer's dress can be seen on the Internet.

Lomio and Babcock welcome submissions to the site from the general public, including proposed links, suggestions for articles and sources for the bibliography.

The response has been positive, Babcock says. Historians and even descendants of some of the women have offered comments and additions to the Project.

Jennifer Drobac, an attorney who is earning her doctorate in law at Stanford, took Babcock's course in the fall of 1997. Her biographical subject is Nettie C. Taylor, the first woman who attempted to join the California Bar in the late 1800s.

In researching Taylor, Drobac discovered that she may or may not be the same woman as Nettie C. Lutes, who in 1873 became the first woman lawyer licensed in Ohio. Drobac is so interested in her biography project that she plans to travel to Ohio on her own time to conduct more research. She expects to have the mystery solved and her chapter posted on the Web site by the end of next year.

The project is interactive, so visitors can contact the law school to suggest women lawyers worthy of study and to offer documents that might help students' research.

"The students are really excited about the site," Drobac says. "It's a forum for women's legal history that doesn't exist anywhere else. For so long, women have been excluded from history. This [Web site] remedies that to the public -- in a way that's completely accessible from a third-grade book reporter to a hobbyist."

Professor Babcock says that she likes having students, librarians and faculty working together on a Web-based project for the course. She adds, "The main thing about this site is that it's a whole new way to inspire the very best work from students."