Quote on the Law Profession

The May 1947 Alumnae Quarterly featured an article “The Lady is a Lawyer" about Katharine Bennett Martindale ’26, a practicing attorney. She had this advice for students: 

“I am well aware of the fact that most of you young women are bent on making matrimony your career…Don’t brush aside the law because you expect to reduce your life as soon as possible to ‘wife and motherhood’.

“Time marches on. You marry, and the law becomes your avocation. You no longer need it to survive materially. You need it to survive spiritually. You have a baby. You find a part-time girl and with your earnings pay her so you can spend part of a day in your office. You have an identity – a personality outside of your home and that is good. Even your husband appreciates it, for it sets you a little apart from other women.”

“I believe that as you sit here today, you young women have the brightest plans for the future, and the best-oiled intellects that you will ever have. I can’t tell you how daily living is going to whittle you down, not by big things but by little things. Time and the routine of everyday living when you become “house-wives” will have a soporific effect upon you so that if you are not constantly alert, you’ll wake up one fine day to the fact that your mind is sluggish, your spirit satisfied to lie abed and your ideals circumscribed by the four walls of your home.”

“You are all convinced at this moment that you are, as a group, all going to make yourselves more …well, felt… in this world than your mothers did. You don’t know yet how domesticity and expediency will get you if you don’t watch out!”