The Incredible Story of California’s First Female Trial Lawyer

“They call me a Lady Lawyer, a pretty sobriquet, for of course to be worthy of so dainty a title, I was bound to maintain a dainty manner, as I browbeat my way through the marshes of ignorance and prejudice.” -Clara Shortridge Foltz

The legal profession is a very sexist profession. Women are simply not as respected as men when it comes to lawyering, if you will. It’s the truth. One could just look at my writings and take note of the absence of women. I am constantly invoking the great legal minds of the past; Darrow, Marshall, and others; or more contemporary radicals; Kuntsler, Spence, Serra, and still more.

The truth is that women have played a very important role in the shaping of America’s legal system, and the radical lawyers that stood before an evolving system in the 1960s and shook their fists at the establishment were quite often women. But before those great women came others and perhaps the most important and forgotten was Clara Shortridge Foltz. Foltz did more than shake her fist at the establishment, she changed it forever.