Full Description
This book tells the spectacular history of women lawyers at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). SDNY is a storied institution, the oldest federal prosecutor's office in the United States and its most renowned - and a critical player in New York City's high-stakes legal arena. But its history has been only sparsely written, and this is the first book to share the riveting account of how of SDNY's doors came to open to women lawyers. Remarkably, SDNY hired women lawyers far earlier than the Wall Street firms and other elite legal institutions. This book explores why that was. It begins in 1906 starts with Henry Stimson's hiring of Mary Grace Quackenbos, the very first woman to hold an Assistant title anywhere in the Department of Justice. It continues with the SDNY women lawyers who intrepidly entered the arena throughout the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II, and who overcame the strict social conformities of the 1950s, when women who entered the law were social "deviants." It tells the previously untold full story of how women challenged the SDNY blockade - erected in 1959 and lasting through 1960s - to women serving as criminal prosecutors. And it culminates in the 1970s - when that blockade came down and the door to women's entry was irrevocably blown of the hinges. Those SDNY women of the 70s went on to transform the bench and bar. Throughout, this book dissects and examines the close connection between SDNY's hiring of women and its legacy of nonpartisan leadership, which is what drove SDNY's emergence as an important American institution in the twentieth century and beyond.
Contents
Introduction 1
On the Precipice of Change, 1 • The Arena, 5 •
Roadmap, 6 • Pat Hynes: "Serendipity," 9
I Mary Grace Quackenbos, A War Poem 11
Verse I: The People's Law Firm 11
Verse II: Mrs. Quackenbos Meets the Monster 17
Verse III: Tip of the Spear—How Quackenbos Came to Be Hired by SDNY 22
Verse IV: Congress—Who Is This Mrs. Quackenbos? 26
Verse V: Hostilities at Home—Stimson and Quackenbos 30
Verse VI: Sunny Side, Roosevelt, and the End of the Odyssey 36
Verse VII: The Exode 45
II The Roaring Twenties for Women at SDNY 55
The War Hero and the Suffragist 56
Emory Buckner: The Kipper's Knickers 70
"Ellamarye Takes Her Broom to New York City" 76
SCRAPS: Pulpit of a Preacher's Son 79
The Naked Showgirl in the Bathtub of Champagne, the Indicted Attorney General,
and Buckner's Stage Right Exit 81
Valerie Block and the Hushed-Up Scandal of 1929 85
Adieu to an Era 88
III Backslide, Amnesia, Blockade 91
Backslide: The 1930s 91
Amnesia: The 1940s 100
Defining Deviance: The 1950s 104
The Blockade: 1959-1969 113
IV How SDNY Irrevocably Opened to Women in the 1970s 119
Shirah Neiman: Her Moment 120
Morgenthau's Refusal to Resign 121
Whitney North Seymour Jr., "Renaissance Mensch " 122
How The Blockade Came Down 124
Barbara Ann Rowan: A Great Wit, and a First 131
The Crack in the Door Widens, 1971-1975 137
How Bob Fiske Blew the Door Off the Hinges, 1976-1980 142
Leaving It All In (and on the) Court 146
On Chickens, Eggs, and the Transformation of the Legal Profession 152
Afterword 155
A Gallery of Women AUSAs of the 1970s 159
Acknowledgments 187
Notes 189
Index 225
