CultureWatch Review — In Defense of Women
In This Issue
Reviewer Jill Norgren writes: In this season of television re-runs, devotees of Law and Order or The Good Wife would do well to turn off the tube, and sit down with Gertner’s book, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate. They might pull an all-nighter
Books
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN: MEMOIRS OF AN UNREPENTANT ADVOCATE
By Nancy Gertner, ©2011
Published by Beacon Press; Hardcover: 298 pp; Kindle e-book
Reviewed by Jill Norgren
What are we meant to think of a federal district court judge who, at her 1994 swearing in ceremony, tells the following story:
"It was June 1971. I was graduating from Yale Law School, well on my way to a prestigious position with the Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. My mother and I were having a huge fight — the kind of fights only mothers and daughters can have. Shrieking at each other in the small kitchen of our apartment in Flushing, Queens; you could have heard us up and down the stairs of the building. My mother wanted me to take the Triborough Bridge toll taker’s test — just in case!"
Memoirs relate journeys. Nancy Gertner, the author of this fascinating and highly readable biography of a law career, started life on New York City’s lower East Side. At the turn of the twentieth century, her grandparents had emigrated from eastern Europe. She was the second daughter of Sadie and Moishe Gertner. The family lived in a tenement until Nancy was seven. Moishe abandoned college in his first semester to support his family in the linoleum business. Old World in his views about women, he told Sadie, his bride, that he would not hear of her holding a job.
Moishe eventually claimed a place for his family in the lower middle class but Sadie saw the world as a precarious place. No fool, she could see that in courtrooms, legislatures, law firms, even the fantasy world of movies and Perry Mason television, virtually all lawyers were men. Yale or no Yale, clerkship or no clerkship, in her mind Nancy was asking for disaster in planning a legal career. Now a toll taker’s position … secure government work…
Fortunately, for Gertner’s clients, law students, and colleagues as well as the men and women who have come before her in federal court, Sadie lost that fight. Her daughter has become one of our most respected and successful attorneys specializing in women’s rights law, and criminal litigation.
In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate chronicles Gertner’s most important cases before she accepted appointment to the federal bench. She tells the stories of her clients, many of them women, and the methods of her advocacy. These accounts of criminal and civil trials are so well told in deliciously readable prose that they almost claim the status of yarns. But they are not yarns; they are cases carefully chosen from a twenty-year courtroom career to teach us about the serious issues, often of gender, faced by Gertner and her clients.
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