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73 B.U. L. Rev. 39 (1993)
Women on the Federal Bench

handle is hein.journals/bulr73 and id is 51 raw text is: ESSAY WOMEN ON THE FEDERAL BENCH MIRIAM GOLDMAN CEDARBAUM* A few months ago when Justice Marshall was sitting in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, I had the pleasure of joining him at the table in the judges' lunchroom. In the course of our conversation over lunch, Justice Marshall told the following story about the first woman to sit on a New York court. An enthusiastic, newly naturalized Italian immigrant appeared in court to represent himself. Oh, he said. This is such a won- derful country. There is no place in the world like America. Imagine, the judge was sick this morning, and he was so anxious not to disappoint me that he sent his wife in his place. The judge in this incident was probably Dorothy Kenyon who had an interim appointment from Mayor Laguardia to the Municipal Court of New York City in 1939. Or it might have been Birdie Amsterdam who was elected to a full term on the Municipal Court in the following year, and who much later, in 1958, became the first woman elected to the Supreme Court of New York County. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Woll- stonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' which helped to spark the struggle for equality and suffrage for women that finally resulted, 128 years later, in the adoption in this country of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Although the legal status of women changed between 1792 and 1920, it was not until after women gained the right to vote that any woman was appointed as a judge. First, women had to be permitted to study and prac- tice law. In 1869, Arabella Mansfield became the first American woman licensed to practice as a lawyer when she was admitted to the Iowa bar. Although in that same year Myra Bradwell was denied admission to the Illinois bar because she was a woman, she was later welcomed to the bar of Illinois and was recognized as one of the eminent lawyers of her time. New York was somewhat slower than the frontier states, and it was not until 1886 that New York admitted its first woman to the bar, Kate Stoneman. Our focus this afternoon is on the bench, and more specifically, the federal * United States District Judge, Southern District of New York. Speech given on May 6, 1992 at the New York County Lawyers' Luncheon Forum, sponsored by the Committee on the Federal Courts. ' MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1992) (1792).

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