Page 72 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

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increases stress and decreases patience and attention, leading to behaviors that can be harmful . Thus it is now theorized that poverty itself leads to bad decision making . Rather than blaming the poor for their mistakes, this research suggests the importance of assisting the poor with decision making and protecting them from exploitation .17 Thus moving women out of poverty is important in order to stop a cycle of poor decision making and its continued harmful impact on families .
Even though we have rarely defined legal aid as women’s rights work, in the past three decades, as women have joined the bar in greater numbers, they have been attracted to legal aid work disproportionately to men . While men are still the majority of Legal Services Corporation (LSC) legal aid executive directors and litigation directors, women make up the majority of other attorney positions, from staff attorney to deputy director .18 Of course legal aid lawyers make less money than lawyers in private practice, a fact which raises concerns about legal aid becoming the “pink collar” part of the law profession, populated by female attorneys making lower salaries than the male dominated sectors of the profession .19
It is time for the legal aid community and its supporters to clearly frame legal aid work as work that brings justice to women, indeed as feminist work . The legal aid community has long recognized and spoken clearly and powerfully about the connection of our work with racial equality and the deep historical connections between racism and poverty . We need to bring that same analysis to poverty and discrimination against women .20 The historical denigration of women and women’s subjugation by men is too often forgotten about in our more equal modern culture, but we need only look to women in less developed nations to see where we were not long ago . The history of humankind is one of women being beaten, raped, controlled and enslaved by men both in wartime and in peace . It is only a hundred years ago that women could not vote, could not make contracts, and could not hold most jobs . The first female federal court judges are still on the bench, and they tell powerful stories of graduating at the top of their law school classes only to be offered jobs as assistants or law librarians . We must recognize that the history of treatment of women has lasting effects on their current status and economic position .
Framing legal aid anti-poverty work as part of the women’s movement may help achieve successes . As we recognize the ongoing second class status of women and its relationship to their poverty, we can also recognize how far we have come with women’s rights and women’s status . Women are both very present and successful in our nation’s professions, including the law, where more women than men now graduate from law schools . While we have far to go, more and more women are representing us in elected and appointed governmental positions, and women are slowly entering more positions of power in academia, industry, and the nonprofit sector . The world is changing and is unlikely to go backwards . We must harness this movement of cultural change and bring
17 See sendhil mullainaThan & eldar shafir, scarciTy: The new science of haVing less and how iT defines our liVes (2014). 18 2014 LSC By the Numbers 31, legal serVices corPoraTion, http://lsc.gov/media-center/publications/2014-lsc-
numbers.
19 Kelly A. Miller, The Pink-Collar Ghetto, 28 clearinghouse reV. 1168 (February 1995). Interestingly, in 1995 Miller reported that 83 percent of LSC Executive Directors were male, the same percentage as reported by LSC 21 years later in 2014. In contrast females only made up 51 percent of all LSC attorneys in 1993 but 67 percent in 2014. See also Catherine C. Carr, Fairness and Justice in Setting Legal Services Attorney Salaries: Finding the Will to Get There, MIE J., Summer 2007.
20 A search of the Clearinghouse Review website, the longstanding journal of the legal aid advocacy community, which recently changed into the “Clearinghouse Community” online reporter, produces about three times more hits when searching for articles on race and legal aid work than on gender. See http://povertylaw.org/content/ clearinghouse-review-0.
Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice