Women in the United States judiciary

Women have long faced significant barriers to entering the legal profession in the U.S., and any steps forward were frequently followed by setbacks.

For example, in June 1869, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that Arabella Mansfield could not be denied a chance to take the bar exam because she was a woman.

The U.S. Supreme Court noted: The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.

And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases.Also in 1872, the Utah Bar admitted its first two women, Phoebe Couzins and Georgianna Snow.

Nonetheless, after her legislative success, she was still denied admission to the state's Hastings College of Law on the grounds that women would "distract the attention of the male students."

In 1884, the District of Columbia trial court appointed Marilla Ricker to the position of United States Commissioner.

[5] In 1914, Georgia Bullock was appointed the "woman judge" of Los Angeles, in charge of a court segregated by sex where "she would serve as a model of Victorian ideals of womanhood for female misdemeanants".

"[12] In 1992, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit convened the first federal all-female three-judge panel, composed of Sixth Circuit judges Alice M. Batchelder and Cornelia Groefsema Kennedy, alongside the Eastern District of Michigan's Anna Diggs Taylor, sitting by designation.

From 1982 to 1984, the New Jersey Supreme Court created and ran the nation's first official Task Force on Women in the Courts to "investigate the extent to which gender bias exists in the New Jersey judicial branch, and to develop an education program to eliminate any such bias".

The New Jersey report garnered significant public attention and prompted other states to consider similar studies in their own judicial branches.

[citation needed] At a 1988 joint meeting of the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators the participants formulated resolutions directing each chief justice to create a task force in the judge's jurisdiction to study "gender bias and minority concerns".

The progress made by these courts was almost terminated in 1995, when the new Republican majority that swept into Congress under the Contract with America sought to cut off funding that had been provided to run these task forces on the federal level.

)[citation needed] Many of the task forces found both explicit and implicit unacceptable treatment of female lawyers by male judges.

For instance, in 1988, a senior status federal district court judge refused to address a female attorney as 'Ms.'