Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Jeanine M. Donahue back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.
There are moments that stay with you not because they were catastrophic, but because they captured an entire workplace culture in one small, ridiculous object. For me, that object was a box of Pamprin.
I graduated from college in 1987 and went to work as a case assistant for a highly respected, venerable San Francisco law firm. Our legal team included many recent college graduates, and the women in our group wore pants to work. We were on the lower floors of the firm, somewhat removed from the client meeting areas and power offices, so perhaps no one had yet focused on us.
A couple of months into my employment, everyone in the firm received a memorandum stating that the partners had met and decided that women who worked at the firm were now “allowed” to wear pants. I was shocked. I had not been told about the prior rule, and I had not followed it. This was 1987, for God’s sake. And yet what sounds absurd now was still being treated as a workplace concession in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
That context matters. Until the early 1990s, women were not reliably permitted to wear pants on the United States Senate floor. The “pantsuit revolution” sounds almost quaint now, but it is a useful reminder that institutions often defend old rules as decorum until someone forces the rule to explain itself.
Then came my Pamprin moment. When I passed the California Bar Exam in 1992, one of the law partners I had clerked for — a lawyer I respected — gave me a box of Pamprin with a note that read: “So that you don’t become a bitch of an attorney.” He and the other male partners apparently thought this was very funny and clever. I did not. I was horrified, humiliated, and hurt.
I also did what many young women in workplaces did then: I absorbed it. I did not report it. I did not demand an apology. I did not explain to a room full of men why the joke was demeaning. I was new, ambitious, grateful to have passed the bar, and still trying to understand the unwritten rules of a profession that had not been built with women in mind.
That is why the Pamprin box matters more than the box itself. It was not just a bad joke. It was a message about what kind of woman lawyer was considered acceptable: capable, but not too forceful; smart, but not too sharp; assertive, but only if she could make everyone else comfortable while doing it.
Thinking back on the pants memorandum and the Pamprin box, I know progress has been made. I cannot imagine a law firm today circulating a memo announcing that women are finally permitted to wear pants. I also cannot imagine a male partner handing a newly admitted woman lawyer menstrual-pain medication as a warning not to become difficult. Or at least, if he did, I cannot imagine the institution being able to treat it as harmless fun.
That is not because sexism has disappeared. It has not. The gender pay gap remains real, and the numbers depend on how they are measured. The progress is incomplete, uneven, and too often slower than it should be. But it is progress nonetheless, built on the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enforcement, litigation, cultural pressure, and generations of women refusing to accept the rules as fixed.
The same is true of sexual harassment law. Before the late 1970s and early 1980s, federal law did not clearly recognize workplace sexual harassment as a legal wrong. In 1977, a federal appeals court recognized that firing a woman for rejecting a supervisor’s sexual advances could violate Title VII. In 1980, the EEOC issued guidelines defining sexual harassment and making clear that sex-based intimidation and hostile work environments were unlawful. That legal architecture did not eliminate harassment, but it changed what workers could name, challenge, and prove.
Culture changed too. Some of that change came from lawyers and courts. Some came from advocates like Gloria Steinem, who insisted that women’s lived experiences belonged in public conversation. Some came from women like Dolly Parton, who used humor, talent, business acumen, and an unmistakable sense of self to make power look different. They did not advance women’s rights in the same way, but both helped expand the imagination of what women could be.
Has progress been made? You betcha, as Dolly might say. But my Pamprin moment reminds me that progress is not abstract. It is measured in whether the next young woman lawyer has to decide whether to laugh off the humiliating joke; whether she can walk into the room dressed for the work, instead of the rule; and whether she can be excellent without first proving she is not “too much.”
That box of Pamprin — expired since 1993 — sits encased in a clear box on my desk. It is there to remind me how far we have come. I do not romanticize the workplace that produced it. But I am grateful to be old enough to remember it clearly, and still optimistic enough to believe that telling the story matters.
Jeanine M. Donohue is a member of Buchalter’s Litigation Practice Group and Wineries, Vineyards and Breweries Practice Group. She practices in the firm’s St. Helena and San Francisco offices. With over 30 years of experience, Jeanine is a big picture strategist who quickly appreciates the 30,000 foot major issues, while also being attentive to the nuances and important details of each matter she handles. Jeanine maintains a broad litigation practice that includes insurance recovery, commercial, real estate and products liability. Since 2013, Jeanine has served as Outside General Counsel to four active 524(g) settlement trusts with over $1 billion in assets. She manages all outside trust litigation including insurance coverage litigation, bankruptcy and adversary proceedings.
