Quiet Rebels: Researching Gender Patterns in the History of Ontario Women Lawyers

Quiet Rebels is a group biography of the 187 women who were called to the Ontario bar between 1897 and 1957, detailing their experiences as a tiny number of women students and often the only woman lawyer in many Ontario communities. Most of these women lawyers were Protestant, white and middle class, although the stories of a few others have special significance. In these six decades, the Law Society of Upper Canada provided the only accredited legal education for admission to the bar, including articles in law firms and a few daily lectures (mainly by practitioners) at Osgoode Hall. The book also focuses on significant changes after 1957: the accreditation of university law schools in Ontario; the surge in numbers of women in law in the context of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and ’70s and more recently; new (and sometimes exclusionary) developments in the practice of law in recent decades; and the experiences of more numerous women lawyers who are not Protestant, white or middle class. Overall, the individual biographies of these women lawyers provide little stories that reveal an important bigger story about gendered patterns of exclusion and discrimination in the legal profession, and how some women lawyers responded to these challenges.