ABA Senior Lawyers Division
Women Trailblazers in the Law
ORAL HISTORY
of
LOIS SCHIFFER
Interviewer: Katherine J. Henry
Dates of Interviews:
April 13, 2006 October 12, 2006 October 19, 2006 February 29, 2008 November 13, 2008 January 11, 2010 January 11, 2011
ORAL HISTORY OF LOIS SCHIFFER
FIRST INTERVIEW
April 13, 2006
Ms. Henry: Commission on Women in the Profession taping Lois Schiffer's personal
history. We are in her office in Washington, D.C. My name is Katherine
Henry. I am the interviewer and Lois Schiffer is the interviewee. Good
morning Lois.
Ms. Schiffer: Hello.
Ms. Henry: Lois, what we'd like to do is start with your early childhood history. Can you
tell us where you were born?
Ms. Schiffer: I was born in Washington, D.C.
Ms. Henry: So you're a local girl.
Ms. Schiffer: I'm a native.
Ms. Henry: Ok. What can you tell me about your early years in Washington?
Ms. Schiffer: I think it's interesting to take a step back and see how my family came to
Washington.
Ms. Henry: Sure.
Ms. Schiffer: To start out with, all of my grandparents immigrated to the United States from
different countries in Eastern Europe. My mother's mother and father went to
Boston and my mother grew up in Boston. My father's parents came to New
York and my father grew up in New York. Both of my parents grew up very
much feeling that they were poor children of immigrants who were given
great opportunity through the public education system in our country. My
mother went to public schools in Brockton and then in Roxbury, both near
15847v1
Boston or in Boston. It was when she was in high school that a teacher said to
her, that she seemed like a smart person and she actually could go to college.
And I remember that my mother told us that she had to take lots of years of
Latin [laughing] all at the same time and was quite firm that I take Latin in
junior high school as a result of that. But really through a combination of
being very capable and working hard and the help of this teacher, my mother
went to Radcliffe College on scholarship and lived at home. Boston, unlike
New York, had no real public universities so that a few lucky and able people
got to go to some of the private colleges. She was always very proud that she
had gone to Radcliffe and that figured eventually in my life as well.
My father went to Stuyvesant High School in New York and then to CCNY
and it was a similar story. He was plainly very smart and able and had the
opportunity for an education. Then each of them separately -- they didn't
know each other then -- came to Washington during the 1930s. They took the
Civil Service exam and through merit selection, could come to work for the
federal government. I point that out because all of this history eventually
come back to be a significant part of my life. They met in Washington and
both of them worked for the government for a while. My father eventually
left and went to a private company. My mother went in and out of work. But
much of her work life was working for the federal government. The
government provided a very important opportunity for both of them. So they
came to be in Washington as a result of their working, and like many people
of their generation, they stayed and raised a family and that's how I came to
be born in the 1945 in Washington. My mother used to say I was born six
15847v1 -2-
weeks before Roosevelt died. It took me a while to realize that I also was
born while World War II was going on because the Roosevelt focus was much
more significant.
Ms. Henry: Now, were you a first child, second child, only child?
Ms. Schiffer: I was the first of four. I have a sister Nancy who is two years younger than I
am, a sister Susan who was born in 1951, and then a brother Alan who was
born in 1954. My sister Susan, my brother Alan and I all continue to live in
Washington. My sister Nancy went to the University of Wisconsin and stayed
in Wisconsin.
Ms. Henry: So you were born in Washington in 1945 during World War II.
Ms. Schiffer: Yes.
Ms. Henry: Was your father, did he do any military service?
Ms. Schiffer: He did not. He worked for the Federal Power Commission on issues related
to natural gas and utility rate making.
Ms. Henry: What are your earliest memories of Washington?
Ms. Schiffer: My first memory, at least as I reconstruct it, is of playing in, what was then
called Meridian Hill Park, which was the park right across from the apartment
building where we lived on Fifteenth Street. And we went there quite
regularly. My parents took me to Meridian Hill Park and I remember playing
in that park probably when I was two or three.
Ms. Henry: And then did you go to pre-school in Washington?
Ms. Schiffer: I did. I think pre-school wasn't so common in those days, but I went to a
nursery school that was in our neighborhood. I remember that, but I don't
have very clear memories of pre-school.
15847 I - 3 -
Ms. Henry: And do you remember when your sister Nancy was born?
Ms. Schiffer: I don't remember precisely, but I remember when she was small.
Ms. Henry: And what about, as you had your other siblings come along, do you have any
recollections of that part of your life, as they became part of the family?
Ms. Schiffer: I very much remember when Susan was born. We were all born in the same
hospital, which was then called Garfield Hospital. It has now been
demolished. But it was on U Street near the old, what was the old Children's
Hospital. And when Susan was born, my mother was in the hospital for, I
don't know, it seemed like a long time. It was probably four or five days. We
would go to the hospital but then we had to stay downstairs while my father
went upstairs to see her. So I was old enough by then to have a pretty clear
memory of that. After Susan was born and came home, we continued to live
in the apartment building where we had lived, but by the time Susan was
about one, we moved to a house. We were actually quite a large family to be
living in an apartment building at that point. So we moved to a different
location.
Ms. Henry: Where was your house?
Ms. Schiffer: The apartment building, as I said, was on Fifteenth Street and the house was in
Chevy Chase, DC on a street called Patterson Street, quite near Lafayette
School.
Ms. Henry: And how long did you live in that house?
Ms. Schiffer: My mother stills lives there. [My mother died in April 2009]. I lived there
the whole time I was growing up.
Ms. Henry: So that was your childhood home.
15847v1 -4-
Ms. Schiffer: It was, although I have clear memories of Fifteenth Street and I went through
second grade living on Fifteenth Street. I started third grade at Lafayette.
Ms. Henry:
Now what about things you liked to do that you can recall doing, say before
you started school. What kind of activities? Did your parents take you to
museums, what are the sorts of things you remember doing?
Ms. Schiffer: I remember liking to read. I always liked to read and I probably learned to
read pretty early though I can't put a finger on when. We certainly went to
the zoo. We went to Gifford's for ice cream that was a big event. There was
a Gifford's in those days both in Bethesda and in Silver Spring and it was an
excursion to go. We went to Beltsville which gives us sony, perspective on
how time passes -- in those days the Department of Agriculture had an
experimental station in Beltsville, which seemed very far away. We used to
go to see the goats and other animals at Beltsville. We went on car rides.
That was a big adventure. [Laughter] A big way my family spent time on the
weekends was to take a ride and then to take a picnic.
Ms. Henry: You mean car rides?
Ms. Schiffer: Car rides, right. Rides in the car. That was an activity in those days. My
mother's mother lived in Boston and we went many summers on car rides to
visit my grandmother in Boston. I'm sure that we went to museums but I
don't have a particular memory of it.
Ms. Henry: And then you started, you went to pre-school, which you said was unusual at
that time. And then from there to school?
Ms. Schiffer: From there I went to Georgetown Day School for kindergarten and first grade.
My birthday was in February and the cutoff for public school was January and
5847v1 -5-
so my parents had me go to kindergarten and first grade in private school so
that I could start school earlier.
Ms. Henry: Do you have any recollections of Georgetown Day School?
Ms. Schiffer: I remember liking it. I'm sure I was a good student, and that was probably
part of it. I made a friend there who continues to be a friend of mine. She
was then Emily Lebowitz, now Emily Olbrich. I have a mental picture of
what the building looked like and the place looked like. I certainly enjoyed
school.
Ms. Henry: And then after you completed first grade at Georgetown Day School, where
did you go?
Ms. Schiffer: In second grade, I went to H.D. Cook Elementary School, near Meridian Hill
Park. I remember that my teacher was Mrs. Pitzer. 1 don't know why I
remember that, but 1 do. 1 remember being quite, I don't know what the word
is, concerned, because we were reading the same books in second grade that I
had already read in first grade. I have a mental picture of where preschool
was, but I don't have too many other memories of it. We had some children
of military people in my class who were bused to the school. In retrospect, it
was because there was a large concentration of military people in the
Washington area and the school system wanted to be sure that they were
spread around among the schools. I don't have much more memory of second
grade than that.
Ms. Henry: And you remember Mrs. Pitzer. Do you remember any women that were
particularly influential during these early years as you were growing?
I 5847v1 -6-
Ms. Schiffer: My mother, certainly. It's an interesting story. My parents had a number of
friends, many of whom worked for the government, and we knew them. It
turned out I learned much later in life that at least one them was a women
lawyer, but of course at the time I had no clue. To say were they influential -
I was too little. I didn't really know what my parents friends did. There were
certainly teachers who were influential along the way, but I would not say that
the teachers that I had in those early years were among them.
Ms. Henry: So, what . . . you were at, I'm sorry, what was the name of the elementary
school you were in?
Ms. Schiffer: H.D. Cook.
Ms. Henry: That's what I have here, H.D. Cook. And how long were you at H.D. Cook?
Ms. Schiffer: Just for a year.
Ms. Henry: And then?
Ms. Schiffer: Then we moved and I started Lafayette and I was at Lafayette from third
through sixth grades. It's also interesting to note, although we weren't
particularly aware of it, that in Washington, D.C., the schools were race
segregated by law. Of course it was during my third and fourth grade years,
that Brown vs. Board was decided and the D.C. schools became desegregated.
In my family, nobody ever would have made a point of the segregation since
my parents were very strongly opposed to it. The truth of it is that even after
Brown, when the D.C. schools did race desegregate, I continued to be in
classes with virtually no black students, as a function of housing
discrimination and other things as well, but we were oblivious at the time.
Again, as an adult, in retrospect its interesting to me to note that I was plainly
15847v I -7-
in school, and in a school system, where the companion case to Brown made a
significant difference.
Ms. Henry: And it's interesting that, at least for you, it didn't have that much of an impact
because the school composition didn't change.
Ms. Schiffer: That's right.
Ms. Henry: Now, what about outside of school? Was your family active in any kind of
religion? Did you go to church, synagogue, anything like that?
Ms. Schiffer: We were Jewish and we knew we were Jewish. I went to Sunday School from
second or third grade on, and then it eventually became Hebrew School. I
didn't mach care for it. I'm sure it was partly the way the classes were taught
and partly that I didn't feel a particularly integral part of the classes that I was
in. We weren't particularly observant; my parents didn't go to synagogue.
We did participate in seders but religion was not, a major force in my life.
Ms. Henry:
You said that you didn't feel like you were integrated into the class. Could
you explain that to me?
Ms. Schiffer: I didn't feel a part of the class. The people who were my friends from regular
school weren't the people who were in my Sunday School class. Hebrew
school was less intellectual than I might have liked even when I was pretty
young.
Ms. Henry: Did your gender have any impact on that?
Ms. Schiffer: It was certainly true that there were very much two tiers of participation in
Sunday School. The boys were on a track to be bar mitzvahed and for the
girls that was unheard of. Its hard to convey how unheard of it was. We
were on a track to be confirmed - a longer and less glamorous process. And
5847v1 -8-
frankly, you learned a lot less. But I don't know that I was so conscious of the
fact that there were these two tiers. Though, of course, in retrospect, it seems
completely obvious. [Laughter]. Of course in regular school, where I was
having a lot of academic success, I didn't sense at that age any distinction
based on the fact that I was a girl.
Ms. Henry: And there were boys and girls in your grade school.
Ms. Schiffer: Yes. I always went to sex - integrated classes.
Ms. Henry: So you were a Lafayette from third through sixth grades, and then you went to
another school after that?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes. Lafayette was an elementary school. In the D.C. school system junior
high school went from 7 through 9 and high school from 10th through 12th
grades. I went to Alice Deal Junior High School and then Woodrow Wilson
High School.
Ms. Henry: So what were the names of these schools?
Ms. Schiffer: Alice Deal, D-E-A-L. And Woodrow Wilson High School. They were the
neighborhood schools. In those days D.C. was pretty much a neighborhood
school system.
Ms. Henry: And these were public schools.
Ms. Schiffer: They were all public schools, right.
Ms. Henry: And did most of your friends also go to public school at the time?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes.
Ms. Henry: Did your family ever consider . . . it sounds like with your intellectual gifts,
did your family ever consider putting you in private school?
158470 -9-
Ms. Schiffer: Not that I'm particularly aware of other than that I had gone to private school
in those early two years. In those days, there were lots and lots of very able
students in the public schools and while my public school experience was not
the most intellectually stimulating, it was fine. Certainly the student body had
many intellectually gifted students, There were plenty of smart kids in public
school.
Ms. Henry: And what sort of activities did you engage in? Were you in, participate in any
clubs or teams, sports teams, anything like that?
Ms. Schiffer: I was not much of an athlete and of course those were the days long before
Title IX, so girls weren't particularly encouraged to be athletes. Although I
did get a high school sports letter [laughter], much to my amazement and that
of everyone else. I got points for refereeing and other kinds of non- physical
activities. I was in many clubs throughout junior high school and high school.
I was very active in the school newspaper, which was actually an academic
course, where I was eventually the second in charge editor - the managing
editor. I'll come back to that in a moment. I was in the French Club at some
point; and the Latin Club; the Future Teach as of America Club; there's was
something called Junior Town Meeting League, which was a public affairs
and debating club. I was in just a raft of activities. I was quite active. The
high school newspaper, called the Beacon, was a significant experience to me,
and the group of people who were involved in the newspaper were among my
close friends. I started working on the Beacon in 10th grade. I took a course
in journalism, which was part of participating on the Beacon. The teacher
who ran the school newspaper was named Dr. Boyle, and she was tough, but
5847v1
10-
Ms. Henry:
she was very strong and it was a really excellent and quite award-winning
student newspaper. It's interesting that I was a strong candidate to be editor-
in-chief of the Beacon, and was passed over for somebody else. I never
understood it at the time, but in retrospect I believe it was because he was a
boy and I was a girl.
I was going to ask that question. [Laughter]
Ms. Schiffer: But I would say in general, we were quite oblivious to any differences in
treatment in those days. But that's one thing where I never quite understood
why it was that I wasn't editor-in-chief Of course, the person who was
picked over me was later in my law school class and is somebody I m still in
touch with. Working on the school newspaper was a very important activity
to me.
Ms. Henry: Do you recall covering any particular stories or anything that stands out in
your mind from that period?
Ms. Schiffer: I have to say I don't particularly.
Ms. Henry: And you mentioned that you did get a sports letter. Was that unusual for girls
to do at the time?
Ms. Schiffer: It was certainly unusual for the intellectual girls. There were girls who were
involved in athletics. But I don't have a general sense of it.
Ms. Henry: And you said you refereed. What kind of sports?
Ms. Schiffer: I don't remember that.
Ms. Henry: Because your focus was more on intellectual activities?
Ms. Schiffer: It was definitely much more on intellectual activities. There were a group of
us who thought of ourselves as the smart, thoughtful students, and that was
15847v1
very much my focus. Actually, there came a time my senior year in high
school when I won an award that was counter to these intellectual activities
and it was a source of great embarrassment to me, although now it's of course
a very funny story. I was selected in my senior year in high school to be the
third place national winner in the Betty Crocker search for the Future
Homemaker of Tomorrow. [Laughter]. But that came about because we all
took three days of gym and two days of hygiene and my hygiene teacher was
quite insistent that if we were going to pass hygiene, we needed to take the
Betty Crocker test. It turned out that she had gone on the Betty Crocker trip
with a student from a private school, so she was familiar with the fact that she
could win a trip for herself if her students did well. So I took the Betty
Crocker test and I was a good test taker -- I didn't know much about
homemaking, but I was a quite good test taker. I had one of the top five
scores in my state, which was the District of Columbia, a quite small state.
And from that the program looked at your activities and school standing, so I
became my state's winner. With my hygiene teacher, Mrs. Ogilvy, I won an
all expense paid trip to Washington, D.C. But also to the Waldorf Astoria in
New York and to Williamsburg, Virginia, where we were given colonial ball
gowns for the event. Throughout the course of the trip, people from Science
Research Associates, the testing agency talked to us in large and small groups,
and through that process I became the third place national winner.
Interestingly, although I cannot be certain I was convinced that one of the
ways that I became the third place national winner is that we had what we
would now call a focus group discussion and the hypothetical was that
5847v1 -12-
somebody had been the science teacher in a small town. Then fell off for
some reason. The potential substitute had a child and was ambivalent about
working. What should she do? Who knew how I thought this up — I said: she
was in a good position to bargain and she could come back part-time. And
I'm just convinced [laughter] that answer had something to do with my being
the third place national winner. I did get a substantial scholarship from that
success. On the other hand I was mortified, because here was I, this smart,
intellectual kid with this "Betty Crocker" award. On the all expense paid trip
were several people who have actually been long-time friends of mine. They
included a friend who I had no other way to know, and for years when people
would ask us how we knew each other, it was an awkward moment, because
neither of us wanted to say "because we were Betty Crocker future
homemakers." That's a roundabout way of saying that I very much saw
myself as in the intellectual crowd and not in the homemaker crowd.
Ms. Henry:
Did you have some sense of what you wanted to do in the future, that you
wanted to go to college that you maybe wanted to work during those years?
Ms. Schiffer: From the day I was born, I knew I wanted to go to college because my mother,
as I mentioned, had gone to Radcliffe and was quite firm about the fact that
she would like to see her daughter go to Radcliffe. So I always knew from a
young age that I would go to college, not necessarily Radcliffe. All of my
siblings understood that the expectation in our family was that one would go
to college. On the other hand, I didn't see so much of what the work
opportunities were. The adults I knew worked for the Government or were
teachers. And so, from some time in high school, I always thought that I
15847v I -13-
wanted to be a teacher. Again, in retrospect, that's what I saw and that's what
I knew. It really wasn't until my sophomore year in college, when somebody,
a friend who had been a senior in my dorm when I was a freshman, went on to
Harvard Law School, I saw that a woman could be a lawyer. My junior year,
when I came to be in the student government, I saw that I could actually do
some of these organizing activities pretty well. Also in my junior year I was
dating a man who was in the process of applying to law school. It was that
combination that led me to law school. But it was far from my mind as even a
possibility before that.
Ms. Henry: But it certainly was understood that you would go to college and education
was highly valued in your family. Just because a lot of people won't know
about this, Betty Crocker search for Future Homemaker of America, which is
really quite unusual.
Ms. Schiffer: Very funny.
Ms. Henry: Can you tell us a little more about what the Betty Crocker search was looking
for?
Ms. Schiffer: It's a little hard to say what they were looking for. The test was 150 questions
in 30 minutes, with nothing off for wrong answers. So they plainly were
looking for someone who would know how to take a test. The questions ran
the gamut. There were math questions; how much carpet in a 3 by 5 room? I
knew math. There were questions about sewing. I actually knew how to sew.
There were questions about which is the cheapest cut of meat - I didn't have
the vaguest idea, but there was no penalty for guessing, so I guessed. There
was a ten-minute essay on compromise in marriage, a topic on which I was a
1 5347v1 -14-
world expert at age seventeen. I really had to focus on making my
handwriting legible. So, I don't really know what they were looking for - for
some combination of smarts and connections to community, activity in the
community. Beyond that, I just don't know.
Ms. Henry: What was your essay on compromise in marriage about?
Ms. Schiffer: I haven't a clue [laughing]. I think it was some version of compromise the
little things, not the big things, but I really don't know. It was open only to
girls. I also believe in retrospect, though we had no idea at the time, that the
search was race-segregated. Since I was in Washington, D.C., race
segregation would have limited the pool, but I don't really know that about the
search. In later years, the Betty Crocker contests made a point of the fact that
they picked the first African-American. And then the fact that they opened it
up to boys. Betty Crocker used the search for promotional purposes. The
company did give out a lot of scholarship money through the search and
provided a lot of opportunity. There were plenty of people on my trip who
had never been on an airplane before, or who came from states where they had
never been out of the state. Of course, I had never been west of Pennsylvania
either. There was a newsletter for a while, sort — an informal newsletter
among some of the award recipients. You will be surprised to learn that a few
other people that you know and love were Betty Crockers too. Linda
Greenhouse comes to mind. The big activities for me were also the high
school newspaper, and some of the discussion groups.
15847v1 -15-
Ms. Henry: Now we've talked about junior high and high school a bit, and all the activity
that you engaged in. Did you, when you graduated, did you go on a high
school trip with your class? Do you remember anything like that?
Ms. Schiffer: We didn't have a high school class trip. Of course we were in Washington,
D.C., the mecca of high school trips. We had a couple of trips with various
journalism people. The editors of the school newspaper went to a program at
Washington and Lee University in Virginia. We may have had a journalism
group trip to New York.
Ms. Henry: Now we haven't talked much about growing up with your brothers and sister.
Can you talk about that a little bit? What you recollect of that before your
college years?
Ms. Schiffer: My sister Nancy and I were relatively close in age and did activities together.
She picked up the activities where I didn't do so well, so that she was very
good at art, which was something that I had no talent for and didn't
particularly interest me. My sister Susan was enough younger -- she was six
years younger, that, in some ways she seemed to be in a somewhat different
universe. All four of us went on trips together with our parents - we have
photos of those activities. My brother was just a cute kid who was quite a bit
younger than I was, when I was growing up. I thought of him as a small child.
Ms. Henry:
You said your mother worked pretty much on and off as you were growing
up?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes.
Ms. Henry: How did that affect your upbringing?
15847v1 -16-
Ms. Schiffer: My mother worked until I was born and then thought she would stop working.
That stop lasted about seven months, and then she went back to work for the
government on issues related to children's health. She worked through the
time my sister Susan was born, and she did stop working for about ten years.
But she was always actively involved in activities like the League of Women
Voters. As a kid, I didn't make a big distinction between her working at a
paid job and working at those kinds of activities. My father worked for the
Government through the time I was seven or so, then went to work for a
private company where he was a consultant on natural gas rate-making, and
he traveled a fair amount. He was gone for several weeks at a stretch. That
had an effect on me that he wasn't around as much as I might have liked.
When he was home, he was very helpful with math homework and things like
that and of course took us on excursions too.
Ms. Henry: Would you describe your mother as a strong role model for you?
Ms. Schiffer: Certainly.
Ms. Henry: And were most of your friends' mothers also either working or very active as
your mother were, or did they tend to be homemakers? Was there some
distinction, or was everybody about the same?
s. Schiffer: Certainly there were some distinction and certainly I had friends whose
mothers were home all the time. Some of their mothers would be available at
school, and I did not like it when my mother wasn't available at school.
Ms. Henry:
Katherine Henry. I'm here with Lois Schiffer. Lois, we were just talking
about your years up to college. And I wanted to ask you about some of the
158470 -17-
Ms. Schiffer:
strong women in your life, who influenced you. In addition to your mom,
who played an important role.
My mother was plainly influential. I certainly would say that I had some
teachers along the way who influenced me. My Latin teacher in eighth and
ninth grade was Miss Beall. And she was quite a strong teacher. She was
very committed to Latin, which was a terrific topic for me because it was an
orderly and logical language that I very much enjoyed. Miss Beall's rigor and
real interest in me were quite strong influences and were something that led
me to think that I wanted to be a teacher. Dr. Boyle, the journalism teacher,
was also a strong influence. That class or activity contributed greatly to my
learning to write well. While I've said that there were a lot of able students in
my high school and the high school program was okay, it wasn't fabulous, and
I did get to college not really knowing how to write a paper. In my freshman
English writing class, the instructor ask us to go read an essay and write about
what you think about it. I had never before been asked to write about what I
thought about something [laughter]. What do you mean, what I think? We
had secondary sources. Learning to write grammatically and forcefully in Dr.
Boyle's journalism class was an important point for me. Seeing a strong
woman do well, as Dr. Boyle did, certainly had an influence on me too. The
editor-in-chief Steve Block and I went to law school together, and we've been
in touch in more recent years. When he was in Washington a few years ago,
we called Dr. Boyle together and indeed she's still alive. We asked her how
old she was and she didn't answer but my best guess would be that she was in
her late 80's or early 90's. And she's going strong [laughter]. She's still
15847v I -18-
teaching journalism classes. She's still working on college newspapers. She
left high school teaching at some point, taught in other places. She had a long
affiliation with Catholic University. It was quite an interesting conversation
and she continued to be quite a force. She was a significant influence on me.
The two teachers that I've mentioned are probably the two most forceful ones.
I would also say -- and this has continued to be true in my life -- that my peers
were and are a significant influence. In high school there were a group of
students, both girls and boys, as we would call them then, and they were smart
and thoughtful and we had discussions and, they were influences in my life.
And I don't mean in the sense of peer pressure that we talk about now, but in
the sense of really, showing a way that you can have a good friendship and
think about things, and worry about issues and commitment. That group of
my friends was significant to me.
Ms. Henry:
You mentioned that you really enjoyed your Latin class. Any other classes
come to mind as particularly pleasurable?
Ms. Schiffer:
The biology class that I took in tenth grade was a significant class. We had ...
that's another wonderful teacher. We had a truly fabulous teacher, Ruth
Strosnider, who had won many awards for teaching and I've always been
convinced that if my high school had more good science like that, I would
have become a scientist. That was really a wonderful class and she who was
so interested in the world and in learning and in teaching that she made a big
impression on me. I was very interested in math. I went to college thinking I
was going to be a math major so I was interested in the math classes that I
took along the way.
I 5847v1 -19-
Ms. Henry: Which was unusual at the time, wasn't it? For a ..
Ms. Schiffer: Well ...
Ms. Henry: a young girl to be interested in .
Ms. Schiffer: I mean I know that there's a lot of research about girls and math phobia. My
father did a lot of math so I didn't grow up with any math phobia. It was a
fairly common occurrence that a lot of people went to Radcliffe thinking they
were going to be math majors and then got disillusioned pretty fast because
really high powered math was something other than what we were doing. For
smart students in high school, math is an orderly, logical, problem-solving
process and if you think you can do well and you consider yourself a
mathematician. So it wasn't so unusual for people to go off thinking they
wanted to be math majors. When I got to college, I first learned that math was
something different than what I thought, and secondly, the world of social
science was opened to me and, as soon as I saw it I knew that this was for me.
Ms. Henry: When did you graduate from high school?
Ms. Schiffer: In 1962.
Ms. Henry: And then did you go ...
Ms. Schiffer: And I went immediately to college, yes. We were very much students of the
fifties in high school even though we graduated in the 1962.
Ms. Henry: What do you mean by that?
Ms. Schiffer: The open-mindedness and forward thinking of the sixties was something that
hadn't yet arrived for us. When I was in tenth grade, President Kennedy was
elected and inaugurated. That really had an effect on me and on us. First of
all, Kennedy recruited the best and brightest, new government employees
15847v1 -20-
came to town and their children were often in classes with us. We were
beginning to be more aware of the news and what was going on and the fact
that you had a young, dynamic President who made government attractive and
public service attractive was certainly something that we were very much
aware of. I failed to mention a couple of other timeline facts that were
significant. When I was in probably eighth grade, but certainly junior high
school, two events happened pretty much around the same time. Sputnik went
up -- the Russians put Sputnik into space, and at that time there were
demonstrations in Little Rock, Arkansas as Central High School, was trying to
be desegregated. I remember a discussion in our eighth grade class about the
significant event of that week and of course it seemed to me it was Little Rock
and seemed to many other people Sputnik, but the truth of it was that they
were both very significant. , The United States' response to Sputnik was to
substantially improve science curriculum, and although I don't think I was
particularly affected by it., a lot of people of our age and stage were affected
by that important step. And of course Little Rock's reverberations continue to
today. So we lived in a time when we were quite aware. On the other hand, I
also was not quite in junior high school when McCarthy was going on, but
that I was not particularly aware of.
Ms. Henry: And what's your recollection about Little Rock desegregation? You
obviously recognize it as a very important event.
Ms. Schiffer: We of course were all for race integration in my family ... so it seemed to us
that the resistance was terrible. And in retrospect, my mother always made
the point, which I think is right, that right after Brown vs. Board was decided.
15847v1 -21-
it would have been vastly preferable if President Eisenhower had announced
that it was morally correct and he was going to make it stick. That he decided
is something that inures to his detriment. We had a turning point in our
country, and it didn't take as attractive a course as it might have taken. Of
course as a result, as a nation we curtailed the lives of many people. As a
nation, now, just as we have made a lot of progress with women, we've made
a lot of progress on race too. Just not as much as we might hope.
Ms. Henry: So you began Radcliffe in what year?
Ms. Schiffer: I began Radcliffe in the Fall of 1962. Fairly shortly after I arrived, the Cuban
Missile Crisis occurred and i remember other students being sure that the
world as we knew it was going to be bombed to death. I didn't feel that way.
I was your average freshman, not quite sure I was there rightly, thinking
maybe I was the mistake in the admission process. Basically I very much
liked the opportunity to be with other students who were as smart as I was. I
had always gone to school thinking I was one of the smarter students in the
class, and now suddenly I had classrooms and friends who were similar and it
was really quite a wonderful experience. I didn't feel particularly prepared
and I had a pretty hard struggle for the first six months or so because I was
having trouble in math class and I didn't really know how to write a paper.
My peers were wonderful and I made close life-long friends from that group
of students. But it was kind of a mixed experience for awhile. So, there we
were in a circumstance where, though we wouldn't have said it at the time
women were very definitely second class. We lived in sex-segregated dorms.
Radcliffe had the girl's dorms and Harvard had men's dorms and houses.
15847v I -22-
There was a library on the main campus that women were not allowed into,
Lamont Library. No one quite believes that. We can tell people now, and
they think you're crazy, but actually that was true then. The much bigger and
more important fact is that we had virtually no women teachers. The message
was pretty much that you're second class. We weren't encouraged into
graduate programs in at all the same way as men were. We were aware that
there weren't easy, informal ways for with men and women to be together.
The classes were all sex-integrated classes but, because of the separate living
arrangements and no student union, it wasn't so easy. There were of course
many activities that were sex-integrated. It was mostly quite a terrific
experience and I liked it a lot.
Ms. Henry: You said the classes were sex-integrated?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes, they were. There weren't separate Radcliffe classes.
Ms. Henry: And what was your experience being a young woman in those classes with
young men? Did you perceive any different treatment?
Ms. Schiffer: Of course, I'd been in high school that way too, and so that was nothing new
to me. In the classes, I didn't perceive different treatment. In retrospect, I
think there was plenty of different treatment and of course, when we've all
gone to reunions now, a great deal of anger comes out. To me, what summed
it up, though I wouldn't have thought this at the time, is that when I went to
apply to law school, the Radcliffe guidance counselor told me I might not get
into any law school, rather than doing what she ought to have been doing --
going over to Harvard and saying our students have had exactly the same
education as the Harvard students, and Harvard law school ought to prefer
15847vI -23-
Radcliffe students in exactly the same way as it refers Harvard College
students. But instead, we got the message that you girls all write well, we did
well on the writing test, but not that the school was out there fighting for us to
be treated equally with regard to law school admissions. Now, of course, I did
get into law school, but I think it summed up a part of the attitude of the
College that someone in authority would tell me I couldn't get into law
school. I don't mean just me, it really was a framework, both for the fact that
there was a double standard, and that nobody was out there fighting to end
that double standard any time soon. The basic message at Radcliffe at the
time was sounded by the President, Mary Bunting, who had the message that
women can work: she herself had quite a good career both in the government -
- she was on what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission -- and as
president of the college; and at the same time have a family, and somehow
will work out. Nobody was too heavily into the details of how it would
somehow all work out. At the same time, there was clearly this thread of a
double standard, in regard to what academic opportunities we were given,
what attention was paid to us and again, in going to professional schools,
nobody was pushing for most of the women.
Ms. Henry:
Did you have any women professors at Radcliffe?
Ms. Schiffer:
Very few. My freshman year, I took a seminar on India and the teacher was
the one Radcliffe professor, Cora DuBois, who was a sociologist. She was
one the very few. I had one woman section teacher. When you had a big
class, the "sectionmen" taught an add-on classes. I had a woman section
teacher in the philosophy courses that I took. That was pretty much it.
I 5847vI -24-
Ms. Henry: Who were the major influences on you during college?
Ms. Schiffer: Certainly my friends. My friend Susan Segal, who became Susan Segal Rai,
was the person who introduced me to law school. She had been a senior in my
dorm when I was a freshman and she then went on to law school. I always tell
her she's the reason I went to law school. She always laughs. She was plainly
a significant influence and continues to be a close friend. There was a woman
named Kate Hollahan, who was a few years ahead of me and who majored in
Social Studies; she was influential in getting me into that major, which was a
special honors major, and that was very significant to my college career.
There was, my friend Marcia Siegel, who continues to be one of my closest
friends, and was a peer to me, and she was very influential. Then I was in this
special major Social Studies -- where we had a series of tutors, some of whom
were graduate students. The theory of Social Studies was that you could not
look at the problems of society from only one discipline. I focused on the
problems of industrial societies, through the background, both theoretical and
as applied, of history, government, economics and social relations. That
approach was interesting and influential in the way I have thought about
problems since. You can't look at them from just a narrow perspective but
need to examine the problems more broadly if you are going to solve them.
Some of the tutors I had -- tutors were a kind of teacher at Harvard who were
graduate students in various social sciences -- were very influential as well. I
wrote my senior thesis with John Rawls, who was a famous philosophy
professor, and focused on equality, and he was influential.
Ms. Henry: Well I would say that's a great understatement [laughter].
158470 -25-
Ms. Schiffer: He was a wonderful man.
Ms. Henry: Most people would know who John Rawls is. Can you tell me a little about
the thesis that you . .
Ms. Schiffer: Yes. It is an odd thesis and if I had it to do over, I might do it differently. I
focused on novels about ideal societies, utopian novels, and what we could
learn from them about equality and how they handled issues of equality. I
used the John Rawls framework, which in those days hadn't been finalized
yet, but he'd been thinking about it for a long time. So I really struggled with,
how you deal with equal treatment and what does it mean to be equal and
Rawls had a theory of looking at putting ourselves in a state of no knowledge
and looking at the least well off person. That's a helpful approach to thinking
about solving social problems.
Ms. Henry: Was there any, did you have any particular focus on gender at the time, or it
was just across society?
Ms. Schiffer: It was really across the board and if you asked any of us at the time what we
were thinking about in terms of equality, the focus was plainly on race. I
graduated from college in 1966. This is when the big civil rights activity was
going on and there isn't any doubt that that was the primary focus of our
struggle with equality.
Ms. Henry: Were you active in any way in the civil rights movement during your college
years?
Ms. Schiffer: Not during my college years. After my first year in law school, I spent a
summer in Mississippi. Before that, I certainly was sympathetic to the civil
rights movement.
15847v1 -26-
Ms. Henry: You mentioned the people who were influences on you in college and, if I
understand it right, all of these people that you mentioned were your peers,
correct?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes.
Ms. Henry: No one comes to mind who was a teacher or professor or administrator,
anything like that.
Ms. Schiffer: The tutors that I mentioned in social studies were quite influential on me. We
all were aware of Mary Bunting and what she did and so that was an influence
that pervaded the school, but I didn't know her well. On the other hand, the
college had administrators who told you that you might not get into law
school.
Ms. Henry: Now you said that your friend Susan Rai, did go to Harvard Law School, is
that right?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes, she did go to Harvard Law School.
Ms. Henry: And she went to Harvard Law School when you were a sophomore or junior?
Ms. Schiffer: Sophomore.
Ms. Henry: And how did that influence you?
Ms. Schiffer: Here was a friend, who I saw going through law school. Because she was at
Harvard, she lived near me and so we saw each other quite regularly. We
actually were together when we both learned that President Kennedy had been
shot. 1 could see that here was a woman who was going to law school and
doing fine. It made it apparent to me that that was an option in a way that was
very influential.
15847v1
27-
Ms. Henry: And so what was the next step? You saw that Susan was going to law school.
You saw it as an option. What did you do to move forward with that?
Ms. Schiffer: Also I was dating at the time a man who eventually became a first-year law
student as well. That also had an impact. So, I applied to a gamut of law
schools. They were telling me I might not get in anywhere, so I applied to
five or six law schools. I remember -- this is now laughable -- that I was
considering graduate school as well, though I wasn't particularly committed to
a specific discipline, and was certainly not getting particular encouragement.
But the applications for graduate school were long and involved writing long
essays, and the application for Harvard Law School was two index cards, and
so that was pretty much what swung me [laughter] to sticking with law school.
I applied to a range of law schools and once I got into enough of them, I
pulled the rest of my applications and then spent the traditional week
agonizing about whether to go to Harvard or Yale. Partly I knew Cambridge
and partly there were very women in any of these law school classes, but in
my class at Yale law, there would have been only six or seven women and that
seemed like a very small pool to me, whereas in my Harvard class, there were
all of 35 of us in a class of over 500. But it provided a bigger group of people
women peers.
Ms. Henry: So you applied and were granted admission to all these law schools and then
you eventually selected Harvard.
Ms. Schiffer: Yes.
Ms. Henry: Now that would have been, would that have been in your junior or senior
year?
I 5847v1 -28-
Ms. Schiffer: My senior year.
Ms. Henry: Your senior year. So you graduated from Radcliffe in what year?
Ms. Schiffer: 1966. And then I went directly to law school.
Ms. Henry: Now, during the time you were in college, did you work?
Ms Schiffer: I worked in the summers. Let me see if I can reconstruct this. The summer
after my freshman year, I didn't work, I traveled in Europe. The summer after
my sophomore year, I worked in Washington for the Agency for International
Development. The summer after my junior year, I went to Berkeley. And the
summer after my senior year, I worked in Washington at 0E0, which was the
Office of Economic Opportunity.
Ms. Henry: You said the summer after your freshman year, you traveled.
Ms. Schiffer: Yes.
Ms. Henry: Where did you go?
Ms. Schiffer: I was on a program sponsored by Oberlin College to learn to speak French and
study, to take classes in French and then to travel primarily around France.
We did that and then when the program ended, I also did a little bit of
traveling in Scandinavia.
Ms. Henry: Any events stand out in your mind from that summer?
Ms. Schiffer: I became fluent in French, which I no longer have, I'm sad to say, but it was
quite significant at the time. Seeing a different culture was an interesting
experience, living in a different way. Also the substantive learning about
French architecture and art and language courses was quite interesting.
Ms. Henry:
And then you said you worked your second summer for the Agency for
International Development here in Washington? What did you do?
15847vI -29-
Ms. Schiffer: I lived at home because this is where my family was. I was a summer intern
in that part of AID that was responsible for bringing people with knowledge
from foreign countries to the United States and I remember working to do the
paperwork for a group of social scientists who were coming from the Middle
East. It was just a low-level job.
Ms. Henry: And your third summer, you were at Berkeley. Were you taking classes?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes, I did. I really wanted a summer in California. That summer was really
the first time I went west of the East Coast. I took a class in art and a class in
modem literature and lived in Berkeley and traveled around California. At the
end of the summer I went to visit a friend of mine who was living for the
summer in Watts and left there a week or so before the Watts Riots. We have
to cast our minds back to what those times were like. I loved Berkeley and
thought California was pretty spectacular . My eyes were opened to the fact
that there was more than the East Coast in this country.
Ms. Henry: And then finally, after you graduated, you worked in the Office of Economic
Opportunity also in Washington?
Ms. Schiffer: It was also in Washington and was also pretty much of a summer intern job.
But of course 0E0 was doing important work. It was running a whole set of
President Johnson's programs to lift people out of poverty. I particularly
worked on the Job Corps. It was at a time when we thought there was good
hope for government programs to help address some of the real inequalities of
income in our country. I was around people who were setting up the Job
Corps and making it happen. It was quite exciting.
Ms. Henry: And then in the Fall of 1966, you started at Harvard Law School?
15847v1 -30-
Ms. Schiffer: Yes.
Ms. Henry: And you said you were one of 35 women?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes, we were a tiny handful. The dean made it clear we didn't belong there.
The class was over 500 students divided up into four sections, so each section
had about 150 people and of that, I would say it was seven or eight women.
So we were very visible [laughter]. We were very much not equally treated in
different ways by different professors. The dean made it quite clear that we
didn't belong there, that we were taking the place of men. Even if we thought
that we were not well treated in college, this was sort of whole new world of
discrimination.
Ms. Henry: And how did the dean convey that? I mean, you obviously have this
impression. How was it conveyed to you?
Ms. Schiffer: My memory, which may be apocryphal, is that at the opening program, the
dean conveyed the values of the law school, and made some suggestion he
wasn't so fond of the fact that there were now women in law school.
Ms. Henry:
Now did your, the group of women in your class, were you a close group,
since there were so- few of you?
Ms. Schiffer: We were very close and we all knew each other and we all talked to each
other. We were also friends with the men in our class.
Ms. Henry: Sure.
Ms. Schiffer: But the women really did know each other because, we were in a little
fishbowl there [laughter], and I continue to have some very good friends from
that time. I lived in an apartment. There were four of us -- me, another
woman in my law school class, a woman who was a first-year medical
158470 -31-
student, and a woman who was getting a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at
MIT. We had all been in the same class in Radcliffe, but hadn't particularly
known each other. That was really a wonderful experience too. We all
learned to cook, we had endless discussions, as aspiring lawyers and doctors,
about the intersection of those issues, and what were the issues that we were
dealing with, and that was a quite exciting time. I actually very much liked
the first year in law school once I got the hang of it. I thought the classes
were very interesting, there was a level of thinking about things that I found
interesting. I had some very wonderful classmates, both women and men.
And some very fine professors.
Ms. Henry: How did the men in your class react to having women in the class?
Ms. Schiffer: It was the total gamut. Some of them thought it was just fine and then the
person who sat next to me in one of my classes said: "now why aren't you
home doing pottery? I think the breathtaking part was that people felt free
to say that to you. But it was a different time and we have to remember that.
We very much felt that we were pioneers, that this was something really
special, that we were women in law school, and in Harvard Law School no
less. So we just put up with it. But it was a time when people told you they
might never hire you and professors didn't call on you or, as in the case of my
property professor, put all the women in the front of the room one day to talk
about dower. So it wasn't a very pretty picture, but the other side of it was,
that you were visible so when people came to interview, you would be the
person who stood out if they interviewed 15 or 20 people and. Most of us
have had good careers.
5847v1 -32-
Ms. Henry:
Now you said you enjoyed your first year quite a bit. What can you remember
about that first year?
Ms. Schiffer:
I remember it pretty vividly. I used to say it's like going back to junior high
school. We had lockers, we had sections, you moved around with your
section in groups. We had study groups. We read cases and talked about the
cases. It was a fairly rigorous program. There was a fair amount of reading. I
remember my friends. I remember that we talked about course work and the
legal issues. And I think how, though I wouldn't have thought it at the time
that we were in the process of becoming lawyers. We were in the process of
looking at facts and trying to discern what are the facts and what is the law?
And, bringing a certain amount of skepticism and also intellectual rigor to it.
Of course the law school classes were much focused in those days on
appellate cases and, appellate cases primarily in the traditional subjects.
Certainly first year, it was all the traditional subjects. We had contracts,
property, torts, civil procedure, criminal law, which was both criminal
procedure and criminal law. [END OF TAPE]
Ms. Henry:
We could call it Tape 3 but it's physically Tape 2, Side A of the Lois Schiffer
oral history. And Lois was just telling me about her experience at Harvard.
And Lois, we were talking about your first couple of years and your
experience there. What else can you recall about your first year?
Ms. Schiffer:
We took quite traditional courses. In criminal law, which was a combination
of substantive criminal law and criminal procedure, I was taken out of my
section and was put into a special little class. Harvard was trying an
experiment of seeing what it was like to have classes of 35 people in the first
15847v1 -33-
year. The program set up one class in each of several topics and took people
out of their regular sections. I was put into the special criminal law class and I
remember being very upset about it because I was being taken out of
Professor Dershowitz' class and put into a criminal law class with Roger
Fisher, who wasn't much of an expert on criminal law. Fisher certainly called
on the women in his class, but he was quite putting down of us. We were
aware of it at the time, although I loved the subject and thought it was really
quite fascinating. My torts professor, was a visiting professor from Berkeley
and quite a lovely guy and I very much enjoyed him and interestingly, he had
a professional wife, but he didn't call on women unless they volunteered and I
once asked him why and he said, "well girls have to comb their hair." The
idea was we had other things to do. The property class was sad. I mean it was
focused on medieval land law and not on modern [laughter], not on modern
property law and that was the professor who put the women in front of the
room and had us talk about dower. So, I certainly felt, and I would probably
generalize this to many of the women, felt that while we certainly belonged
there, we were so separately treated, that there was a little gnawing part of us
that thought, well maybe we really aren't able to do this and maybe we really
aren't able to be good lawyers. It was a little disquieting. But the program
was interesting and I certainly had wonderful friends -- both men and women.
I learned a lot and enjoyed thinking in the way that lawyers think. I was quite
focused in those days on wanting to be a poverty lawyer and wanting to do
law for poor people. In the first year, you're pretty focused on your classes
rather than much outside activity. I do remember that although we had a
5847v1 -34-
program on how to do legal research, I pretty much got all the way through
law school without really knowing how to do legal research and it wasn't until
I had my first job out of law school and then became a law clerk the following
year that I really learned how you found cases and dug out legal research
materials. When I tell people that, they look at me as if the intellectual
stimulation, the way of thinking "...and you got all the way through Harvard
Law School" and I did [laughter]. But and our living circumstance, where we
had this wonderful intellectual and fun experience, are the big things that I
remember of my first year in law school.
Ms. Henry: Did you work after your first year?
Ms. Schiffer: The summer after my first year I went to Mississippi on a program through the
NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I was in the Fund office in Jackson doing
research on civil rights cases.
Ms. Henry: And what can you recall from that summer?
Ms. Schiffer: We were scared. It was not 1964, but on the other hand, there was certainly
still plenty of discrimination. I lived in a house with a couple of other people
in a middle class black sc-ction of Jackson, and went to the office every day.
We pretty much stayed in Jackson but we had a couple of experiences where
we went out of town and it was very much a sense of us and them -- there was
real race segregation. I met some terrific people that summer and people who
were really committed to and working on civil rights. One felt you were
making a little bit of contribution to what was a really important and
significant movement.
A
5847vI -35-
Ms. Henry: And were there other law students who were participating in the program as
well?
Ms. Schiffer: There were. There were several.
Ms. Henry: And were there other women, were you the only woman, what was that like?
Ms. Schiffer: There were other women and that was not particularly a focus. Our real focus
was on the race discrimination.
Ms. Henry: So you did research on civil rights cases?
Ms. Schiffer: I did.
Ms. Henry: Does any thing particular come to mind?
Ms. Schiffer: No, not particularly. I remember we were developing a case on the statewide
schools for the deaf and there were two in Jackson, a black one and a white
one. We took a tour of the black one and the poor conditions compared to the
white one were just remarkable. It would be very hard to have anything other
than have it hit you in the face that this was about as unequal as two facilities
could be. That's a very clear memory of that summer.
Ms. Henry: Did the experience change you in any way or were you already cognizant of
these race issues by the time you got there?
Ms. Schiffer: I would certainly say I was cognizant of them. The sense of what it was like
to be living in the thick of it was a significant experience to me and to see
what life was like for people who really lived there and really participated in it
was a significant experience to me.
Ms. Henry: And this was your first visit to the South.
Ms. Schiffer: It was my first visit to the South.
Ms. Henry: Then you returned to Harvard for your second year of law school.
15847v1 -36-
Ms. Schiffer: Yes, I did and it was a little less fun than first year, I thought, but we had
some more flexibility in the courses we were taking. I don't really remember
all the courses I took. I do remember -- because in retrospect it's pretty funny
-- that I took a course called Economic Regulation with Derek Bock, which
covered everything we would now call the regulatory state, and that is how
many, many, many courses in law school, but then it was folded up into one. I
took Administrative Law, which I thought was quite interesting and of course,
became a significant subject matter in my later work. I took tax and then my
tax professor, who was Dean Griswold, got called to be Solicitor General, so
then we had to switch tax professors. But I don't remember so much more
about it.
Ms. Henry: Were you involved in any other activities outside of class?
Ms. Schiffer: Yes, I was. I was involved in an early clinical program called CLAO,
Community Legal Community Legal Assistance Office, or maybe Cambridge
Legal Assistance Office that, because these things have a way of coming back
full circle, was then run by John Ferren who you know, later was somebody I
knew when I moved to Washington. I handled a couple of cases through
CLAO, though to be sure I didn't have a very clear idea of how to go about
[laughter] handling those cases. That was a program that I participated in,
either in my second or third year.
Ms. Henry: Anything else stand out from your second year? Although you said it wasn't
quite as interesting as the first.
Ms. Schiffer: Not particularly.
Ms. Henry: And what did you do after . . .
I 5847v1 -37-
Ms. Schiffer: The summer after my second year, I went to work for a big New York law
firm as a summer associate. At Kaye Scholer in New York where I worked on
a corporate closing and Kaye Scholer represented the National Education
Association and I worked on a couple of matters for them. We spent quite a
bit of time in the library that summer talking about the upcoming 1968
election. That was a very interesting and difficult election for people of my
age and stage. That was when McCarthy was running, when people were not
so happy about Senator Humphrey and it was a summer in turmoil vis-a-vis
who the President would be. I remember having a lot of discussions about
that. It wasn't really part of the law firm summer program. I also remember
some pretty blatant discrimination on the basis of sex. First of all, this was a
law firm that did hire women for the summer; not all law firms did. Secondly,
there was a dinner for people in Boston who were going to be or had been
summer associates of that program and it was at a big downtown Boston
restaurant, the name of which will come to me, but it was the famous, old line
Boston restaurant [Lochober's] and because there were a few women in the
group, we had to be upstairs in a private room. We couldn't sit in the main
dining room. That summer, I had worked on some corporate closing and at
the end of the corporate closing everybody went off to lunch at a club except
for me. who wasn't invited, because it wasn't a club that let in women. So,
we really had a pretty clear sense that there were mountains to climb here, and
the message was sent. And this was a law firm that was, regarded as at the top
in terms of women. I think there was even a woman partner. There was
certainly a woman who was well on the way to being a partner. But all along
5847v1 -38-
the way there were these messages of, women are separate, women are
separate, women are separate. In my third year, when I interviewed, there
were law firms that told me," we hired a woman once. We may never hire
another one.- There were people among my group who knew this wasn't
right, but I don't think any of us thought we ought to be filing lawsuits at that
point.
Ms. Henry: Now I was going to ask you. You talked about your third year interviewing. I
wanted to ask you about your second year interview process where you were
looking for your first law firm job. What can you recall about that?
Ms. Schiffer: I had plenty of offers, so I don't have any bad feelings about it, though
somebody at a prominent Washington law firm that shall remain nameless
told me I hadn't done well enough. It was interesting to me in later life, when
lawyers from that firm were on the other side of cases from me. I remember
that, some people told us they might never hire us, and on the other hand, if
people had interviewed a whole raft of people in a day, it was clear that we
stuck out and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing when somebody's
interviewed 19 people who look the same and one person who looks different.
We all asked, I remember asking people who had been in those law firms the
summer before, do they hire women, how do they treat women? So it was
somewhat on our mind, but not in as significant a way as it might have been.
Ms. Henry: And then you were able to . . .
Ms. Schiffer: I picked the law firm I picked because a woman I knew who was a year ahead
of me had been there the summer before and had said she'd had a good
experience and that seemed as good a basis as any to pick . . . I don't think
15847v I -39-
that I thought of this as picking the law firm where I was going to spend the
rest of my life. I thought of it as this will be a summer experience in New
York and it'll be fun [laughter]. And so, that was as good a basis as any to
pick.
Ms. Henry: And do you recall any particular influences coming out of that summer at
Kaye Scholer? Anything that stands out in your mind, as being important for
your career?
Ms. Schiffer: Not really. I recall one funny story was on the way to getting the job. The
system was similar then to what it is now - people came to the law school,
interviewed and then if they liked you, you went back down to the firm to
interview. I went to New York to interview with a big poobah. He was a
small, balding man and he had pictures of little children on the walls. And I
said, "Oh are these your grandchildren?" And of course they were his
children [laughter]. I learned from that not to ever make [laughter] that
mistake again. He didn't say anything. But . . . don't assume. I was
mortified. But in terms of practicing law, nothing particular stands out. \
Ms. Henry: So you spent your first summer at Kaye Scholer.
Ms. Schiffer: My second summer.
Ms. Henry: I'm sorry, your second summer. You had done public work before and now
this was in the private sector. How did that compare in your mind at the time?
Ms. Schiffer:
I didn't particularly compare it. Ifs not as if I thought I really wanted to work
for a law firm and this was the big test. I more thought I really want to do
poverty law but spend the summer working in New York and get a big law
5847v1 -40-
firm experience and so I didn't compare them in quite that way. And it was a
fine summer.
[END OF TAPE]
15847v1 -41-