Abstract
This book aims to reconstruct the history of legal aid to the poor by examining the role of women through the decades. Batlan explores ideologies of gender and how they shaped legal aid whether it was provided by lay women volunteers, women lawyers, or male lawyers who denigrated the role of women. The author maintains that previous histories of legal aid have minimized or ignored the important role that women played. Her history parallels social welfare development in documenting how legal aid began as a volunteer women’s project in the Progressive era and morphed into a service provided by social workers. Then in the early 20th century, as in the medical profession, male lawyers attempted to claim the turf, as “objective professionals,” in contrast to “charity workers” who were female social workers that they criticized as spending too much time with clients and being subjective in their work. Lawyers demanded a hierarchical relationship, where the male lawyers would be in charge, and if women were hired at all, they would be subservient to them.
The history of legal aid is not uniform throughout the nation. In New York, for example, social workers were more likely to be subservient to the legal profession, while in Chicago, women social workers dominated social welfare agencies. The difference may be explained because of the settlement houses and the School of Civics and Philanthropy (later the School of Social Service Administration) both led by strong women who advocated for social justice. Batlan singles out Sophisba Breckinridge as the first woman lawyer in Kentucky, who earned a PhD in political science and later served as a faculty member at the University of Chicago. She educated social workers to understand poverty as a structural problem. These leaders challenged the male legal profession by providing alternative legal aid in their agencies, often with professionally trained women lawyers as well as social workers in social welfare agencies.
The very concept of legal aid is gendered. The legal profession focused on a narrow adherence to procedural aspects of the law, focused on property issues, and often charged clients a fee or a percent of what they were able to collect. In contrast, the social welfare–based legal services looked at equity and social justice as an issue and were more likely to take on the role of advocates, especially for poor women.
While Batlan discusses the role of social workers throughout the book, Chapter 5 “Constellations of Justice” is particularly focused on the contrast between social workers and lawyers and their contrasting views of what services legal aid should provide and to whom. Social work tended to raise larger questions of social justice and addressed policy changes when they believed laws were unjust. As social work schools were established, most offered courses on social work and the law, blurring the boundaries between the two professions.
This book offers a thorough historical analysis of primary sources, with extensive footnotes and a list of 12 primary organizations from the American Bar Association and other legal organizations through social welfare organizations in Chicago, Boston, and New York.
While the book is organized chronologically, Batlan often jumps back and forth through time as she discusses certain issues. Moreover, in her concluding chapter, she briefly remarks on legal aid in the 1960s and later brings in developments in the mid-1950s. As her title takes the history through 1945, this seems out of place, especially as she does not bring it forward to the present.
Despite these minor concerns, this is a rich, important volume that would be appropriate for graduate students studying social welfare history, women studies students examining the history of gendered roles in the social work and legal professions, and law students or legal scholars as a corrective to the male-dominated history of most legal aid studies.