Quiet Rebels: A History of Ontario Women Lawyers

＂It’s a girl!＂ the Ontario press announced, as Canada’s first woman lawyer was called to the Ontario bar in February 1897. Quiet Rebels explores experiences of exclusion among the few women lawyers for the next six decades, and how their experiences continue to shape gender issues in the contemporary legal profession.

Mary Jane Mossman tells the stories of all 187 Ontario women lawyers called to the bar from 1897 to 1957, revealing the legal profession’s gendered patterns. Comprising a small handful of students--or even a single student--at the Law School, women were often ignored, and they faced discrimination in obtaining articling positions and legal employment. Most were Protestant, white, and middle-class, and a minority of Jewish, Catholic, Black, and immigrant women lawyers faced even greater challenges. The book also explores some changes, as well as continuities, for the much larger numbers of Ontario women lawyers in recent decades.

This longitudinal study of women lawyers’ gendered experiences in the profession during six decades of social, economic, and political change in early twentieth-century Ontario identifies factors that created--or foreclosed on--women lawyers’ professional success. The book’s final section explores how some current women lawyers, despite their increased numbers, must remain ＂quiet rebels＂ to succeed.

Mary Jane Mossman is Professor Emerita, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She is the author of many articles and the book The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions (2006), which explores early women lawyers’ experiences of gender exclusion in several world jurisdictions.