Several critics and scholars who have contemplated the portrayal of female lawyers in Hollywood films of the 1980s and 1990s have heard echoes in the films of the notorious United States Supreme Court opinion in Bradwell v. Illinois. In that 1872 case the court refused to reverse an Illinois bar decision to preclude women. According to Justice Bradley, “The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female gender evidently unfit for many of the occupations of civil life. The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” As provocative as this analogy might be, it seems slightly inappropriate. The sexism of the films, as opposed to that of Bradwell, is subtle rather than overt.
For many of us, Atticus Finch, the principled hero of the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, was our first positive legal role model. We may have heard of Clarence Darrow or known that Abraham Lincoln was a country lawyer before becoming president, and we may have even read Harper Lee's unforgettable book, but it was the dignified, sagacious, and unquestionably humane Gregory Peck on the screen, who educated us about what a lawyer was supposed to be. Atticus Finch braved the censure of his small southern town, represented a poor black farmer against the accusation of sexual assault by a white woman in the racist south of the 1930s, artfully used his advocate's skills in court, all the while retaining the affection of his white neighbours, the respect of the black community, and the unqualified love of his children and inspired students to look at law as an interesting career option.
Conflict between Gender and Professional Life
During the more than thirty years that Atticus Finch reigned as a leading-man legal role model, he had no female counterparts for the many women who became lawyers in the period beginning in the early 1970s when women first trickled into, then flooded, the legal profession. There was no female cinematic equivalent to Atticus Finch to emulate or admire, a deficiency that was all the more aggravating in light of the lack of real-life role models for this generation of aspiring lawyers. With few exceptions, cinematic women lawyers have been depicted in patriarchal roles, dependent for their success, approval or self-protection on male colleagues, mentors, or father figures. Moreover, they have been portrayed as immoral by society's standards, and unethical according to professional norms. Even those movies that initially seemed to showcase the skills and successes of a woman attorney favourably, were quickly stripped of this pretense of respect as the plot degenerated into a trite potboiler in which the woman's downfall is due to either absurd professional miscalculations, serious emotional problems, sexual transgressions, or all of the above.
In this batch of mediocre films there were a few of better quality that are worth examining for their more serious portrayal of women lawyers in their professional milieu. Four of them, Jagged Edge, Suspect, The Music Box, and Class Action, follow a familiar formula in which a reasonably successful, somewhat frustrated, or disappointed woman lawyer takes on a big case with either temporary or long-term disastrous consequences. The fifth, The Accused, manages to avoid these melodramatic pitfalls, but still portrays its featured attorney as a flawed heroine, and, because of its subject matter-a rape prosecution-it still suffers from some objectionable stereotyping. The Client, offers a more sympathetic, humane, and likeable portrait of its lawyer protagonist who, largely by supplementing her legal judgment with maternal impulses, achieves both a legal advantage for her client and a large measure of personal gratification.
Other movies echo these melodramatic themes of sacrifice and choice. The Defense Rests concerns a successful lawyer for organized crime and a young female law school graduate who attempts to expose him. The Law in Her Hands tells the story of a woman lawyer newly admitted to the bar who becomes quickly disillusioned and eventually becomes the under- world's leading mouthpiece, thus combining the shyster and woman's genres. In Career Women, again the young woman lawyer defends a girl accused of murdering her father. In Portia on Trial, a female lawyer defends a woman charged with murder. These movies all send the same basic message: women do not really belong in the legal profession. Even if she is spunky and good at her work, a woman lawyer is riddled with either self-hatred or self-righteousness. She induces jealousy, engages in self sacrifice, and simply cannot have both professional and personal identities. Moreover, she is either suckered by some shyster or in love with the prosecutor, and in any event, cannot truly succeed without the help of a man. Another recurrence in these early women lawyer films is the eventual marriage of the women attorneys to the prosecutors who opposed them at trial. Even if she is a successful litigator, the celluloid female attorney must be domesticated.
Probably no comedy about the law will ever surpass the charm and genius of the classic Adam's Rib. Katherine Hepburn, a solo practitioner, defends a woman accused of assault and attempted murder after she shoots her husband while he was in the arms of his lover. This film artfully and engagingly portrays the legal and marital skirmishes of this professional couple. The charm of this movie owes a lot to the Hepburn-Tracy chemistry while its portrayal of two complementary yet equally capable professionals and its explicit advocacy of women's equality are its real attractions. Despite its comedic format, the movie sends a serious message about equality for women eloquently delivered by Hepburn both in and out of court. An egalitarian, she declaims, "We don't want any advantages or prejudices."
An examination of the depiction of law and lawyers in popular media is most useful as a measurement of the general public perception of the law and the legal profession. Forms of popular culture can chart the impact of law on society as its creator has understood, processed, and then communicated the phenomena, assuming that the creator is observant and perceptive. Examining images of women lawyers thus permits us to question the status that women seem to have attained in the legal profession, and the personal, moral, or emotional adjustments they have been required to make in order to participate in that world, as conceived on film. Portrayals of women in the movies presumably attempt to mirror the authentic ambivalence of real life women lawyers about whether and how their gender influences the law and its practice, and reflects and reinforces the skepticism of lay people about the relative abilities and competence of women attorneys. These fictional characterisations and their accompanying conflicts, dilemmas, and choices not surprisingly suggest that media portraits of lawyers perpetuate the stereotypes as well as the actual differences between women and men in the legal culture, registering an outsider's perspective that those of us on the inside may have overlooked, ignored, or even rejected. We, therefore, should be able to gauge the perceived status of women in the legal profession since the credibility of plot and character depend to some degree on the authenticity of the depiction of the woman lawyer in her professional role.
Conclusion
At the end of her critique of women lawyers in film, Stacy Caplow lamented, “We are still waiting in the darkness of the movie theater … in hopes of finding our Atticus Finch.” Neither Amanda Bonner, Kathryn Murphy, Darby Shaw, nor Elle Woods are an Atticus Finch, and that is a good thing. Atticus Finch is decidedly too good to be true. The lawyer, parent, citizen, and friend is an idealized archetype. Like Henry Fonda's portrayal in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, Atticus Finch is an apotheosis: the lawyer as Jesus. A female "Atticus Finch" would be an onscreen saint. What we really need are characters based in social reality. We need more portrayals of hard-working, successful women lawyers who live rich and fulfilling lives. We need portrayals of women lawyers who have partners, children, families, and most importantly, lives outside the law. Most of all, we need women role models. If the audience generally does not love or even like most cinematic women lawyers, if most women in the audience would not identify with them nor want to be them, then we need likeable and believable agents of change. Most Hollywood depictions of women lawyers separate the female mind from the female body in unattractive, implausible ways. Hollywood wants us to believe the opposition between being a woman and being a lawyer. But, Hollywood's depictions of typical female lawyers are far from the truth. Being a female attorney does not limit a woman's depth. More than likely she has great depth of character and personal accountability because of her life situation, education, and knowledge of the law. The counter-narratives of the characters Amanda Bonner, Kathryn Murphy, Darby Shaw, and Elle Woods begin to carry us beyond the characters portrayed by both Eve Stephens and Atticus Finch and show that women lawyers in celluloid neither have to be the stereotypical "basket-case" nor do they have to be "saints" to gain audience approval and sell tickets.