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• Tuesday, January 17, 2006 02:21 PM

  Sure she would have been a lawyer, sure . . .

  I had to laugh when Kate O'Beirne insisted she would have been a lawyer without feminism. Conveniently, she's ignored the fact that law schools had quotas that limited women to a tiny percentage of the class--if they allowed them at all. My mother graduated from law school in the 50s. She was one of five women in her class--and that was at infamously "liberal" Berkeley. She then went on dozens of interviews to get a job--most firms were willing to hire her as only a legal secretary or a librarian.

  It's interesting to note that conservative Queen bees like O'Beirne (and Phyllis Schafly and Laura Ingraham)all took advantage of the hard spade work feminists did to abolish these quotas to obtain the prestige law degrees confer. None of them went to law school before feminism opened the legal doors to more than a tiny segment of women.

  It's also interesting to note that Republican women, such as Sandra Day O'Connor and Elizabeth Dole, who did go to law school under the quota system, have never taken the vituperative, misogynistic attitude toward women's rights that someone like O'Beirne does.

  As for Traister getting bulldozed--well, yeah, that's clearly O'Beirne's shtick. But since Traister had the advantage of being able to look up information and facts after the interview, why on earth did she type this up as a Q and A. O'Beirne clearly lied and skewed facts to serve her agenda, why didn't Traister point out these out? Surely, that's her job as a print journalist? I mean, who cares if she was a punching bag during the interview?

  —Uriel. Read Uriel.'s other letters
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