MODERN PORTIAS

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 150, 21 March 1925, Page 15

MODERN PORTIAS

what women barristers ARE DOING Less than four years ago there wasn’t a woman barrister in England. Now there are 46. Not that they all practise, but' then, neither do all the men who have qualified for the English Bar. A social as well as an intellectual cachet comes of being a barristar-at-law. Quite a dozen of the 46 women barristers have put up their names in Chambers, and been briefed at least once. Perhaps the best known is Miss Helena Normanton, who created a sensation in legal circles by taking the first three parts of the law examination at a single sitting instead of at three separate ones as is usual. She was not, however, the first woman to bo called to the Bar—that distinction belongs to Miss Ivy Williams. But Miss. Normanton was the first woman barrister to appear in the Divorce and Chancery Courts, and the first to practise as counsel at the Old Bailey.

Mistaken for a Man. True that last was due to chance, Miss Normanton, dressed in wig and gown, was sitting in the court during the bearin'’ of a case in which three men were charged with fraud. One of them appealed for the services of a lawyer, and being told to select his counsel from among the members of the Bar present, hit upon Miss . Normanton, without apparently noticing she was a woman, thanks to the rule laid down by the Benchers that a woman barrister’s wig must completely cover her hair! . Her more recent achievement, and one that affects married women in other professions, is that of getting a passport granted in her maiden name. It was for a visit to New York, and one can .well imagine the force of the arguments she would have brought to bear on any Ellis Is’and official who dared to cast the slightest doubt on her qualifications for landing in the States, as once happened to Flora Annie Steel, the novelist. Successful Pleading.

’ Miss Ida Duncan is another woman barrister who is making a name for herself and proving the wisdbm of throwing open the legal profession to women. Not long ago she successfully appeared in the Court of Criminal Appeal for two men accused of house-breaking and stealing iewellery. The Court quashed the convictions, and the Lord Chief Justice, in giving judgment, said that Miss Duncan had argued the case for the appellants with clearness and force. Not all the members of the English Bar are of the English race. Miss Mitham Tata, for instance, who oualified two years ago after “eating her dinners” in Lincoln’s Inn, is a hich-horn Parsi from India, educat’d at Bombay University. She and her mother came to England in connection with the Suffrage question, and while the younger studied law, the elder took a course in Economics nt T ondon University. Now they have both returned to the land of their birth •and Miss Tata has been admitted an Advocate of the Bombay High Court, where she is specialising as a pleader in cases that affect the native women. If. as there is a tendency to say, the path of women lawyers in England is not as rosy ns in France, there is every possibility of it becoming so when it has been sown as long with the seeds of opportunity and recognition. Fifteen years ago, when Colette Yver, the novelist. wrote “Ces Dames du Palais.” the path of the French women ’awvers was, not as rosy as it is now. —“Westminster Gazette.”