Understanding #MeToo by Listening to the Past: Preserving, Mining, and Promoting the American Bar Association’s Women Trailblazers in the Law Oral History Collection @ Stanford Law School

Abstract

The dialogue created by the #MeToo movement continues to be a catalyst for change, particularly for women working in the legal profession. Law students are openly and collectively resisting employment arbitration clauses, which can be seen as vehicles to silence evidence of sexual harassment in the workplace. And women are speaking out as they’ve rarely done before about their experiences being sexually harassed as judicial clerks and law firm associates. The American Bar Association’s Women Trailblazers in the Law is an oral history collection of 100 pioneering women who entered the legal profession in the 1970’s. Newly digitized by the Robert Crown Law Library at Stanford Law School, this truly unique corpus of stories contains a wealth of information about women succeeding within challenging environments where their accomplishments could be (and sometimes were) dismissed, rather than heralded. The stories also exhibit ways of talking about sexual harassment and violence against women that need to be mined for their meaning about the past, present, and future of women in the law. This paper will investigate what this collection of women’s stories, as told by themselves, has to say to our current generation of law students; in addition, it will tell the story of how the Robert Crown Law Library used the opportunity to curate this archival collection to promote our services, to connect with our community, and to support new scholarly endeavours.