There is a dream that follows me in life. I dreamed it once when I was five years old, and never again since. Still, late at night it sits on haunches in the shadows, waiting. In the dream I am small, maybe three or four years old. My cousin Keith and I have been kidnapped. The kidnappers rush across an open field of knee-deep golden grasses, dragging us behind. The men flop us over the side of a huge basket – into a hot air balloon. The balloon slides into the sky. On the ground, police chase after us, aiming guns at the balloon. I duck down on the floor of the basket, hiding my head beneath my hands. Sandbags careen over the side as the men try desperately to escape the police. But there is still too much weight in the balloon. The kidnappers grab me. And then I am falling.

For more than twenty years every detail of that dream has held vivid in my mind. I have had other dreams of falling, other dreams of dying, but this dream remained. Over the years I wracked my mind for an explanation, for a meaning, and never succeeded in locating one. But a few months ago it fell out onto a crumpled piece of notebook paper. In a Gender and Women’s Studies writing practicum for graduate students, our professor challenged us to write “about the time you were the most scared.” The dream clawed its way to the front of my mind – clawed its way past a car accident even. Above all things, I was most scared by a dream. Having no explanation, but also no other choice, I scribbled the dream onto paper. And onto the paper, other things crept – things I had never linked to that dream.

This is what I wrote: My grandmother, my father’s mother, does not like women. My family tells me that when her two daughters were born in the 1950s, she told the doctor to “take them back” because she “didn’t want girls.” She never wanted her son to marry and refused to support his choice of my mother (now his wife of almost forty years). My grandmother didn’t attend the wedding and refused to allow my aunts to attend. Later, she babysat both me and my cousin Keith during our childhoods, always making it clear that her preference was for Keith.

Before scrawling the dream onto paper, I had never linked my dream to my grandmother’s preference for male children. The kidnappers, like my grandmother, would not consider tossing Keith over the side. But I, the girl, was not nearly so valuable. The kidnappers didn’t stop, think, consult, or discuss the alternatives between them – my lesser value was already understood. I wasn’t afraid of falling, of dying. No, the dream terrified me because I was afraid that the kidnappers were right – girls were less valuable.

There is reassurance in finally knowing why this dream insists on following me. And it makes a hundred tiny pieces of family dynamics – always previously understood in fragments – fall into a coherent whole. The dream taints my relationship with my grandmother, still living, who has mellowed in her old age. I am not sure that she now values me less, but I do see that old habits die hard.

For me, finding the meaning of the dream has led to reflection on why, of all things, the dream surfaced in public, at school. At first, it may seem an unlikely place for such an intimate psychological development. However, in retrospect, it is not odd, but rather wholly fitting. The dream emerged in a community of women, which offered support and perspective. As I heard the stories, the struggles and triumphs of each woman, I felt more equipped to take on my own challenges. Together, these women explicitly verbalized the antithesis of my fear – together, they named all women as sacred. And they acknowledged that other women fought – like me – with experiences of being explicitly devalued for being woman. Most remarkably, they did all of this in a university class. In this unique space, our personal experiences were not digressions from the suggested readings and discussion, but rather an integral part of our academic lives. The pedagogy of this women’s studies class gave me permission to speak about my own life in an academic forum – something utterly foreign to me in the discipline of law. This course being my first in women’s studies, I can say nothing about how common such spaces are within women’s studies; what I can say best is how grateful I was to come from law and stumble upon them.

That this was my very first gender and women’s studies class is a fact I now consider mortifying. I have no explanation for how I made it through a wonderful undergraduate program without taking a single course. (And, in part, this is why I write of my experience now – to emphasize to those ensconced in women’s studies that your students may, more often than you think, share my learning situation. Women who have spent decades in women’s studies seem to forget that well-educated women are still often wholly without experience speaking openly about gender in the classroom.) My own lack of experience does, however, have its positive points: maybe all of that education without a single women’s studies class gave me the proper perspective to understand why the dream emerged when it did – and to see in stark contrast the very different style of pedagogy that I was exposed to in this particular women’s studies class, a pedagogy that could not be set in sharper relief than against those I had experienced in law.

I offer here some comments on women’s experiences of studying law for two purposes. First, I maintain that, based on my own experiences, which include completing law school just over five years ago and teaching in a law school for the past two years, the male-dominated learning schemes of law schools have changed very little, despite excellent studies that demonstrate the need of women law students for different strategies. Second, I offer some comparison of my experiences of law school pedagogy and one particular women’s studies pedagogy because I anticipate that those of you teaching women’s studies are finding, and will find, more women like me in your classroom – women who are reaching outside law for a different learning experience.

Law school is characterized by an experience known as the Socratic method or “cold calling.” Displayed famously in the film The Paper Chase, the Socratic method is a technique of calling on students to answer questions about previously assigned reading material. The teacher uses the student’s answers to guide a discussion of the legal rules in one particular legal case – i.e., the case method of learning law. One student is generally the sole sufferer for the entire class period. And, of course, the entire experience is watched by about a hundred of your classmates. The technique is the epitome of putting someone ‘on the spot’ and is often referred to as ‘torture’ by students. While law professors seem rather attached to the method, students often view it as quite like a bad parental relationship – you learn out of fear, not out of love or respect. Then there is the rigid adherence to the ‘case’ as the only literature, the only source, of dialogue in the class. Law students “are taught to look inward to a narrow telling of the law as a body of rules gleaned from the appellate decisions […] Poetry and song, history and literature – none has a place in this classroom” (Abramson 228). Needless to say, one’s own life experiences are hardly welcome in this sort of classroom. The important thing is the rules, not how you may have experienced them as a woman, a minority, or an impoverished child.

In the last thirty years, quite some attention has been drawn to this quintessential law school experience as male-centred and detrimental to female learning. Of course, women have long criticized law for being “a male-constructed, excluding domain” (Menkel-Meadow 57). However, particular attention has been paid to the pedagogical techniques that may make law school a difficult place for women students to thrive. In particular, attention has focused on women’s feelings of silence and their discomfort in participating in classroom discussion. Recent studies of women law students at Ivy League schools demonstrate that women law students feel alienation, dissatisfaction, and discomfort in their law school experiences and are less likely to participate in classroom discussion (Guinier et al.). This problem of speaking in law school classrooms strongly aligns with standard scholarship in women’s studies that focuses on the theme of silence (see, e.g., Lewis). Based on the problem of silence for women, feminist analysis has argued repeatedly that the Socratic method should either be “eliminated or substantially modified” (Torrey, Ries & Spiliopoulos 308). While these issues began to be documented in the late 1980s, the data has not changed in recent years. The three most recent studies of gender differences in legal education, from Harvard in 2005 (Neufeld), the University of Texas in 2000 (Bowers), and Yale Law School in 2002 (Yale Law Women), all find a similar list of disparities in women’s academic success, coping, and/or performance.

Beyond the issues created by a pedagogy that arguably does not support women, women simply lack female role models and continue to struggle in classrooms dominated by male-centred examples and language. Indeed, women remain unlikely to be taught by anyone except a male professor. In 1995 less than 20 percent of law professors were female, and in fact the numbers were down slightly from figures a decade earlier (Curran 38). Thus, even if every female law professor adopted feminist methodologies in law teaching (and assuming no male professors did so), only one in five law professors in America would apply the methods.[1] Finally, as unlikely and ironic as it may seem to outsiders, sexual harassment remains a major concern for women law students (Torrey, Ries & Spiliopoulos 271). In 2007 women at Yale Law School filed suit in federal court over the issue of Internet posts that ranked their beauty scores, commented on one woman’s breasts, and suggested that specifically named women law students “should be raped.” Law has difficulty learning even its own lessons at times. Thus, despite women’s advances in legal fields and a well-documented critique of the legal academy, scholars continue to see traditional legal education as “remarkably resistant to radical reform” (Menkel-Meadow 72).

My own experience comports with this conclusion. Over three and a half years of legal education, by my best recollection, I had thirty-seven different law professors, only four of whom were women. Over two years of teaching first-year law students, I was the only professor for my students who did not employ the strict Socratic method in teaching. Indeed, I found that because I did treat my students with a deliberate respect and kindness, I was the professor sought out for advice and comfort when my female students considered dropping out of law school (a thought that seems to have occurred to at least a third of them each semester).

The focus here on the American law school experience is neither American exceptionalism nor narcissism. The American experience is fundamental for understanding women’s experiences in other common law legal systems, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Why? A bit of history is in order. While America inherited its legal system in the colonial period (and like other British colonies follows the common law approach), the primary pedagogy of law teaching within common law countries is an American invention dating from the end of the nineteenth century. The Langdellian case method, and accompanying Socratic tendencies, was instituted first at Harvard Law School, and from there spread across America (for a history of the Langdellian method, see Chase). Within a short time, the method was exported to the United Kingdom and other common law countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the ‘export’ is not completely finished yet. A colleague recently told me that she had been trained in New Zealand without using the Socratic method, but when she was later hired to teach law school there, her interviewers demanded that she either know or learn the method. Thus, the American model (and problems) of legal education are significant in that they have strongly influenced the development of legal education in other countries – notably, by exporting a pedagogical tool that is at the heart of feminist criticisms of the legal classroom.

Offering comparisons between other common law countries and the American experience of women in law schools is a complex endeavour. Among common law countries there are a multitude of histories on the movement of women into the profession. And indeed, those histories suggest that women’s experiences differ in parliamentary and non-parliamentary systems. With that said, the American export of the case method has serious consequences. For example, a recent study by the Carnegie Foundation summarized five primary educational observations, which applied to both Canada and the United States (Sullivan et al. 2007). These five observations included various pedagogical challenges, such as the lack of assessment tools for student learning and heavy reliance on a single pedagogical tool: the case method. To the degree that American pedagogical tools have been exported, other common law countries face similar feminist critiques of the law school classroom.

So what happens when women like me survive law school and enter the legal work force? The short answer is that they encounter a fully male-dominated world of law. While women are increasing in numbers at law schools, women remain a tiny percentage of practising partners at law firms and CEOs of major corporations. “Female lawyers are problematic trespassers into the domains of men” (Mintz 60). As Susannah Mintz states in her article “In a Word, Baywatch,” which describes the portrayal of women attorneys on television, women must “soften their intellectual edge” and be careful not to be too strong or too masculine (60). I’ve also shared that experience. In my first time teaching undergraduates, I found 112 sociology students staring at me in terror. I was perplexed. After five days of virtual silence in the classroom, someone said, “It’s because you’re a lawyer.” The next day I brought the problem out into the open with my students. “You’re terrified of me?” I asked. “Why? Because I’m a woman and a lawyer, I have to be a bitch?” My off-hand comment resulted in a lot of laughter and a substantial reduction in the classroom stress level. But I understand their initial reaction to me – or shall I say, more specifically, the reaction is not unfamiliar to me. Women routinely have difficulty carving out feminine identities in the world of law. And unfortunately the result of this quandary is that many women simply give up and leave. Women are common as first-year associates at law firms but very rare as sixth-year associates. Women simply choose eventually to find spaces that are more inhabitable.

It is that search for alternative spaces that often brings women attorneys to the experience of women’s studies. I don’t believe there’s any understanding on the part of former lawyers that women’s studies offers the kind of non-traditional academic space that my class did. Rather, it’s more a desperate reaching for something different, guided particularly by the need to discuss the gender issues that so permeate the legal workplace. Whether by a specific search for a place to discuss gender issues or simply a desperate hit and miss, women attorneys find themselves back in graduate school, doing second bachelor’s degrees and taking night classes in an attempt to find spaces that acknowledge the gendered dimensions of their experiences in law. If they’re really lucky, they find the kind of space that was generated in my women’s studies seminar.

Such spaces are, of course, rarely achieved accidentally. It must be with conscious design that these strategies are employed. Pedagogy can easily become an accidental victim of business strategy – of schools pushing for more students in the classroom, faster-paced programs, and so forth. Making safe spaces in the classroom may require pushing against this business-model focus in education and emphasizing a slower, more small-scale orientation. For example, in my course, we eschewed the assigned university classroom to meet off campus, where we spent the winter curled in leather chairs before a fire. Class time always included food and wine. We cooked for each other, sharing our own talents as gifts. We created a physical environment that felt open and secure, and it perhaps released us from some traditional ideas about what was or was not appropriate to share in the classroom. While such things are simple, scholars have documented the significance of limiting the number of persons in a class and the use of circles rather than rows of chairs for generating safe space for voices (Gallagher 74). Our class was small, only eight of us, which fostered a spirit of intimacy and allowed us the time to give each person individual attention, feedback, and support.

Wonderful as those changes are, they are not enough to ensure a safe space for marginalized voices. Most importantly, I acknowledge that there is no indication that a women-only space will ‘do the trick.’ While I found a women-only space to be particularly helpful in discussing gender issues, I acknowledge that women-only education has a long history of debate and that in the legal field in particular the data does not indicate that law classrooms with a high proportion of women yield any better results for women students (Bowers). Thus, I focus here on the details of the physical environment that created opportunities for learning and on the pedagogical strategies – not gender specific – that also strongly contributed to these opportunities.

As Carmen Luke documents in her essay on women’s speech and silence in a university setting, creating safe space for voices requires active commitment because numerous student and teacher behaviours – from body postures to comments – can prevent the feeling of safety (222). Beyond the choice of physical space, I credit three particular aspects of my seminar experience with making that space possible.

First, we were willing to deal with the whole of each person’s life: we did not allow either frustrations or successes to go unacknowledged. Indeed, one might say we modelled our classroom on the new hybrid work in women’s studies and the trend of authors such as Magda Lewis who combine academic analysis with personal life stories and experience. Thus, in between rigorous critiques of our articles, we celebrated new jobs, admissions to new programs, and the publication of articles with champagne. With hugs, we softened the blows of negative reviews, inattentive advisors, and random acts of prejudice by male professors. By sharing our similar struggles in the gendered academic world, we were able to appreciate the uniqueness and value of a space where our experiences were the norm. As Kathleen Gallagher argues in “The Everyday Classroom as Problematic: A Feminist Pedagogy,” there is great value in simply creating space where affective life is ‘normative’ (72). Additionally, sharing those life events rather than withholding them meant that no member of the class ever assailed another simply because she was having a rough day.

Second, our teacher chose instructional methods that maximized community. Some types of assignments, such as journalling or collaborative work, functioned to build community (Gallagher 74). In addition, these techniques generated respect for diversity and tolerance for new viewpoints (Roberts & Smith 294). One particular technique we utilized required each paper to be left without a title; after critiquing each paper, we brainstormed appropriate and creative titles for the piece as a group. Such explicitly joint activities invested each of us in the work of the group as a whole and in each other’s successes.

Finally, there was never any assumption that we already knew how to critique each other’s work. The assumption, while bizarre in many ways, is one I have encountered frequently in the classroom. Of course, a writer is not necessarily a successful editor and vice versa – the skill sets are distinct. My seminar was unique in that it began with teaching us how to critique, rather than assuming that, by virtue of our other skills, we would be able to do so naturally or without specific instruction. Our first set of handouts for the class discussed the kinds of questions to ask when critiquing, how to best manage critical comments, and what kinds of (unhelpful) comments to avoid. There was one golden rule: balance praise with criticism. We were to find what was best about any piece of writing and what could be improved. Both critiques were to be offered together. Thus, we ripped apart manuscripts, but always with a sense of building and growing, not tearing down. Our guiding principle was to push each other further, to see beyond mistakes to what each of us wanted to do and to pull each other forward to our individual goals.

Creating our safe space also involved talking about and acknowledging fear. Our professor began with this premise: we write best when we write about the most deep and meaningful things in our own experience. Yet most of us avoid writing about precisely those things because we are afraid – afraid of being known, afraid of being wrong, afraid of saying something so clearly that there’s no room for adjustment later. And a lot of bad writing is borne of those fears; the wonderful stories we could tell, the deep insights we could reach are suppressed. Over the first few weeks, we read about and discussed the fear of writing personal experiences in academic work, the fear of answering for your thoughts later in your career, the fear of becoming what you are afraid to be. Each of us shared our personal demons – the dark things that kept our pens from the page: fears of attacks by former romantic partners who are also scholars (and who harbour a few bad feelings), fears that using our own personal life histories will doom us to a lifetime of uncomfortable holiday dinners with glaring family members, fears that baring our whole souls on the page will make us permanently undateable.

Before our discussions on the fear of writing, I was productive. Fear had not incapacitated me or left me to daily strangle out words past writer’s block. The preceding years were marked by several completed manuscripts, works in progress, and publications. But as we know from therapy, self-diagnosis is dangerous. Believing that I didn’t have a problem with fear or writer’s block, I could not see how fear had regrettably stunted my writing life. Fear had not kept me from writing, but I discovered that fear had kept me from writing what I really wanted to write. Fear had battened down the hatches on the things that meant the very most to me – all of the areas where failure to change the world would be too painful to endure. As an attorney – someone who does have, in a sense, power to change the system – that fear was particularly debilitating. Having now come to terms with it, I find myself with more faith, not only in my capacity to use law for the good of women but also in the capacity of women’s communities to help other women attorneys maintain their faith and exit the legal world that they fought so hard to enter.

At the same time, I understand that the safety of a space created in the classroom – and the confidence it generates for writing – is problematic. I thought my lovely classroom of women would always stay in touch. It has, rather, been quite the opposite. We’ve barely spoken. There could be many reasons – many unrelated to this discussion – to cause a lack of communication. But part of me wonders if it is deliberate. Did we spoke too openly? Are we avoiding each other the way one avoids a stranger who accidentally opened the stall to your dressing room in the mall? because too many intimate things were shared with someone who really wasn’t that close to you. And will we take risks in publishing that we should, in fact, not take? Is it possible to generate a false sense of security that will be easily broken when tested in the real world? The irony here is that, despite those worries, I’m still willing to believe in the safe space. For women lawyers who will frequently work in an adversarial and gendered community, the respite of safe spaces is particularly worth its challenges.

Of the many changes a single course has brought to my life, perhaps the most significant is that the dream and the meaning behind it are on the page. Not just on a crumpled notebook paper, but on this page. And if I am brave enough to hit a send button on my laptop, it may even be read someday. The fear is still there, but I trust other women to come to this page and know of my life – to meet me here with openness and understanding. To my surprise, I am able to trust that much, and I am finding that taunting my fears is rather seductive. I’ve fallen in love with the hybrid form, and I am working on pieces that combine my experiences growing up in Appalachian areas devastated by mining with my legal experience in litigating toxic tort issues. A year ago, I would have written none of this.

In the company of women, surrounded by warmth and wine, we created for a time the perfect space where the knowledge of safety was rampant and voices crawled out from the corners where fear had chased them. I believe in places, in the mystery of the human and the environmental coming together with divine synergy to create something new and enduring, a spirit tied into the land. Thursday evenings before the fire a new place emerged – a place where we could know ourselves, where we could think and write with the demons rather than with our thoughts pushed into the corners. The chemistry of this place may not be precisely replicable, but there are elements to mimic. One part of that chemistry is the jubilant spirit of women’s studies itself – an open door to diversity, to ideas, to acknowledging the fundamental truth and value of our everyday experiences as women, to faith that we are not alone but rather that we are gathered up into a great river, a moving community of women thinkers.

For women lawyers like me, this community is needed desperately. In my own classroom, I try to embody the techniques that I was taught. I hold office hours in the local coffee shop, hold class on the lawn during the warm months, and invite all of my students to dinner at my home. I make sure they know that I’m someone they can talk to when they feel like dropping out. I wait them out when they are shy to answer questions and ask, “Could we hear from someone who hasn’t contributed to the discussion yet?” Most importantly, I remember all those rules about criticism – about how to give it correctly and how to balance it with praise. I mimic a former law professor of mine, one who never said “no” or “wrong,” but who always pushed us gently towards the right answer. I hope those things make my classroom a safer space for learning. Law is able to offer so much to women today – possibilities of freedom, equality, and rights that have been missing for centuries. Yet law will remain bound by its own masculinity, limited in vision and limited in voices, unless women lawyers are able to find ways to remain in the legal community to fight for the needs of women. By reaching out to women’s studies, to other pedagogies and to moments of safe spaces found in other disciplines, I hope women lawyers will find the support they need and remain in the legal community where together we can create future generations of women who need never share my childhood nightmare.