Joan Arnold

I had a great legal career and I had the experience of being the first woman to do the job. And that's not an uncommon thing with women of my age. I’m 71 now and for example, when I went to Boston to find a job after law school, the [jobs] classifieds were still listed in columns, women and men.  Or female and male or something like that: classifieds female, classifieds male. And so, because it was just that time, so many of my jobs were [pause] they hadn't come across women before.  And so, my first job as a public defender, which I wanted that job very badly because by then I had done clinical education at my law school. I had gone to court as a student, a supervised student, and I thought I loved that. I thought that's really great stuff and I wanted to do criminal law because it sounded exotic. [laughs] I didn't know anything about it, it just sounded like, “That's pretty cool, I'll do that.” And so I applied and I did get the job, but the person who told me—I was interviewed a bunch of times by the person who was the decision-maker guy and he said to me, “You know, I don't think women can be trial lawyers [laughs] but we need to start hiring some women so we're going to hire you and send you out to Springfield where they never had a woman so good luck.”