Pledges Can Apply To Most Aspects Of Life

As I stood in the Spokane County Courthouse last November, a generation flashed by in a rush of memories.

I was there for a special reason: a new lawyer’s swearing-in for my oldest daughter Trilby Dorn and her husband Brent Walton, newlyweds who graduated from law school last spring and are working for Seattle law firms.

Spokane Superior Court Judge Jim Murphy, an old family friend, was conducting a private ceremony to induct them into the Washington State Bar.

“Do you solemnly swear?” Judge Murphy began.

Twenty-seven years ago, I had come to this same Spokane courthouse to witness a similar rite of passage for Trilby’s father, Spokane attorney Charlie Dorn.

In September 1970, Trilby was a month-old, red-haired infant, and I was a novice nursing mother.

She and I missed most of the ceremony because she needed to be fed. I slipped into an anteroom in the late Judge John Lally’s chambers.

Meanwhile, Judge Lally swore the group of solemn young men into membership in the state bar - and into Spokane’s legal “fraternity.”

The law is no longer a men’s club, and that’s happened largely in my lifetime.

Brent’s mother, Los Angeles attorney Shauna Walton, joined Charlie and Judge Murphy in welcoming Trilby and Brent to the legal profession.

What a difference a generation makes. And how difficult it sometimes was for the women in the vanguard, like Shauna and Edie Brown, a sister undergraduate during my years at Stanford in the ‘60s.

She was accepted to Harvard Law School in 1963 - among a handful of brilliant women in a law school class of nearly 500 young men.

Charlie Dorn was also in her Harvard Law class.

Edie, a national debate champion, was told pointedly at Harvard that she shouldn’t be there because she was “taking a man’s place.”

Some professors wouldn’t call on her or her classmate Elizabeth Hanford, who later married Sen. Bob Dole, ran the Red Cross and vied for the job of First Lady.

Now, Edie Brown is Professor Edith Brown Weiss of Georgetown Law School. The Harvard snubs are history.

Shauna Walton faced similar hostility at Brigham Young University Law School in Utah.

She went back to school to support her two young sons after her husband, a business executive, died in his 30s of kidney failure.

“Your husband should be here, not you” the Mormon widow was told by some of her less-than-thoughtful male classmates.

“A corpse can’t take notes,” she angrily retorted.

My daughter’s law school experience in the mid-‘90s was vastly different.

At Tulane Law School in New Orleans, as at other law schools nationwide, women now make up roughly half the entering classes.

Trilby’s law school girlfriends are a diverse and confident bunch.

They include a former auto mechanic from Klamath Falls, Ore.; the feminist daughter of a Pentagon naval officer; and an elegant Southern belle and fledgling Baton Rouge prosecutor whose father sits on the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Perhaps the changes in women’s lives that these young women embody will be equally dramatic over the next generation, when I’ll be a very old woman.

But the big issues won’t change: When, or if, to have children. How to balance career and family. How to allocate the chores of daily life. How to keep joy in a marriage. How to care for aging parents.

“Do you solemnly swear? Judge Murphy again asked the young couple.

The pledges we make to our children over a generation usually don’t come with formal ceremonies, but they are just as significant: to nurture them, sustain them through adolescence, pay for their college educations.

“We do,” they said.

And I echoed their pledge from the spectator’s side of the courtroom bar.

, DataTimes MEMO: Karen Dorn Steele is an investigative reporter who writes about the environment and other issues for The Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5462 or karend@spokesman.com

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