Because I write for ForbesWoman, I get email and telephone calls. Not the frightening women-bashing kind, but the reaching out for advice-kind. It’s one of the many great benefits of blogging there.

Just a few months ago, I received an email from a new lawyer who was in the job market after working in the public sector for a few years. She wanted to start a blog and was curious about the effects the expression of her political opinions might have on her career trajectory.

If Carrie Bradshaw were framing the issue she might write:

Should We Sell Out Our Girlfriends to Further Our Careers?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know my deal with the devil already.

Long story short – I was extremely active in the Second Wave women’s movement, working full time as a Vista volunteer (for the $200/month stipend) at the Center for Women’s Studies and Services in San Diego.

First week of law school, I made my way to a classroom in the basement where the Women Law Students Association (now the Feminist Forum) was having an introductory meeting for new students.

“I don’t want to ally myself with women anymore,” I thought. “I just want to be a law student, not a woman law student. I want to be a lawyer, not a woman lawyer.”

And that was the end of my involvement with women’s organizations for thirty years.

So, yes, I did stop supporting my women friends to further my career. But did I have to?

Is it Worth It?

When the young woman lawyer who wrote me for advice called, I answered her question the best way I knew how.

“Yes, you will limit your market if you express your political opinions publicly. There are people who will not hire you as an associate attorney in their law firms and others who will not retain your services as a lawyer. It’s a personal moral decision – one only you can make.

“No one can tell you what to do. If you have something important to say about the status of women in the law and you don’t say it, it might not get said. And the women who need support, whose spirits are flagging because they don’t hear your voice in the desert, might suffer a spiritual death from the thirst.”

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Of the thousands of words I’ve written about women in the law, not one contains the word “secretary” or “assistant” and that’s just wrong.

Ask any lawyer. Nothing happens in a law firm – certainly nothing happens well – in the absence of experienced, professional, well-compensated legal secretaries.

For a woman lawyer like myself, it’s a particularly egregious oversight to have completely ignored legal secretaries and assistants in a career-oriented blog for women.

My own willful blindness to women’s issues in the office place is one of the reasons I was so impressed by law professor Felice Batlan’spresentation on legal secretaries at last week’s South Carolina Women Lawyers Association annual conference, as more thoroughly explored in her article If You Become His Second Wife You Are a Fool: Shifting Paradigms of the Roles, Perceptions and Working Conditions of Legal Secretaries in Large Law Firms.

In my own puny defense, let me first say that I was never expected to be anything other than a teacher, a nurse or a secretary until I got married, after which I would, of course, never work again unless (god forbid) something should happen to my husband.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those professions. It’s just that they are all I was given to choose from when I was graduating from high school in 1970 and entering college.

A couple of years and a women’s movement later, I’d somewhat hesitantly tell my mother that I was applying to law school. In response, she asked why I didn’t become a legal secretary instead. They made good money and I could meet and marry a lawyer.

“I don’t want to marry a lawyer, mom. I want to be a lawyer.”

There you have the set up for a few decades in legal practice ignoring the plight of my secretaries.

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Getting Him to Do What You Want posted by VICTORIA PYNCHON Over at Psychology Today, mental health professional Steven Stosny recommends negotiation rather than coercion, manipulation, persuasion or “incentive/bartering” to prompt your spouse or other romantic partner to do what you want him to do. “We’ve evolved a few tricks over the millennia,” writes Stosny, “but most of them are not adaptable to complex modern relationships.” After condemning manipulation, coercion, bartering and persuasive argument, Stosny unsurprisingly recommends negotiation focused on feelings rather than on behavior, a distinction without a difference for those who realize that love is not a feeling but an action. Though I’m no marriage counselor and certainly not a psychologist or therapist, I do know a bit about how people in conflict manage to transcend their disputes, transform their relationships, and find mutually satisfactory means of turning cross-purposes into shared values. continue »

Over at Psychology Today, mental health professional Steven Stosny recommends negotiation rather than coercion, manipulation, persuasion or “incentive/bartering” to prompt your spouse or other romantic partner to do what you want him to do.

“We’ve evolved a few tricks over the millennia,” writes Stosny, “but most of them are not adaptable to complex modern relationships.”

After condemning manipulation, coercion, bartering and persuasive argument, Stosny unsurprisingly recommends negotiation focused on feelings rather than on behavior, a distinction without a difference for those who realize that love is not a feeling but an action.

Though I’m no marriage counselor and certainly not a psychologist or therapist, I do know a bit about how people in conflict manage to transcend their disputes, transform their relationships, and find mutually satisfactory means of turning cross-purposes into shared values.

continue »