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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