One hundred years have passed since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 sought to put women in the legal profession ‘in the position of a man.’ This was an undeniable landmark in legal history. Joanne Conaghan has observed that women in law ‘have long been positioned as outsiders’ and that ‘until the late 19th and early 20th century, they were completely excluded, legal knowledge and practice evolving over centuries on the premise that law was an unreservedly masculine enterprise.’1 The judgment in Anderson, Petitioner marked a formal end to this exclusion, as Madge Easton Anderson became the first woman to gain access to the law as an ‘insider,’ a law agent in her own right. However, even when access to the ‘inside’ was granted by the law to women, challenges remained….[click on the image below to read on]
