Pinstripes & Pearls: The Women of the Harvard Law School Class of ’64 Who Forged an Old-Girl Network and Paved the Way for Future Generations

To illustrate the challenges facing women of her generation, author Judith Richards Hope describes the lives and careers of a handful of barrier-breaking women, including herself, from Harvard Law School’s class of 1964, who fought and overcame preconceptions and prejudices against their entering what, at the time, was a male vocation. Despite their struggles in law school and in the workplace, they maintained their ambition and ultimately achieved remarkable success. They look back on law school as a time of enormous personal and intellectual growth.
Pinstripes & Pearls illuminates the extraordinary trajectories of these women – among them Pat Schroeder, Judith W. Rogers, and Hope herself – who forged an old-girl network and became lifelong friends. Through compelling and often witty anecdotes, unprecedented archival research of Harvard records, and revealing testaments to the difficulties faced by women harboring serious career goals, Pinstripes & Pearls personifies in these women the emergence of a new type of American female, one whose “goal is to reach the destination, not just to avoid humiliation on the way.”