I magine if you had to put a rubber base on your work shoes so that your heels wouldn’t make a sound? Imagine that your colleagues went on strike the day you were promoted? That you were told you can’t do your job because you’re a woman? Imagine you were told you were not a ‘person’?

These were just some of the dilemmas that women have faced in legal practice over the past 100 years. On this year’s International Women’s Day, observed annually on March 8, I am sharing some of my ongoing research, which studies women legal practitioners in Pakistan from a socio-historical perspective.

My interest in this area may resonate with other women lawyers and is rooted in the advice I received upon graduating with a law degree: “You should focus on corporate law and, if litigation is necessary, you should stick with family law.”

Later, when I chose to pursue an academic career instead of staying in legal practice, I was informed, “It is women like you who leave the field… you pull women back several steps.”

They were told they couldn’t practice law, that they weren’t even “persons” under the law. They fought back. Commemorating International Women’s Day, legal historian Summaiya Zaidi looks at the trailblazing women lawyers in Pakistan and beyond who changed the rules of the game…

Somehow, a woman in a male-dominated field can never win. This essay focuses on the fights that women lawyers have been forced to undertake and celebrates their wins over the past century.

Justice Majida Razvi was the first woman judge of a high court in Pakistan | Herald Archives

THE TRAILBLAZERS

Legal practice these days is still predominantly viewed as a male field, with profit-making as the objective. But if law has its roots in morality, should it not be seen as a service instead? My research in this area has revealed some fascinating trends — early women lawyers around the world saw the legal profession as a service, and the parallels between the journeys in law of a North American woman and Asian woman were surprisingly similar.

They looked at the law through a compassionate and empathetic lens and believed it could address the injustices suffered by women and other marginalised communities. With these lived realities in mind, these women made the law personal and justice possible.

In 1874, during British rule in India, an eight-year-old Cornelia Sorabji was reading a book, lying in the corner of a room in her home in Pune, when a thakurani [lady of the estate] from Kathiawar came to seek advice from Cornelia’s mother, a woman known for her philanthropy. The visitor’s property had been stolen by her legal agent of 30 years, who had taken her signatures on blank papers and assigned her estate to himself, a fate shared by many purdahnasheens [women who observed the veil] in India at the time.

Justice Nasira Iqbal served as a justice on the Lahore High Court from 1994 to 2002 | Facebook

This incident from her childhood remained imprinted in Cornelia’s mind, leading her to fight with the University of Oxford in the UK to change her major from English literature to law. She became the first woman to study this field in the history of the university. Though she passed the law degree examinations........

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