In 1941, when I was in the seventh grade, I elected the academic instead of a vocational program at my junior high school. I lived with my divorced mother, a secretary and the family’s only high school graduate. My teacher asked what I wanted to be; “a lawyer,” I said, and I said it with fear. My fear stemmed not from the fact that I was a girl — in the Irish working class of my origins, being female meant you were more likely to possess the lawyerly qualities of sobriety, competence, and reliability. No, I feared rising above my station, above my class, and to my relief, my teacher only said I must work hard for scholarship money. From that day until I left my law firm in 1959 to raise a family, my aspirations were never questioned — not by the teachers and counselors who helped me obtain scholarships, nor by the employers and colleagues who always supported my career. I was a woman, and I was a lawyer, and there was an end of it.

The only disdain I have ever experienced, in fact, has come from contemporary feminists who have spent three decades or more waging war against the choice I made along with countless millions of my contemporaries and our younger sisters — -the choice to be a homemaking wife in a traditional marriage with a breadwinning husband. The feminist goal has been to drive homemakers into the work force to work as hard as men and thus gain equal political and economic power within an increasingly androgynous society. Indeed, every action of contemporary feminism has served this goal, which is why feminists have ardently supported the modern sexual libertinism that has encouraged women to mimic male sexual patterns.