The excerpt describes a once-thriving American town that descends into silence and death due to environmental contamination caused by human actions, particularly through the use of harmful chemicals. It explores the irreversible damage these substances inflict on ecosystems, agriculture, and public health, emphasizing the imbalance created by modern agricultural practices and the escalating use of pesticides. The author warns against the dangerous consequences of humanity's attempts to control nature without understanding the ecological ramifications, urging for a reevaluation of our environmental practices.

1. From SILENT SPRING By Rachel Carson
A FABLE FOR TOMORROW
There was once a town in the heart of America where all life
seemed to live in harmony with its
surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of
prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of
orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above
the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch
set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a
backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer
silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall
mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder,
great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through
much of the year.
Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty,
where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on
the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The
countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and
variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was
pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from
great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the
streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and
contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the
days many years ago when the first settlers raised
their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.
Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began
to change. Some evil spell had settled on the
community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens;
the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere
was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness
among their families. In the town the doctors had become

2. more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing
among their patients. There had been several sudden and
unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among
children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play
and die within a few hours.
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example where
had they gone? Many people spoke of them,
puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards
were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were
moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a
spring without voices. On the mornings that had once
throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays,
wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now
no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The
farmers complained that they were unable to
raise any pigs the litters were small and the young survived
only a few days. The apple trees were coming into
bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no
pollination and there would be no fruit.
The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned
and withered vegetation as though swept
by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things.
Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer
visited them, for all the fish had died.
In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the
roofs, a white granular powder still showed a
few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the
roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams.
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new
life in this stricken world. The people had
done it them selves.
This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a
thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere
in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all
the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these

3. disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real
communities have already suffered a substantial number
of them. A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and
this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark
reality we all shall know.
What has already silenced the voices of spring in countless
towns in America? This book is an attemp t to
explain.
The Obligation to Endure
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is
the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with
dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the
most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not
only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is
for the most part irreversible. In this now universal
contam ination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister
and little recognized partners of radiation in changing
the very nature of the world the very nature of its life.
Strontium go, re leased through nuclear explosions into the
air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in
soil enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there,
and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being,
there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals
sprayed on croplands or forests or gardens lie long in soil,,
entering into living organisms, passing from one to
another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass
mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and,
through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new
forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work
unknown liarm on those who drink from once pure wells. As
Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even
recognize the devils of his own creation."

4. It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that
now inhabits the earth eons of time in which
that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a
state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings.
The environ ment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it
supported, contained elements that were hostile as well
as supporting. Cer tain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even
within the light of the sun, from which all life
draws its energy, there were shortwave radiations with power to
injure. Given time time not in years but in
millennia life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time
is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world
there is no time.
The rapidity of change and the speed with which new
situa tions are created follow the impetuous and
heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.
Radiation is no longer merely the background
radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the
ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any
life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural crea tion of man's
tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life
is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the
calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the
minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the
sea; they are the synthetic creations of man's inventive
mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in
nature.
To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale
that is nature's; it would require not merely the
years of a man's life but the life of generations. And even this,
were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for
the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless
stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into
actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering
and its implications are not easily grasped 5oo new

5. chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required
somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally
outside the limits of biologic experience.
Among them are many that are used in man's war against
nature. Since the midi940's over 2oo basic
chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds,
rodents, and other organisms described in the modern
vernacular as "pests"; and they are sold under several thousand
different brand names. These sprays, dusts, and
aerosols are now applied almost uni versally to farms, gardens,
forests, and homesnonselective chemicals that have
the power to kill every insect, the “good" and the "bad," to still
the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the
streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on
in soil all this though the intended target may be only
a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay
down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the
earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be
called "insecticides," but "biocides."
The whole process of spraying seems caught up in an endless
spiral. Since DDT was released for civilian
use, a process of escalation has been going on in which ever
more toxic materials must be found. This has happened
because insects, in a trium phant vindication of Darwin's
principle of the survival of the fittest, have evolved super
races immune to the particular in secticide used, hence a
deadlier one has always to be developed and then a deadlier
one than that. It has happened also be cause, for reasons to be
described later, destructive insects often undergo a
"flareback," or resurgence, after spraying, in numbers greater
than before. Thus the chemical war is never won, and
all life is caught in its violent crossfire. Along with
the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear
war, the central problem of our age has therefore be come the
contamination of man's total environment with such
substances of incredible potential for harmsubstances that

6. accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even
pene trate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of
heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.
Some wouldbe architects of our future look toward a time
when it will be possible to alter the human germ
plasm by design. But we may easily be doing so now by
inadvertence, for many chemicals, like radiation, bring
about gene mutations. It is ironic to think that man might
determine his own future by something so seemingly
trivial as the choice of an insect spray.
All this has been riskedfor what? Future historians may well be
amazed by our distorted sense of
proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few
unwanted species by a method that contaminated the
entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death
even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we
have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse
the moment we examine them. We are told that the
enormous and expanding use of pesticides is necessary to
maintain farm production. Yet is our real problem not one
of overproduction,? Our farms, despite measures to remove
acreages from production and to pay farmers not to
produce, have yielded such a staggering excess of crops that the
American taxpayer in i962 is paying out more than
one billion dollars a year as the total carrying cost of the
surplusfood storage program. And is the situation helped
when one branch of the Agriculture Department tries to reduce
production while another states, as it did in i958, "It
is believed generally that reduction of crop acreages under
provisions of the Soil Bank will stimulate interest in use
of chemicals to obtain maximum production on the land retained
in crops."
All this is not to say there is no insect problem and no need of
control. I am saying, rather, that control must
he geared to realities, not to mythical situations, and that the
methods em ployed must be such that they do not

7. destroy us along with the insects.
The problem whose attempted solution has brought such a train
of disaster in its wake is an accompaniment
of our modern way of life. Long before the age of man, insects
inhabited the earth a group of extraordinarily varied
and adaptable beings. Over the course of time since man's
advent, a small percentage of the more than half a million
species of insects have come into conflict with human welfare
in two principal ways: as competitors for the food
supply and as carriers of human disease.
Diseasecarrying insects become important where human be ings
are crowded together, especially under
conditions where sanitation is poor, as in time of natural
disaster or war or in situations of extreme poverty and
deprivation. Then control of some sort becomes necessary. It is
a sobering fact, however, as we shall presently see,
that the method of massive chemical control has had only
limited success, and also threatens to worsen the very
conditions it is intended to curb.
Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few
insect problems. These arose with the
intensification of agricul ture the devotion of immense acreages
to a single crop. Such a system set the stage for
explosive increases in specific insect populations. Singlecrop
farming does not take advantage of the principles by
which nature works; it is agriculture as an engineer might
conceive it to be. Nature has introduced great variety into
the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying
it. Thus he undoes the builtin checks and balances by
which nature holds the species within bounds. One impor tant
natural check is a limit on the amount of suitable
habitat for each species. Obviously then, an insect that lives on
wheat can build up its population to much higher

8. levels on a farm devoted to wheat than on one in which wheat is
intermingled with other crops to which the insect is
not adapted.
The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or
more ago, the towns of large areas of the
United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now
the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with
complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms,
carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance to
build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the
elms were only occasional trees in a richly
diversified planting. Another factor in the modern
insect problem is one that must be viewed against a
background of geologic and human history: the spreading of
thousands of different kinds of organisms from their
native homes to invade new territories. This worldwide
migration has been studied and graphically described by the
British ecologist Charles Elton in his recent book The Ecology
of Invasions. During the Cretaceous Period, some
hundred mil lion years ago, flooding seas cut many land bridges
between continents and living things found
themselves confined in what Elton calls "colossal separate
nature reserves." There, isolated from others of their kind,
they developed many new species. When some of the land
masses were joined again, about I 5 million years ago,
these species began to move out into new territories a
movement that is not only still in progress but is now
receiving considerable assistance from man.
The importation of plants is the primary agent in the modern
spread of species, for animals have almost
invariably gone along with the plants, quarantine being a
comparatively recent and not completely effective
innovation. The United States Office of Plant Introduction alone
has introduced almost 2oo,ooo species and varieties
of plants from all over the world. Nearly half of the i8o or so
major insect enemies of plants in the United States are

9. accidental imports from abroad, and most of them have come as
hitchhikers on plants.
In new territory, out of reach of the restraining hand of the
natural enemies that kept down its numbers in its
native land, an invading plant or animal is able to become
enormously abundant. Thus it is no accident that our most
troublesome insects are introduced species.
These invasions, both the naturally occurring and those de
pendent on human assistance, are likely to
continue indefinitely' Quarantine and massive chemical
campaigns are only extremely expensive ways of buying
titne. We are faced, according to Dr. Elton, "with a
lifean'ddeath need not just to find new technological means of
suppressing this plant or that animal"; instead we need the basic
knowledge of animal populations and their relations
to their surroundings that will "promote an even balance and
damp down the explosive power of outbreaks and new
invasions."
Much of the necessary knowledge is now available but we do
not use it. We train ecologists in our
universities and even employ them in our governmental
agencies but we seldom take their advice. We allow the
chemical dtath rain to fall as though there,were no alternative,
whereas in fact there are many, and our ingenuity
could soon discover many more if given opportunity.
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as
inevitable that which is inferior or
detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to
demand that which is good? Such thinking, in the words
of the ecologist Paul Shepard, "Idealizes life with only its head
out of water, inches above the limits of toleration of
the corruption of its own environment ... Why should we
tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid
surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our
enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to

10. pre vent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is
just not quite fatal?"
Yet such a world is pressed upon us. The crusade to create a
chemically sterile, insectfree world seems to
have engendered a fanatic zeal on the part of many specialists
and most of the socalled control agencies. On every
hand there is evidence that those engaged in spraying operations
exercise a ruthless power. "The regulatory
entomologists ... function as prosecutor, judge and jury, tax
assessor and collector and sheriff to enforce their own
orders," said Connecticut entomologist Neely Turner. The most
flagrant abuses go unchecked in both state and
federal agencies.
It is not my contention that chemical insecticides must never be
used. I do contend that we have put
poisonous and biologically potent chemicals indiscriminately
into the hands of per sons largely or wholly ignorant
of their potentials for harm. We have subjected enormous
numbers of people to contact with these poisons, without
their consent and often without their knowledge. If the Bill of
Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be
secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private
individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because
our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and
foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
I contend, furthermore, that we have allowed these chemicals
to be used with little or no advance
investigation of their effect on soil, water, wildlife, and man
himself. Future generations are unlikely to condone our
lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world
that supports all life.
There is still very limited awareness of the nature of the threat.
This is an era of specialists, each of whom

11. sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the
larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated
by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost
is seldom challenged. When the public protests,
confronted with some obvious evi dence of damaging results of
pesticide applications, it is fed little tranquilizing
pills of half truth. We urgently need an end to these false
assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It i s
the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect
controllers calculate. The public must decide
whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do
so only when in full possession of the facts. In the
words of Jean Rostand, "The obligation to endure gives us the
right to know."
Surface Waters & Underground Seas
Of all our natural resources water has become the most
precious. By far the greater part of the earth's
surface is covered by its enveloping seas, yet in the midst of
this plenty we are in want. By a strange paradox, most
of the earth's abundant water is not usable for agriculture,
industry, or human consumption because of its heavy load
of sea salts, and so most of the world's population is either
experiencing or is threatened with critical shortages. In an
age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his
most essential needs for survival, water along with
other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
The problem of water pollution by pesticides can be under
stood only in context, as part of the whole to
which it belongs the pollution of the total environment of
mankind. The pollution entering our waterways comes
from many sources: radio active wastes from reactors,
laboratories, and hospitals; fallout from nuclear explosions;
domestic wastes from cities and towns; chemical wastes from
factories. To these is added a new kind of fallout the

12. chemical sprays applied to croplands and gar dens, forests and
fields. Many of the chemical agents in this alarming
melange imitate and augment the harmful effects of radiation,
and within the groups of chemicals themselves there
are sinister and littleunderstood interactions, transformations,
and summations of effect.
Ever since chemists began to manufacture substances that
nature never invented, the problems of water
purification have become complex and the danger to users of
water has increased..
************
Yet these fish, too, contained DDT. Had the chemical reached
this remote creek by hidden under ground
streams? Or had it been airborne, drifting down as fallout oii
the surface of the creek? In still another compar tive
study, DDT was found in the tissues of fish from a @atch cry
where the water supply originated in a deep 'well.
Again there was no record of local spraying. The only possible
means of contamination seemed to be by means of
groundwater.
In the entire waterpollution problem, there is probably noth
ing more disturbing than the threat of
widespread contamination of groundwater. It is not possible to
add pesticides to water anywhere without threatening
the purity of water everywhere. Seldom if ever does Nature
operate in closed and separate compartments, and she
has not done so in distributing the earth's water supply. Rain,
falling on the land, settles down through pores and
cracks in soil and rock, penetrating deeper and deeper until
eventually it reaches a zone where all the pores of the
rock are filled with water, a dark, subsurface sea, ri sing under
hills, sinking bene ath valleys. This groundwater is
always on the move, sometimes at a pace so slow that it travels
no more than 5o feet a year, sometimes rapidly, by

13. comparison, so that it moves nearly a tenth of a mile in a day. It
travels by unseen waterways until here and there it
comes to the surface as a spring, or perhaps it is tapped to feed
a well. But mostly it con tribute, to streams and so to
rivers. Except for what enters streams directly as rain or surface
runoff, all the running water of the earth's surface
was at one time groundwater. And so, in a very real and
frightening sense, pollution of the ground water is pollution
of water everywhere.
It must have been by such a dark, underground sea that
poisonous chemicals traveled from a manufacturing
plant in Colorado to a farming district several miles away, there
to poison wells, sicken humans and livestock, and
damage crops an extraordinary episode that may easily be only
the first of many like it. Its history, in brief, is this.
In 1943, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal of the Army Chemical
Corps, located near Denver, began to manufacture war
materials. Eight years later the facili ties of the arsenal were
leased to a private oil company for the production of
insecticides. Even before the change of opera tions, however,
mysterious reports had begun to come in. Farmers
several miles from the plant began to report unex plained
sickness among livestock; they complained of extensive
crop damage. Foliage turned yellow, plants failed to mature,
and many crops were killed outright, There were
reports of human illness, thought by some to be related.
The irrigation waters on these farms were derived from shallow
wells. When the well waters were
examined (in a study in1958, in which several state and federal
agencies participated) they were found to contain an
assortment of chemicals. Chlorides, chlorates, salts of
phosphonic acid, fluorides, and arsenic had been discharged
from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal into holding ponds during the

14. years of its operation. Apparently the groundwater
between the arsenal and the farms had become contaminated and
it had taken 7 to 8 years for the wastes to travel
underground a distance of about 3 miles from the holding ponds
to the nearest farm. This seepage had continued to
spread and had further contaminated an area of unknown extent.
The investigators knew of no way to contain the
contamination or halt its advance.
All this was bad enough, but the most mysterious and probably
in the long run the most significant feature
of the whole episode was the discovery of the weed killer 2,4D
in some of the wells and in the holding ponds of the
arsenal. Certainly its presence was enough to account for the
damage to crops irrigated with this water. But the
mystery lay in the fact that no 2,4D had been manufactured at
the arsenal at any stage of its operations.
A disturbing example of (contamination of the surface waters
)seems to be building up on the national
wildlife refuges at Tule Lake and Lower Klamath, both in
California. These refuges are part of a chain including
also the refuge on Upper Klamath Lake just over the border 'in
Oregon. All are linked, perhaps fatefully, by a
shared water supply, and all are affected by the fact that they lie
like small islands in a great sea of sur rounding
farmlands land reclaimed by drainage and stream diversion
from an original waterfowl paradise of marshiand and
open water. These farmlands around the refuges are
now irrigated by water from Upper Klamath Lake.
The irrigation waters, re collected from the fields they have
served, are then pumped into Tule Lake and from there
to Lower Klamath. All of the waters of the wildlife refuges
established on these two bodies of water therefore
represent the drainage of agricultural lands. It is important to
remember this in connection with recent happenings.
In the summer of ig6o the refuge staff picked up hundreds of

15. dead and dying birds at Tute Lake and Lower
Klamath. Most of them were fisheating species herons,
pelicans, grebes, gulls. Upon analysis, they were found to
contain insecticide residues identified as toxaphene, DDD, and
DDE. Fish from the lakes were also found to contain
insecticides; so did samples of plankton. The refuge manager
believes that pesticide residues are now building up in
the waters of these refuges, being conveyed there by return
irrigation flow from heavily sprayed agricultural lands.
Such poisoning of waters set aside for conservation purposes
could have consequences felt by every
western duck hunter and by everyone to whom the sight and
sound of drifting ribbons of waterfowl across an
evening sky are precious. These particular refuges occupy
critical positions in the conservation of west ern
waterfowl. They lie at a point corresponding to the narrow neck
of a funnel, into which all the migratory paths
composing what is known as the Pacific Flyway converge.
During the fall migration they receive many millions of
ducks and geese from nesting grounds extending from the
shores of Bering Sea east to Hudson Bay fully three
fourths of all the waterfowl that move south into the Pacific
Coast states in autumn. In summer they provide nesting
areas for waterfowl, especially for two endangered species, the
redhead and the ruddy duck. If the lakes and pools of
these refuges become seriously contaminated, the damage to the
waterfowl populations of the Far West could be
irreparable. Water must also be thought of in terms
of the chains of life it supports from the smallasdust
green cells of the drifting plant plankton, through the minute
water fleas to the fishes that strain plankton from the
water and are in turn eaten by other fishes or by birds, mink,
raccoons in an endless cyclic trans fer of materials
from life to life. We know that the necessary rninerals in the
water .ire so passed from link to link of the food chains.
Can we suppose that poisons we introduce into water will not

16. also enter into these cycles of nature?
The answer is to be found in the amazing history of Clear Lake,
California. Clear Lake ties in mountainous
country some 'les north of San Francisco and has long been
popular with go ml anglers. The name is inappropriate,
for actually it is a rather turbid lake because of the soft black
ooze that covers its shallow bottom. Unfortunately for
the fishermen and the resort dwell ers on its shores, its waters
have provided an ideal habitat for a small gnat,
Cbaoboius astictopus. Although closely related to mosquitoes,
the gnat is not a bloodsucker and probably does not
feed at all as an adult. However, human beings who shared its
habitat found it annoying because of its sheer
numbers. Efforts were made to control it but they were largely
fruitless until, in the late 1940's, the chlorinated
hydrocarbon insecticides offered new weapons. The chemical
chosen for a fresh attack was DDD, a close relative of
DDT but apparently offering fewer threats to fish life.
The new control measures undertaken in 1949 were carefully
planned and few people would have supposed
any harm could result. The lake was surveyed, its volume …
May 14, 2018
Stephanie A. Scharf, Chair
ABA Commission on Women in the Profession
American Bar Association
321 N. Clark Street - 18th Floor
Chicago, IL 60654
Dear Mrs. Scharf,

17. The American Bar Association has taken great strides to
increase the number of women lawyers who pursue successful
enduring careers in the law. The gender gap, however, persists
both in the public and private sector. I am writing to propose
the creation of the initiative Women for a Balanced Future in
Law that focuses on empowering women who are entering the
legal field. This initiative emphasizes funding research that will
discover the driver behind the inequality, and on improving the
efficacy of the existing women’s initiatives in firm. With
increased funding, the Commission has the ability to fulfill its
mission to secure the equal participation of women in the legal
profession, and the justice system.
Law has been extremely important to any progress women have
made, giving them a platform to speak on broader social issues
that were swept under the rug by the previously male-dominated
jurisdiction. The Women for a Balanced Future in Law initiative
could make a substantial contribution to the commission’s
ultimate goal. As outlined in the proposal, pitfalls remain in the
methods firms and other sectors have taken to help their female
employers, and further action is necessary to ensure that women
do not continue to be disadvantaged by institutional inequality.
I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you in advance for
your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
XXXXX
ABA Commission on Women in the Profession Initiative
Proposal
WOMEN FOR A BALANCED FUTURE IN LAW
The Need for this Women’s Initiative
The American Bar Association Commission on Women in the

18. Profession has made considerable strides since its establishment
in 1987 to identify women’s barriers to advancement in the
field. In the past thirty years, women have graduated law school
at the same rate as men. These high numbers of equal
representation are also seen in prestige law schools. For
example, 48% of Harvard Law School’s current entering class
and 53% of Yale Law School’s entering class is comprised of
women. Despite this considerable improvement in education,
gender inequality is rife in the legal profession, as women make
up 36% of the field and are not progressing at the same rate as
men throughout their careers. The Commission’s reports have
called for the reevaluation of the structure of the legal
profession. As noted by the ABA, women continue to be
exceptionally underrepresented in leadership positions and
experience lower upward mobility in the public and private
sector. This discrepancy in leadership positions is exacerbated
when race/ethnicity are taken into account. In the private sector,
women in executive positions are viewed as an exception in the
corporate culture, as they make up 18% of equity partners and
women of color make up less than 2% of equity partners.
Moreover, in litigation, women only act as the lead attorney in
24% of the cases they examine. These numbers have remained
static for the past ten years indicating a lack of progress
towards equality despite the recognition of disparity.
The gender parity of law school students is not observed in law
school faculties. According to the Association of American Law
Schools, in 2007–2008, women only made up about 30 % of full
professors in law schools while still representing half of law
school students. While the ABA Commission on Women in the
Profession currently has three initiatives to help women
overcome the barriers still faced in the field, an initiative
focusing helping women new to the field is necessary to address
the remaining discrepancies.
Challenges Facing Women Today

19. Institutionalized Gender Stereotypes
According to American sociologist Joan Acker (1992), “The
term ‘gendered institutions’ means that gender is present in the
processes, practices, images and ideologies, and distributions of
power.” Law was historically created by men, and continues to
be dominated by men, as men still hold majority of the leading
positions today. Moreover, the hyper-competitiveness of the
legal profession tends to disadvantage women, as cultural
narratives about how a woman should or should not behave
inevitably affect their practice of law. Particularly, women have
to exert a certain level of aggressiveness and assertiveness to be
considered capable of handle legal scenarios, while also
maintaining the gentleness and agreeability preferred by
societal femininity. Addressing the root and subsequent
consequences of these stereotypes will provide a better
understanding of the more nuanced challenges facing women in
law.
Stereotypes in Litigation Practices
In 2004, DRI, the leading organization of civil defense
attorneys, launched a project to identify the specific challenges
faced by female defense trial lawyers. Through 100 in-depth
interviews of women in private practice and 756 electroni cally
transmitted nation-wide surveys, the DRI was able to identify
the sentiments and drawbacks for women in litigation practice.
About 65.3 % of the women surveyed agreed that there is a
“glass ceiling” for women defense attorneys, 61.6 % considered
leaving the practice of law due to issues related to their gender,
and 70.4 % experienced gender bias in the courtroom. As a
result of these sentiments, many women who leave firms choose
to go into government service, as government lawyers or judges,
because these positions are perceived as more hospitable to
women.
Testimonials
Statements from the ABA Commission on Women 2003 hearings

20. confirmed that these stereotypes for women in the profession
endure outside of litigation practices. The president of a large
California bar association testified that women attorneys are
often described as “too bossy, too aggressive, not aggressive
enough, too emotional, or too strident.” Moreover, women
attorneys practicing in small towns tend to face greater
discrimination, as some attorneys from rural areas in New York
and Florida testified that judges referred to them as “baby” and
“honey” or called them by their first name unlike male
attorneys. Women inevitably have to work harder than male trial
lawyers, yet receive less professional respect from clients, male
lawyers, and judges alike leading to their early departure from
the field.
Sexual Harassment
The persistence of gender stereotypes, particularly the sense
that men have less accountability than men, is evident in the
field, displayed through workplace sexual harassment. Despite
the improvement in sexual harassment policies around nation,
rates of sexual harassment continue to be high. In the most
recent surveys, about half to two-thirds of female attorneys, and
a quarter to half of female court personnel, report experiencing
or observing sexual harassment. A 2017 survey and interview
data from the Youth Development Study revealed the effects of
sexual harassment on women early in their careers. Researchers
found that sexual harassment increases financial stress by
accelerating job change, and altering a woman’s career
attainment. Sexual harassment is not unique to the legal
profession, as these harms are considerable for all women in the
workplace.
Work-Life Balance
The expectation that women will assume most of the
responsibility for child care perpetuates the gender roles that
hinder a woman’s professional advancement. These expectations
are primarily seen in policies directed toward women that

21. provide parental leave, flexible work schedules, and child care
options. In a study done by Indiana University School of Law,
many firms reported that the difficulties for promoting women
were entrenched in the problems faced with retaining women in
a firm more generally. Of these firms it was found that about
67% reported the work schedule required for law firms as a
major factor affecting whether or not they could keep women at
the firm and on the path to obtain partnership. According to the
study done by the DRI, 90 % of litigation firms allow their
lawyers to work part-time, however, very few lawyers actually
take advantage of part-time work opportunities, reflecting a
negative attitude within firms toward working less than full
time. Both of these studies show that part-time work or leave is
often viewed as an indication of a lack of commitment and low -
quality job performance.
Gender Pay Gap
In recent years there has been a decrease in the gender pay gap
between male and female attorneys. Despite this advancement, a
considerable gap remains when looking at the private sector.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2015 that male
partners were reported to earn about 44% more on average than
a female partner. This discrepancy in pay could potentially
decrease a woman’s drive to obtain higher level positions due to
frustration that they would not receive the same compensation
as their male counterparts. The discrepancy in compensating
needs to be further researched and could potentially be tied
back to gender stereotypes in the workplace.
Initiative: Women for a Balanced Future in Law
The Goal of the Initiative
The American Lawyer has projected that at the current gradual
current rate of progress, the legal profession will not reach
gender equality at senior levels until 2181. This Initiative
proposal will strive to provide critical data comprised of first-

22. hand testimony and statistics to ultimately propose the
appropriate solutions to this urgent problem.
National Summits and Hearings
The last time the ABA Commission on Women compiled a
summary including anecdotal testimony and data from in-person
hearings was in 2003. An updated report including this
testimony is crucial to achieving the Commission’s mission to
ensure women have equal opportunities for professional growth
as their male counterparts, as it provides information on day-to-
day issues faced by women attorneys that speak to the structural
inequality.
Aside from this crucial testimony, various National Summits are
required to improve women’s visibility in the field. This
initiative will proposes hosting two National Summits at
renowned law schools to provide a platform where leaders in the
profession including managing partners, chairs of firms, and
judges can interact with high-achieving law school female
students to begin establishing a professional rapport.
Research
The Initiative will fund innovative research to identify the main
causes behind inequality in law. The research will include:
· Longitudinal studies following women leaving law school
throughout the course of their careers.
· Surveys for women in law firms to get data about
compensation and discrimination.
· Focus groups analysis on status and experiences of women in
legal employment
Firm-Specific Strategies
The percentage of women who serve in top positions at firms
has remained steady for the past 10 years, despite firm’s efforts

23. to improve women’s status. An attorney’s long-term success in
private sector is limited by their ability to bring in clients, so it
is imperative to push networking, and marketing training.
Although many firms have recognized this need, the success
rates of “women’s initiatives” within firms have not had
impactful results. In 2012, the National Association of Women
Lawyers conducted the first-ever national survey of women’s
initiatives among the nation’s largest law firms to identify
possible solutions to the problem of gender equity in law firms.
A survey of the initiatives in the nation’s 200 largest firms
revealed important information regarding the financing,
governance, structure and scope of activities of women’s
initiatives. Based on the survey the following recommendations
are made to improve the effectiveness of women’s initiatives in
firms.
Women’s Initiatives within firms should focus on:
· Increasing funding of women’s initiatives
· Increasing monitoring of promotion rates
· Creation of accounting systems that track women’s hours, the
affairs they focus on, and the business/clients women bring in
· Hosting an advisory council with current and prospective
clients to increase women visibility
· Encouraging cooperation between higher ups and associates to
build a business book through seminars and monthly
conferences
· Sending women to local or national continuing legal education
programs to improve presentation and business skills
· Initiatives should have specific mission statements that refer
to particular goals that guide their subsequent programs and
functions
· Annual reviews of programs and program criteria
These recommendations seek to resolve the shortcomings of
women’s initiatives found in the by the NAWL’s survey of
firms being a lack of funding, oversight, and unclear mission

24. statements.
Law School Faculty
Increasing female law school professors will help change the
view of a male dominated field. The Commission’s annual
report includes the demographic for law school deans, but not
law school professors. Inclusion of the percentage of law school
professors who are women in future reports will provide the
necessary date to incite institutions to reevaluate the diversity
of their faculty. Presenting women as leaders in the field to
current law school students will help change the perception of
women in the field. Young law school students will have the
image of a successful lawyer as a female, and not the historical
male image.
Funding
During fiscal years 2017 and 2016, the ABA had $2,182,000
and $2,671,000 respectively, to cover expenses of their
programs. In 2017, the ABA’s Commission on Women received
$74,000 from donations to cover the program’s expenses. This
was a large increase from the previous year when the
Commission only received $29,000. This monetary increase is
promising, and this initiative proposal will help show the ABA
the pressing need for increased funding for women’s goals.
Commission’s Net Assets
2016
2017
$29,000
$74,000
Looking Forward
Law has been exceedingly important to any progress women
have made, giving them a platform to speak on broader social

25. issues that were swept under the rug by the previously male-
dominated jurisdiction. The lack of gender parity in the
profession is a systemic problem that will not fix itself. The
Commission has the monetary resources and industry influence
to push forward research and programs that will inevitably
address the root of the problems faced by women in a more
tangible manner. The issues faced by female attorneys are not
unique to the legal profession, but the profession has
historically been a foundation tool for all of women. The
judicial standards would accurately represent the nation as a
whole if firms and courts were more gender balanced.
Page 2
Proposal Paper
Draft Due: rough draft on 6 May at noon, second draft on 11
May at noon
Final Due: 15 May (that’s FRIDAY) by 5 pm
Length: Around 2000 to 3000 words, plus supplementary
material
Value: 20% of final grade
Description: A full and formal proposal of a specific course of
action in response to the situation that you have characterized
and evaluated in your previous papers.
Assignment Overview
By now you should have a thorough understanding of the
problem or situation you are describing. What remains for you
to decide, then, includes:
Your audience: You must identify and describe a specific
audience, one that you have a reasonable chance of reaching

26. with (and persuading of) your proposal, and one that has the
power to take the action you are proposing.
The Proposal Itself: Be sure to support your claims and reasons
with strong documented evidence and persuasive rhetorical
strategies. Your writing must be clear and interesting, and
establish exigence for your target audience.
Include the following elements in the body of your proposal:
· A summary of the current situation: This is where you may
refer to your conjectural information, proving a problem exists
and supporting with facts, examples, data, and statistics.
· The negative consequences of the situation: you want to
convince your audience to take action, so spend time here
developing your case using effective claims, data, and
examples.
· Evaluate the consequences: put them into context for your
audience; think about using interviews, personal quotes, or
compelling examples to make your case.
· Address some of the root causes of the situation; particularly
causes that you will attempt to ameliorate with your proposal.
· Address objections your audience may have: this is where a
careful audience analysis comes into play. What do they care
about? What do they value? What is their bottom line?
· Proposal to address the current situation: describe your idea
to the audience. Lay it out clearly and succinctly. Support with
research, examples, and logical and ethical appeals. Here are
some elements of persuasion to include:
· The good consequences that will flow from your argument:

27. describe the good that you hope to achieve.
· The bad consequences that will be avoided: spend some time
describing what your audience wants to avoid.
· Make an ethical appeal to your audience’s sense of what is
right, fair, and just.
Then answer this question: Is it feasible? Address concerns
about how to implement the proposal by answering these
questions: (choose the ones most pertinent to your situation).
· Can we afford it?
· How long will it take?
· Can we get people to do this?
· What are the trade-offs?
· How can we do it?
· What’s the first step?
· Has it been done before?
Conclusion: Make a strong appeal for action. Consider ending
by referring back to the problem scenario and how it might look
different if your proposal were to be implemented.
Other Requirements
Cover Letter: Your proposal must be accompanied by a one-
page, single-spaced cover letter (in appropriate business letter
format), targeting a “gateway audience” and designed to
persuade them of the importance and credibility of your
proposal and to encourage them to pass it along to your primary
audience. Such an audience might include a magazine editor,
administrative assistant, etc. (Note that in many cases this letter
might be addressed to your primary audience, though it is really
being read by a “gatekeeper”!)

28. Visual Element: Your proposal must incorporate at least one
graphic element of your own design that illustrates relevant and
appropriate data (e. g., a chart, table, illustration, timeline, or
figure, appropriately labeled).
Headings: Please use clear and interesting headings to
demarcate the sections of your proposal.
Works Cited Page: You must include a properly formatted
works cited page. You must make substantial use of at least ten
primary sources; though many students use closer to 20 sources.
I encourage you to seek out sources from a variety of
perspectives and sources.
Purpose
Your immediate purpose is to have your proposal implemented
by your target audience. To accomplish this, you are expected
to employ all of the rhetorical tools at your disposal; it is a
summation and extension of what you have been learning and
practicing all semester. Beyond the classroom, the assignment is
designed to prepare you for the various kinds of proposals you
are likely to make throughout your post-undergraduate career.
Grading
Your formal proposal will be evaluated on all of the factors that
contribute to its overall persuasiveness. This includes the
professionalism of your proposal’s appearance, the practicality
of its approach, and the lucidity of your thought and writing. It
includes, as well, the effectiveness with which your supporting
arguments and evidence are presented, and the effectiveness
with which you target your intended audience. Your own ethos,
of course, is of substantial importance, and will be assessed
according to your demonstrated depth of knowledge, the
originality and insightfulness of your thought, and the precision

29. and clarity of your writing style.