Pride and Prejudice: Social Workers, Lawyers, and the Provision of Free Legal Aid, 1911–40

In the late nineteenth century middle-class and elite women’s organizations founded societies that provided free legal aid to other women. These were the first organizations to offer free civil legal aid and it was often middle-class women themselves, who were not formally trained in law, who counseled other women and pursued their legal claims.

As an emerging group of male legal aid lawyers came to the fore, they sought to  expand legal aid societies and standardize the provision of legal aid services. It was such leaders’ goals to align legal aid with bar associations while professionalizing and masculinizing it.  In the process, women’s visibility as lay lawyers and even professional lawyers declined. 

 This project, however, was never complete for social workers asserted their own authority over the provision of legal aid. Many social workers had a vision of the services that a client was entitled to as vastly broader than many legal aid attorneys. By the early 1920s, when four out of five social workers were women, the leaders of legal aid exhibited a full-fledged panic over its relationship to social work and this panic mapped onto issues of gender, authority, and expertise. This heated controversy raised issues such as the nature of the role of lawyers, what it meant to practice law, whether law was a specialized form of knowledge, whether legal training should be reserved for lawyers, and ultimately what the rule of law meant. It further brought into conflict the central question of what services legal aid should provide to clients, and what clients legal aid should serve.