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By Root 889 0

in preparation for my first semester at Yale Law School. I wanted to adjust to living in Connecticut before my classes started. I approached my first year of law school with the mingled anticipation and apprehension of a child about to receive her first bike. I had first become interested in law at age fifteen when I read in JoAnn’s sorority magazine that two of the women active in politics and the civil rights movement, Yvonne Burke and Patricia Harris, were lawyers. The images of the marchers and protesters influenced me as well. They were people who knew how cruel the law could be but believed so much in it that they were willing to die for changes in it. The civil rights movement and the people, lawyers and nonlawyers, in it inspired my belief in the law. My family and family friends had instilled in me a belief that I could actually achieve a law school education. But even at age twenty, as I readied myself for school, I had known only one lawyer personally. Nor had I ever spent more than two weeks outside the state of Oklahoma or crossed its border more than twice. For sixteen years of my life, I had not ventured more than 120 miles from our farm, and life in Stillwater during college was almost an extension of my life on the farm. But now the distance offered by Yale was a daunting prospect.

Arriving in New Haven, I knew that my apprehension was justified. New Haven and Stillwater could not have been more foreign to one another. The first thing that I noticed was the cold. May in Connecticut felt more like March in Oklahoma. Not only was the temperature fifteen degrees lower, but it was measured with a Celsius thermometer—sparing me the satisfaction of protesting with absolute certainty just how much colder. In Stillwater I could look from the top floor of my dormitory and see beyond the edge of town to the surrounding pastures, miles across the flats. Neither trees nor buildings nor hills obstructed my view. New Haven, a small town by East Coast standards, stretched into endless suburbs—Woodbridge, West Haven, North Haven—and signs designating the various townships were the only lines of demarcation. In three years in New Haven I never found a vantage point that allowed me to see beyond the city boundaries to the countryside. I felt confined—able to escape only when time and finances allowed me to travel by train.

The Yale campus itself fulfilled my apprehension as well. Even the buildings were different. Ivy really did cover the walls of the Gothic-style structures so unlike the red brick buildings of Oklahoma State. And these differences seemed to have everything to do with tradition and expectation. And I feared that my early education at rural schools in Oklahoma and later in college was hardly adequate preparation for the top law school in the country.

I had decided to go to Yale rather than Harvard after visiting both. Yale, the smaller of the two, gave me the feeling of protection and security I needed for two major transitions—undergraduate to law school, public to Ivy League school. But once I got there I discovered that the small size only compensated so much for the inevitable feeling of being an outsider. However much those who direct the educational process perceive it as race and gender neutral, Yale cannot escape its history. (In many respects it does not want to.) It was designed for young white men of privilege and only began to admit women in 1969. From its secret societies to its Whiffenpoofs, men dominated the culture of the institution in the 1970s, just as they had historically. And if we never spoke of class, status, or distinctions in background, it was because they were so clearly taken for granted.

My class at Yale was 165 students from all over the country. I was attracted to students who were making transitions similar to my own, though few, if any, seemed to be bridging barriers of race, gender, class, geography, and education. I recognized my inexperience and naiveté, but was committed to learning all I could at Yale. The summer before, I had vowed to be like a sponge, soaking up