The passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 enabled women to qualify as solicitors and barristers as well as to become magistrates and members of other professions to which they had hitherto been denied entry. In December 1922 Carrie Morrison became the first woman to qualify as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of England and Wales. More women followed her example.
This small, exclusive and highly-educated group of women designated themselves the 1919 Club and in a 'revolutionary' step the Law Society provided them with a room where they were permitted to meet on an occasional basis. Although it is impossible to pinpoint the exact date of the founding of the 1919 Club, 1923 is usually taken as the year of its inception. No list of its original members exists although there could not have been more than (10), of whom several were still active members many decades later.
The purpose of the club was acknowledged to be mainly social, but it also provided a forum for the discussion and resolution of the difficulties facing women solicitors, such as what to wear in court and how to persuade clients and other lawyers to take them seriously.
Overwhelmingly middle-class in origin and with the social benefits of private and university education, they combined poorly remunerated 'Poor Man’s Lawyer' work with successfully arranging annual dinners which attracted speakers of the highest calibre including Lord Denning . Their first dinner was held in 1934 at a time when there were still only very few qualified women solicitors compared to women dentists and women architects.
It took some time for the club’s membership to require any formal structure, but by 1946 the club published its club rules which indicated that membership was now extended to law students as well as to articled clerks and fully qualified solicitors.
Subscriptions differentiated between 'town' (roughly Greater London) and 'country' members (the rest of England and Wales) as for many years nearly all meetings were held in London and until 1970 were often a somewhat irregular occurrence.
One aspect of the club’s membership policy which has distinguished it from most, if not all other Law Society groups is the entitlement of any member to retain her membership even if she is retired or no longer practising as a solicitor. This is in keeping with the club’s belief that younger members of the profession can gain much from informal mentoring by its older and more experienced members.
At three points in its history, in 1949, 1960 and 1969, attendance at club meetings had sunk so low that its members considered whether it should be wound up; on each occasion members decided that the club’s initial raison d’etre of 'providing social and instructional meetings' while encouraging professional companionship was still valid.
After the 1969 AGM Juliet Becker, Eva Crawley and Rosalind Bax, all of whom were to become Association of Women Solicitors (AWS) chairwomen, formed part of a new revitalised committee which looked beyond the merely social to providing tangible services to female solicitors of whom there were only 750 with Practising Certificates in the whole of England and Wales.
By 1969 the title 1919 Club was felt to be insufficiently explanatory and it was decided to add the strapline Association of Women Solicitors; in time the original name was dropped and the Club metamorphosed into the Association of Women Solicitors.
This refocusing of the organisation coincided with the accelerating increase in the number of women in the solicitors’ profession and over the next decade the AWS grew sufficiently to generate a demand from several regions for their own affiliated groups.
With the creation of regional groups in Yorkshire, Manchester, Surrey, Birmingham, West Midlands, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Shropshire and Mid Wales, London, East Midlands, North West and Avon and Somerset the AWS began to operate in much the same way as the Law Society itself with local groups providing the social, networking and support function and a central umbrella organisation whose views on women’s position were increasingly sought.
The AWS Working Party (later the AWS Law Reform Committee) inter alia prepared papers and responses on the Elimination of Sex Discrimination and Equality of Opportunity to the Equal Opportunities Commission (1981), on tax reform proposals and amendments to the Equal Pay Act (1983), successfully campaigned for a reduced PC fee for those practising part-time (1993) and against a drastic increase in CPD requirements which would have seriously disadvantaged this same group (2004).
It published a model clause on maternity leave arrangements for equity partners and more ambitiously a rapidly sold-out guide to part-time working.
For the first 50 years of the club’s existence women solicitors came from a small section of society, comfortably off and aided by servants, with a strong likelihood that they would give up work on becoming mothers if not on marriage.
The increase in their number gave them more confidence to speak out about discrimination and also more need to do so. The AWS responded in two ways. First, it changed from being an organisation which had declared that it was not campaigning to one which publicly promoted the interests of its members as working mothers, as members of ethnic minorities as well as putting its head above the parapet to argue for the legal and social rights of women generally. Second, it provided and publicised positive ways of assisting women solicitors over the life-time of their careers.
The returner course was begun by Eva Crawley and carried on by Geraldine Cotton with the assistance of Lucy Cavendish College in Cambridge in order to bring solicitors who had been out of the profession for some time up to date with legal developments and to prepare them for the contemporary workplace.
The mentoring scheme was also developed by Eva Crawley, not as a long term guidance and supervision programme, but as a consultancy service able to give confidential advice to those considering changing specialism, moving from private practice to in-house or the GLS, entering into partnership, or even moving region or country.
The maternity helpline was run by Judith Willis for 15 years giving basic information on the employment rights surrounding pregnancy and motherhood. This was renamed the Maternity and paternity helpline, when new legislation gave time off rights to fathers as well as mothers.
Communication via a regular newsletter began in 1954. Increasingly sophisticated, the newsletter expanded through the efforts of various editors (Geraldine Cotton, Jenny Staples, Elizabeth Cruickshank and Katherine Southby) from a renewed sheet provided to 100 members to a glossy magazine sent out to the 18,000 members of the AWS.
The AWS chain of office was created in 1989 by Keith Grant-Peterkin, the husband of AWS chairwoman Theresa Grant-Peterkin and in 1990 the AWS became a fully-fledged group of the Law Society which now provided funding and administrative support.
In 2013 the AWS voted to be absorbed into the Women Lawyers Division of the Law Society, although the regional groups still remain as independent entities.
Patrons of the Association of Women Solicitors
AWS Patrons were chosen because of their recognised professional expertise, their work on behalf of women and their undoubted status as charismatic role models for women lawyers.
Eileen Pembridge is an indefatigable advocate for Legal Aid, who set up her practice in Kennington to serve her local community. She has acted as Chairwoman of the Law Society's Family Law Committee and was a Law Society Council Member.
Dame Janet Gaymer DBE QC was the first woman to be appointed Senior Partner of a Top Ten City law firm with an international practice. She has acted as the Commissioner for Public Appointments in England and Wales and has a keen interest in standards and legal education and training.
Dianna Kempe was Senior Partner of Appleby, Spurling & Kempe of Bermuda, London and Hong Kong, the first woman to be appointed Queen’s Counsel in Bermuda and the first woman to be elected President of the International Bar Association.
Fiona Woolf CBE (Patron 2007) was the second woman to become President of the Law Society of England and Wales. She is the first and only AWS Chairwoman to have held this post and the first to be elected as a Sheriff of the City of London.
Harriet Harman QC MP is the longest serving female MP in the House of Commons. She is Deputy Leader of the Labour Party and served inter alia as Minister for Women and Equality in the last Labour Government.