It took strong women to forge a path to the bench

In this summer of the Supreme Court, all eyes are on the swing-vote role played by retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and on the big, big question: who’ll replace her.

It seems quaint to turn back the clock to the summer of 1981, when Justice Potter Stewart’s retirement gave President Reagan the chance to appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court.

First woman? Today, it’s almost patronizing to mention it. A quarter-century ago, it was monumental.

At the risk of being quaint or patronizing, and before we get caught up in who’s next, I’m going to mention it.

Women my age and older remember when having all doors open wasn’t a given. Young women, those crackerjack daughters of ours, should thank the ones who pried doors open. It took endless work, smarts and grit.

Thanks, for one, to Kathryn Trumbull.

It was 1990 – yes, we should tell our girls, that recently – when former Gov. Booth Gardner appointed Trumbull as the first female Snohomish County Superior Court judge.

Trumbull, 67, retired in 1999 and lives in Everett.

Last week, she recalled that when Gardner interviewed her for the judge’s position, “he asked why there weren’t any women on the bench. By then, King County had several.”

She remembered some discussion of this being a ” ‘good old boys’ county.” No longer an exclusive men’s club, the Snohomish County Superior Court now includes three women, Linda Krese, Anita Farris and Ellen Fair, on its roster of 14 judges.

Trumbull served as the county’s chief criminal deputy prosecutor and as a Superior Court commissioner before becoming a judge. As a judge in 1993, she made headlines in sentencing serial arsonist Paul Keller to 75 years in prison.

Impressive as her career has been, I find inspiration in the struggles that came before her successes.

Trumbull, the daughter of a Seattle grocer who emigrated from Scotland, was in her 30s when she found herself “about to be divorced and facing supporting my family.”

“I knew I couldn’t do it with a bachelor of science in psychology. I needed some advanced degree,” she said.

She applied to the University of Washington School of Law in 1971. Women at the law school had sent a letter saying that for the first time, female applicants would be considered on equal footing with men, using as criteria Law School Admission Test scores, undergraduate grades and complexity of classes.

The year before she started, there were only 18 women in all three classes at the law school.

“The year I went, there were about 40 of us,” she said.

There’s proof of how times have changed in the July 5 edition of the Washington State Bar Association’s Bar News. In a piece on diversity in the legal profession, Lindsay Thompson, the publication’s editor, wrote: “Women are now commonly the majority of entering classes at Washington’s three law schools.”

If you’ve read much about O’Connor, you know the high court justice faced gender discrimination after finishing law school at Stanford.

“The big West Coast law firms turned her down or offered her secretarial work,” Newsweek magazine reported in its July 11 cover story.

Trumbull, too, said she overcame obstacles, “some little, some big.”

“When I started at Shoreline Community College, a counselor told me I should be either a nurse or a teacher. I didn’t quite do that,” she said.

Trumbull graduated from Ballard High School in 1955, when women were expected to get married and have children.

“If you had to go to college a few years to find a husband, that was OK,” she said. “There are a lot more choices out there now.”

Parenting, working, studying – Trumbull did it all in an era when having it all was uncommon.

“I had three teenagers when I was in law school, and I was a single parent. It was interesting,” Trumbull said. “I don’t think I’ve ever caught up on the sleep from that period. I went to bed with books.”

Hard as it was, she pushes the power of education. “Particularly women need to have a way to support themselves. That’s what we lacked in my generation,” Trumbull said.

Did that single mother, up with her books long past midnight, ever imagine she’d be a judge?

“I never dreamed of it,” she said.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie @heraldnet.com.

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