With the Nineteenth Amendment newly ratified, women — still only a few percent of the profession and shut out of male bar associations — built institutions of their own. Queen's Bench was born of exactly that exclusion.

Through the Depression, women's share of the bar stagnated at roughly three percent, but a handful of pioneers reached national prominence — and Queen's Bench kept its community intact.

Wartime labor shortages opened law school doors as male enrollment collapsed, and California seated its first woman appellate justice — before the postwar years pushed many gains back.

Postwar retrenchment kept women to a tiny fraction of law students — many classes counted two or fewer, and some none at all. Through the lean years, Queen's Bench sustained a professional home for Bay Area women lawyers.

The modern women's movement and the civil rights era began cracking the profession open: women's law school enrollment nearly tripled over the decade, federal law first addressed sex discrimination, and California seated some of the nation's earliest women judges.

A litigation revolution — led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg's ACLU Women's Rights Project — wrote sex equality into constitutional law while women's law school enrollment surged roughly eightfold. Queen's Bench answered the moment by founding its Foundation.

Women reached double digits in the profession and won partnership-track protections — and the first seat on the U.S. Supreme Court — even as the decade showed that progress could meet backlash.

Women broke through at the very top of the profession: the federal bench, the Justice Department, the ABA presidency, and the deanships of elite law schools.

Women — and increasingly women of color — claimed top prosecutorial and political offices, and women neared half of all law students even as leadership in firms lagged behind.

Three women sat together on the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time, a woman of color led California's judiciary, and women became the majority of America's law students.

Queen's Bench entered its second century as women reached the vice presidency, the leadership of California's high court, and — for the first time — the majority of the nation's law firm associates.