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Imagine if you had to put a rubber base on your work shoes so that your heels wouldn’t make a sound? Imagine that your colleagues went on strike the day you were promoted? That you were told you can’t do your job because you’re a woman? Imagine you were told you were not a ‘person’?

These were just some of the dilemmas that women have faced in legal practice over the past 100 years. On this year’s International Women’s Day, observed annually on March 8, I am sharing some of my ongoing research, which studies women legal practitioners in Pakistan from a socio-historical perspective.

My interest in this area may resonate with other women lawyers and is rooted in the advice I received upon graduating with a law degree: “You should focus on corporate law and, if litigation is necessary, you should stick with family law.”

Later, when I chose to pursue an academic career instead of staying in legal practice, I was informed, “It is women like you who leave the field… you pull women back several steps.”

Somehow, a woman in a male-dominated field can never win. This essay focuses on the fights that women lawyers have been forced to undertake and celebrates their wins over the past century.

The trailblazers

Legal practice these days is still predominantly viewed as a male field, with profit-making as the objective. But if law has its roots in morality, should it not be seen as a service instead? My research in this area has revealed some fascinating trends — early women lawyers around the world saw the legal profession as a service, and the parallels between the journeys in law of a North American woman and Asian woman were surprisingly similar.

They looked at the law through a compassionate and empathetic lens and believed it could address the injustices suffered by women and other marginalised communities. With these lived realities in mind, these women made the law personal and justice possible.

In 1874, during British rule in India, an eight-year-old Cornelia Sorabji was reading a book, lying in the corner of a room in her home in Pune, when a thakurani [lady of the estate] from Kathiawar came to seek advice from Cornelia’s mother, a woman known for her philanthropy. The visitor’s property had been stolen by her legal agent of 30 years, who had taken her signatures on blank papers and assigned her estate to himself, a fate shared by many purdahnasheens [women who observed the veil] in India at the time.

This incident from her childhood remained imprinted in Cornelia’s mind, leading her to fight with the University of Oxford in the UK to change her major from English literature to law. She became the first woman to study this field in the history of the university. Though she passed the law degree examinations in 1892, she was not awarded that piece of paper because, under English law, women did not qualify as “persons” at the time.

Indian law was no different. Sorabji, despite many attempts, was denied the formal licence to practice law in India because of this lack of “personhood”. She was allowed special permission to work for wards of the state, but the title of advocate was denied to her, despite her qualifications.

In 1916, Regina Guha joined the fight for formal recognition and filed an application in the Calcutta High Court to be allowed to practice law as a pleader. She was also denied because the expression “persons”, as stated in the 1879 Act which regulated the legal profession in India, was still interpreted as limited to males.

By 1919, England passed the Sex Discrimination (Removal) Act, formally permitting women to practice law, and India followed suit in 1923, with the Legal Practitioners (Women’s) Act. Finally, three decades after completing her degree from Oxford, Sorabji received her law degree. She was finally a person, able to fight for the rights of other persons, legitimately.

Many women lawyers in Pakistan have also had similar passions that drove them to work for women and marginalised communities. The first judges of the high courts of the country, appointed in 1994, were no different.

Justice Majida Razvi had left her Karachi civil practice in 1971 for a brief period to work for the inflow of refugees migrating to an ill-prepared state. Justice Fakhrunnissa Khokhar, alongside her practice, had been a political worker and a women’s rights champion. Justice Nasira Iqbal had been a member of the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), where she recalls: “I told them, if anybody wants voluntary, free legal advice, I’m always available.”

Similar sentiments echo the halls of law in many other parts of the world.

A threat to the status quo?

Women lawyers saw the law as a way to address the unjust lived reality of the marginalised segments of society and used their privilege to work for those who didn’t have the same access. Be it the Canadian Supreme Court Judge Claire l’Heureux-Dubé, known for adding feminism to law, or Cheng Yu Hsiu in China, Salma Sobhan in Bangladesh or Lim Beng Hong in Malaysia, they defended the rights of the oppressed and used law to aid them.

North American equal rights advocates include ‘First Lady of Law’ Justice Florence Ellinwood Allen, US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and first Black Federal Court Justice Constance Baker Motley; and in Europe, there were pioneers such as Romanian Ella Negruzzi and Englishwoman Helena Normanton, amongst others. All women, all lawyers, all what we would now call activists.

This activism or resistance to the dominant narrative always unsettles those in power, as is intended, but when a person’s mere existence in a field is a source of worry, then the problem is much bigger. Women’s entry in the legal profession as advocates was tough and required a statutory intervention, but their entry to the judiciary in Pakistan was even more troubling for men.

In 1974, when Justice Khalida Rashid became the first woman to be appointed as a civil judge in Peshawar, the burning question that riled Pakistani society was: “Can women even be judges?”

In the ‘Islamisation’ period that followed under the Gen Zia dictatorship, Ansar Burney, the philanthropist running a humanitarian NGO which claimed to fight for the rights of women, filed a case before the Shariat Bench in 1982, arguing that “…ladies do not fulfil the qualification of Qazi, according to the established principles of Muhammadan jurisprudence.”

Advocates Salima Nasiruddin and Rashida Patel (also president of the Women Lawyers Association) were part of the legal defence team and were successful in legitimising the presence of women on the bench. But what I find interesting is that this male opposition continues.

Shattering the glass ceiling

When Benazir Bhutto formed her second government in the 1990s, she tried to create a path for women to enter the judiciary. In 1994, she was successful in two significant interventions: firstly, the passage of an amendment to the Family Courts Act, 1964, which declared that women judges are necessary for the successful adjudication of family cases and made mandatory that “…at least one Family Court in each district shall be presided over by a woman judge…”

Secondly, the high courts in Pakistan welcomed five women to judicial office, one each in Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and three in Punjab. Both interventions were not easy, but their impact was felt by women in significant ways, especially by women lawyers, because it showed them that the glass ceiling had been breached.

And then, just three years ago, the ceiling officially shattered — the Supreme Court welcomed its first female judge, Justice Aisha Malik, into the fold.

Justice Malik’s inclusion was also not without resistance. In fact, it was more than one would expect. She had to be nominated twice for this high office because the male gatekeepers, not only limited to the judiciary alone but also the Bar, were not supportive — the Punjab Bar Council went on strike in 2021 against her proposed elevation and, in 2022, the Pakistan Bar Council boycotted all court proceedings on the same ground.

Imagine that! The entire judicial system went into a form of paralysis, trembling in opposition to Justice Malik’s induction, because she was not senior enough. I read this as her being not man enough, even though it was not phrased as such.

Officially, the opposition to her appointment was couched as an attempt to preserve the principle of seniority, ie the senior-most judge should be elevated first. But there had been — and continue to be — countless instances in judicial history where this principle had not been followed. Of course, the beneficiaries were male and thus excused from such harsh criticism and the courts had continued functioning.

In 2023, Justice Mussarat Hilali, another woman, joined her colleague in the Supreme Court with much less opposition. And this is why trailblazers are needed. They light the way for the rest, making the impossible possible.

Barriers beyond the courtroom

While women representation in the judiciary has continued, the numbers are low. Many reasons have been suggested for this but, for me, the legal environment has not changed enough to accommodate and retain women advocates, either in the courts or in chambers.

Women continue to be judged by male standards. Can she stay late in the office? Will the mahaul [environment] of the office be ruined with her presence? Will her blow-dries and manicures have to be accommodated? ‘Khawateen ke tau sainkrron masaail hotay hain’ [Women have hundreds of problems] is a common refrain. One employer at a job interview was bold enough to ask me when I was planning to start a family.

The research being conducted for my larger ongoing project also reveals similar inquisitions that would be illegal in any other part of the world. Meanwhile, there is no conversation about better work hours for men and women both, or about a more respectful and inclusive space for everyone on the team.

The narrative continues to view a female advocate’s sex as a disability rather than an asset. If she finds herself working for an employer that is more tuned-in to the needs of the women on the team, then either she is told she should consider herself, or she does consider herself to be, “lucky.”

I also considered myself lucky when one employer had a women’s only bathroom constructed in the office for my use, considering I was the only female in the office. This basic necessity was not considered earlier, and Justice Majida Razvi recalls that when she joined court practice in 1963, she would have to go to the Gymkhana near the courts to use the washroom!

Things change over time and the environment adapts when one continues to stand firm, despite the resistance one faces. The Aurat March is one such attempt at shifting the political narrative but the opposition it faces is significant, if not repetitive. Each year, cases are filed in the high courts to declare the protest as un-Islamic and fuhash [vulgar]. Each year the cases are dismissed and the courts uphold women’s right to assemble and exercise their constitutional guarantees.

This is only possible because of an inclusive and feminist approach to law.

The women lawyers who have fought for recognition and claimed formerly male spaces over the past 100 years are special. They questioned the accepted male norms of legal practice and successfully carved out a space for themselves. The impact is felt later by others, including me, allowing them to continue to hold that place legitimately.

If Sorabji hadn’t fought for the purdahnasheens, if Guha hadn’t fought for a licence to practice law, if Malik hadn’t persevered and remained strong in the face of the opposition, the world of practice would have remained the same. Solely male, and true to precedent.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, March 9th, 2025

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that, in 2023, Justice Tahira Safdar joined the Supreme Court. The story has been updated to reflect that it was Justice Mussarat Hilali. The error is regretted.