Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer recalls thinking it strange that Harvard Law School admitted hardly any women when he began taking classes there in 1961.

"It was weird for me because I grew up in San Francisco and in the West, everything was co-ed," he said in a conversation with George Washington University Law Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew on Tuesday afternoon.

He also said he found it "ridiculous" how the male faculty treated the few women who were in his classes. Still, over 60 years later, Breyer admitted to not fully appreciating at the time how challenging that sexism was for the pioneering female law students in that era before civil rights legislation and the women's liberation movement.

"They were having a tougher time than we thought," Breyer told Matthew as part of a series of talks at GWU on the retired jurist's life and career.

The obstacles faced by the 15 female law students in Breyer's Harvard class of more than 500 people formed the basis of a 2003 book by Judith Richards Hope, who was one of the 15. The book, "Pinstripes & Pearls," features a foreword written by Breyer.

Breyer considered many of the women his friends, and remembered chatting about his classes with them over coffee. He suggested that he didn't realize at the time the effect that some of the male faculty's sexist attitudes had on them.

The dean of Harvard Law School at the time was renowned appellate lawyer Erwin Griswold, who would later serve as U.S. solicitor general. In "Pinstripes" and in the accounts of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who attended HLS a few years earlier, Griswold was known to host a dinner party exclusively for the female law students at which he would ask them individually to explain why they were taking the place of a man at the school. Another professor, Barton Leach, would refuse to ask questions of the female students outside of an embarrassing spectacle he called Ladies Day.

Breyer said he "would think that was funny because it was so ridiculous but if you were one of the [15] women it wasn't so funny."

The retired justice likened the experience of early female law students at Harvard to the pioneers, who settled the remote western frontier in places like Nebraska before they built "superhighways."

"They had a harder time," Breyer said. "It's important to remember that."

As for the faculty members who doled out this unequal treatment, Breyer said the challenge of historians is that the "past is a different country" where "people do things differently." Later in his remarks, he said Griswold was an otherwise upstanding person.

"You have to try to bring yourself to understand the state of mind and the state of mind of Erwin Griswold, Barton Leach and a lot of the faculty was, 'Well, these are all jobs that are going to men, why should a woman have one? Why are you here at Harvard?'"

The challenges of the first female law students didn't end on campus. Ginsburg and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor often spoke about being shut out of lucrative careers in major law firms, forcing them to forge new paths in the law.

O'Connor was even offered a job as a legal secretary at Gibson Dunn despite graduating third in her class at Stanford Law School. She reportedly brought up the slight years later when, as a justice, she was asked to speak at an event celebrating the firm's 100th anniversary.