Contradictions abound in Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women.” The 1868 loosely autobiographical novel, often given the descriptive “much loved,” focuses on four upper-middle class sisters coming of age in New England just before, during and just after the American Civil War. Not themselves considered wealthy, they fret over dresses, dances, male friendships, and when each will marry and whom. Counter to this stereotypical narrative, though, run contrary themes of a search for female independence and nontraditional gender roles. In particular, Jo (modeled after the author) publishes mystery and adventure stories (under a male nom de plume), rejects a highly eligible suitor and yearns to explore a wider philosophical and geographical world. Alcott, of course, was an ardent feminist, abolitionist, and suffragette, who out of principle never married. The 1994 movie adaptation of the novel has one character say that Jo should have been a lawyer. She was not.

More than 150 years later, the 2019 ABA report on why senior women “leave the law,” “Walking Out the Door,” comes down to an unsettling answer: The practice of law in large firms involving “big” cases and transactions remains a male-dominated profession. Senior women disproportionately leave Big Law, it turns out, not because they are not excellent lawyers or because they dislike the law, but because women confront societal, biological and peer pressures that men do not. Women reported enduring professional, financial and personal insults and indignities solely “because of their gender.” “Death by a thousand cuts” is an oft-repeated characterization.