In 1971, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Nancy Davis, then a 2L at Boalt Hall, was among a group of women who commandeered a small room on campus. In the room was a small couch the school was legally required to make available to “indisposed” women who needed a break. Davis and her cohorts, with the help of a sympathetic janitor, liberated the room and turned it into the office for the new Boalt Hall Women’s Association. They replaced the couch with a desk, and found a spare phone. Davis became the association’s first president.
“It was an interesting time to be a young woman in law school,” Davis says. As an undergraduate, she had witnessed anti-draft sit-ins at Stanford University. Then she went to Mississippi and worked with civil rights and voting advocate Fannie Lou Hamer. She arrived in Berkeley when famed feminist lawyer Herma Hill Kay was teaching family law. Davis’ class was the first in Boalt’s history to be more than 10 percent women. Under Kay’s influence, the women’s association was asking: “How do we improve the experience on campus for women?”
