Professor Marjorie L. Girth

“My life has been a series of opportunities,” said Professor Girth.

She grew up with a brother on a farm in central New Jersey. Her parents had gone to college, and they assumed their children would, too. After she graduated from high school, her Latin teacher suggested she attend Mount Holyoke, in Massachusetts, and she decided to go.

Poorly prepared for Mount Holyoke, she succeeded with help from the faculty. Active on campus, she majored in international politics. During a summer stint at the State Department, a professor strongly suggested that she go to Harvard Law School. “This had never entered my mind,” she said. “It was a far step from a farm in central New Jersey.” With no money, no job, and her parents unable to help, she initially said no. But the professor insisted that without an advanced law degree, her options would be limited.

Girth figured it out. She took jobs as a governess and housemother for her room and board. Harvard Law had begun accepting women 10 years before, and she knew women had succeeded there. In her section there were only four women among 125 law students, and 12 women out of 500 in her 1962 graduating class. While several teachers and students had negative attitudes toward women taking the places of men, many male classmates were nice because they did not believe female classmates would be competitors for jobs. Dean Griswold worried that women would get married and “waste” the Harvard opportunity. Girth and Griswold eventually became good friends over time.

During her 2L summer and for three years following graduation in 1962, she lived on the family farm while working for a Trenton, N.J., boutique, Jewish law firm practicing bankruptcy law. She then went to work on a five-year research project for the Brookings Institution, a foundation in Washington, D.C., that was researching the operation of bankruptcy courts nationwide. It was her dream destination.

At Brookings, she met Vern Countryman, a bankruptcy professor at Harvard Law and close friend of UB law school’s Professor Howard Mann, chair of its personnel committee. UB Law Professor Hawkland, who taught commercial law, was returning to the University of Illinois. Countryman and Mann thought Girth should go to Buffalo and teach bankruptcy and commercial law. None of the Harvard women graduates had ever considered teaching as a career, and there were no women law teachers at the time.

Girth began working in Buffalo in December 1971. The law school was poised to grow and would need additional faculty. She believed it was her responsibility to help recruit the next full-time female professor to the law school.