Hillary Clinton, LSAT, Sexism

'You Don't Need To Be Here': Hillary Clinton's First Experience With Sexism In The Law

She offers a very personal reflection on what it was like to take the LSAT as a woman in the 1960s.

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Hillary Clinton (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

Hillary Clinton (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.

— Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, during an interview with Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York, recounting her experience about what it was like to take the LSAT at Harvard in the 1960s. Clinton took the episode in stride, and enrolled at Yale Law School. She says the tense situation she went through as a young woman helped her learn how — and sometimes why — to control her emotions.

Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. Follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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