Rachel Weiner , The Washington Post; Colleagues want a 95-year-old judge to retire. She’s suing them instead.
"Newman’s refusal to quit on anyone else’s terms served her early in her career. Three decades after her mother marched for the right to vote, Newman decided she would be a doctor. No medical school accepted her. She went to graduate school at Yale for chemistry instead; no chemical firm would hire her except American Cyanamid. She was the only female research scientist there, and her bosses tried to force her into becoming a librarian until she threatened to walk out.
She would later receive her own patents for colorful, dirt-resistant synthetic fabric she helped invent. But after three years, Newman took her savings and bought a ticket on a boat to Paris, where she supported herself by mixing drinks on the Île Saint-Louis.
Six months later, “totally destitute,” Newman came back to the United States and found “a job that I knew no respectable scientist would take, and that was writing patent applications,” she told female law students at New York University in 2013. Soon, she was a patent lawyer. The next time she went to Paris, it was as a science policy specialist for the United Nations, again the only woman in her professional association. On her office desk sits a mug from a bar she could not enter during her time at NYU Law — it reads “Good ale, raw onions, and no ladies.”"
