cery, the first woman to receive such an appointment. Litta Belle Hibben, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles in 1915, and Annette Abbot Adams, assistant United States district attorney in San Francisco in the same year, were the first women to arrive at these appointments. Helen P. McCormick, in 1917 assistant district attorney in New York, is the first woman in the more conservative East to become a public prosecutor. There is a reason for this advance. Could a woman really be accepted as an expert in the interpretation of laws, so long as she was permitted no share in making them? With the pressure of the woman movement at the gates of government resulting in enfranchisement, that handicap of civic inferiority is being removed.
Like this even in the United States farthest from the war zone, the rear guard of the women's lines in the legal profession are moving. At the front "over there," every country reports distinct progress. Even a deputation of Austrian women have been to their department of state to demand admission to the legal profession. In October, 1917, on a petition from the German Association of Women Lawyers, the Prussian Ministry of Justice made the first appointment of women in the Central Berlin law courts, three women having legally qualified there as law clerks. In Russia directly after the revolution one of the first reforms secured by the Minister of Justice was the admission of women lawyers to the privilege of conducting cases in court on equal terms with the men of the profession. The Italian
