By Rebecca Eisenberg, May 1993

Like many people at Harvard Law School, I came to law school as the inevitable culmination of a journey that began in grade school with student council, and continued with student government and local political activism ever since. In high school, I was elected both “Most Likely to be Elected President” and “Biggest Complainer” by my senior class. In other words, I was someone who liked to set the rules, and was vocal about them when I disagreed. Although fame and prestige certainly entered my mind, the true force behind me was a search to find justice.

My first encounters of feminism occurred when I learned about the sexual “double standard.” Immediately I rejected any societal rule that deprived girls of fun simply because they were girls. A strong believer in women’s liberation from an early age, I was perhaps known by some as promiscuous or gutsy, but was never, as far as I can imagine, ever, considered to be a “man-hater.” Perhaps that was because my lifetime goals always seemed to conform to the social role that society dictated for men rather than for women. So, I pursued my academics and extracurriculars with a compulsive drive to be the best — not just the best in my gender — and reached age 18 as high school valedictorian and one of my school’s first women to attend math-and-science-oriented Stanford University.

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