Sharpen your knife, go back in the past, and slice off any section. It all says something. Everything is significant, every mote of dust on the microfiche slide.
We flip to San Francisco. We look at a woman named Zona Sage. In 1970, Zona Sage is a 25 year-old law student at Hastings College of Law. She is newly divorced. She has red hair. She wears women’s liberation buttons, one of which is described at that time as “a circle with a staff and two cross-bars.”
But we must stop there. More than that would be going too far–for now.
Now, Paul Camera. Paul Camera is 34 years old and a professor at Hastings College of Law. Since Mr. Camera’s parents, Dino Camera and Teresa Daveggio, come from Italy, let’s assume that Mr. Camera name is pronounced not like the picture-taking device but with an emphasis on the second syllable.
What brings these two people into conflict are Professor Camera’s comments in Ms. Sage’s criminal law class about women. He says that women lawyers can get too emotional and vindictive when dealing with divorce cases.
Camera kicked Sage out of the class. Sage brought up a complaint before a faculty panel. Eventually, though Sage was not allowed back into the class–the panel stated that this would only lead to more conflict–she was given a 70-percent passing grade.
What’s interesting is that the writer in the San Francisco Examiner article cannot resist a few digs at Sage, referring to her as “plump,” a characterization that has no bearing on story. She’s also described as “militant,” though at the time, “militant” may not have had the ring of insult that it does today. The other irony is that the faculty panel was composed of five men. Another article in the same paper (San Francisco Examiner, April 29, 1970) refers to a networking group of women lawyers as “lady lawyers.”
