(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the friends of Minnesota Experience.

(pleasant music) - [Rosalie] Chief Justice Sharon, Governor Perpich, friends, I am awed and honored to assume the office of associate justice of the Supreme Court of Minnesota.

- [Narrator] In 1977, Rosalie Wahl became the first woman to be appointed to the Minnesota Supreme Court.

- I guess I wasn't thinking of any great career in law.

It just seemed like was a tool.

And it was one way to get inside of those doors, (laughs) the key to those doors outside of which I'd spent a lot of time sitting.

- The only way to change the culture would be to begin to include everyone.

- The courts became very, very important on a lot of the issues that were identified as women's issues.

- Now we take it as common sense to have that gender balance, but it was considered so radical in those days.

- Bob Mattson, who had been attorney general, had stood in front of his desk and said, "If you appoint a woman, I will run against her."

- The person to run against is the person who hasn't yet run statewide.

And that happens to be me and I happen to be a woman, and they're gonna have a good race.

- Her influence to make changes and to make changes so that would open the doors for all, that is crucial for people to understand.

(grass rustles) (birds chirp) - [Narrator] A young girl stands at a gate in 1932.

She'll face tragedy and adversity in her life, but she'll grow up to fight injustice wherever she encounters it to open doors of opportunity for generations of women who will come after her.

- [Rosalie] The bell of justice may be here in this high court, but the rope which rings it, like the grapevine rope which rang the bell of Atri, is among you, and it must be long enough for even a child to reach.

My thanks to you, Governor Perpich, for your trust in me, your trust that I can hear that bell when it rings.

Thank you.

(pleasant music) - [Narrator] Rosalie Wahl was born in Kansas in 1924.

Her small rural community was far removed from the elite world of the law.

At the time of her birth, a professional career was an unlikely, if not impossible, goal for most women, and it would remain so for decades to come.

(muffled chatter) (dishes clink) - When my husband and I graduated from law school, we were invited to a dinner at the athletic club.

I was dressed up like a horse going to the county fair, the way I was dressed, I remember.

And we swept in the front door of the athletic club, and I sat down in the lobby to await the arrival of our host for the evening.

And the woman at the desk came over and told me that women were not permitted to come in the front door, nor were you permitted to sit in the lobby.

And I was so humiliated that I never told anybody that story for at least 15 years because I thought I had done something so wrong.

It wasn't that this discriminatory policy was awful.

It was that I didn't know the rules.

- [Narrator] For women, there were many such barriers set up, even by the nation's high courts.

- [Man] "The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.

This is the law of the creator."

- [Man] "The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life."

- [Man] "Legislation may exclude women from certain employments."

- [Man] "Women not admitted to the bar of this court."

- [Announcer] Robert Young and Jane Wyatt.

- [Narrator] In 1955, Americans watched an episode of the popular series "Father Knows Best."

The episode was called "Betty, Girl Engineer."

(soaring instrumental music) - I am going to be an engineer.

(audience laughs) (light humorous music) I have found my niche.

My life now has direction.

There's a great demand for engineers today.

I went to all the lectures.

I took all the tests.

I showed a strong aptitude for it.

- But you're a girl!

- A girl.

- I'm surprised they'd take a girl.

- But don't they know you're a girl?

- I'm a girl.

(soft pleasant music) (audience laughs) - You're a girl, and a girl has the obligation of being one.

Woman's place is in the home, not knocking around with a trans and a couple of chainmen.

The plan of life was worked out long ago.

The male has his job, and the female has hers.

Don't confuse 'em.

(slow pleasant music) - What do you want?

- By the end of the show, Betty has given up her dream of being an engineer and receives a box of candy as her reward.

- Want some candy, father?

(audience laughs and applauds) (light lilting orchestral music) - [Narrator] Even colleges and universities, the leaders in progressive thinking, automatically erected barriers to women in the professions.

- We hope to show you that engineering is a whale of a broad profession and has in it room for more widely differing people than you may realize.

Here's their class.

Our engineers come out of classrooms just like yours all over the country.

Some girls take engineering, but it's not a common thing, so let's eliminate the girls.

- [Narrator] Like engineering, the field of law was considered a male only profession.

There were almost no women in higher judicial office in the country.

Florence Allen was on the federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, and for a brief time in the late 1940s, President Truman considered appointing her to the Supreme Court.

- President Truman apparently contacted the men on the Supreme Court who said that they wouldn't be able to be comfortable in conference with women.

The men couldn't unbutton their shirts and kick off their shoes or something like that if Florence Allen was in the room.

- [John] Now, on the other side, I asked for.

- [Narrator] In 1971, the Nixon White House, for political reasons, once again briefly considered appointing a woman to the United States Supreme Court.

- [John] We've got chief justice problems.

- [Narrator] These conversations between President Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, and Nixon's top advisor, John Ehrlichman, were recorded in the Oval Office during October of 1971.

- [John] On Wednesday, he wrote me a letter that I mentioned the other day, pointed out that there was no qualified woman to be on the bench.

But yesterday, he insisted on coming over to the Justice Department to see me.

He came over, and he had a handwritten letter that he read to me, and it was, in effect, a letter of resignation.

- [Richard] This is because of a woman.

Is that his point?

- [John] Basically, I believe it is.

It's gonna be a very grace shock to him and whoever- - [Richard] It's a shock to me, for Christ's sakes.

I don't even think women should be educated.

- [John] For the first time, women don't wanna be women.

The wanna belong to the mix.

- That's true.

- This is.

They don't wanna be isolated.

- Yeah.

Too much education.

Who the hell ever thought of education for women anyway?

- [John] I don't know.

It should've been abolished - Terrible idea.

- years ago.

- [Richard] I'm not for it.

I don't think women should ever be allowed to vote even.

- [John] The worst experiences I've ever had were trying cases before women judges.

- Is that right?

- Oh, yeah.

- [Richard] How'd they do?

- [John] Just terrible.

Just terrible.

(slow melancholy string music) - You just didn't know that you could really even be a lawyer, and the thought, when I was going through school, that you could be a judge, that was just unheard of.

- [Esther] Nobody, then, would've imagined that a woman would be on the Supreme Court before we died.

- Let it be said that women, the door was closed in our society.

- [Narrator] As late as the 1970s, women were still prevented from following their own destinies, but the time had come to break down the barriers.

(gentle pleasant music) (birds chirp) - [Woman] "Black-oaked horizons, skies above, binding close this land I love.

Birch Creek, within heart I lie.

As long as you live, so shall I."

Sara Rosalie Erwin.

(birds chirp) (water gently laps) - [Narrator] Her mother Gertrude was the oldest of six children born to Harry and Effie Patterson.

Gertrude married Claude Irwin, and they settled in a place called Gordon, just south of Wichita, Kansas.

Rosalie was born there in 1924, the third daughter after Mary and Jeanette.

They named her Sara Rosalie but called her Rosalie.

Rosalie's little brother, Billy, was born 18 months later.

Her mother died when Rosalie was three years old.

- I remember standing at her knees.

I don't remember her face, and she was getting me all clean and dry and putting on a clean little dress.

And I just remember her as a presence, which made everything feel fine.

- [Narrator] Rosalie's father was not able to care for all four children.

He sent Rosalie and Billy to live with Gertrude's parents.

Harry and Effie Patterson worked a 160-acre farm in Birch Creek, a small rural community in Chautauqua County, Kansas.

Rosalie later wrote about the land and the farm, "There was rolling pasture land, farm land on the river bottom, meadow land and timber.

There was a great barn for the hay and oats and wheat and corn and all the horse stalls.

It was a thriving, throbbing, organic enterprise."

In the early days of their marriage, Rosalie's grandma Effie worked in the fields.

Later, she spent most of her time running the large and busy household.

Rosalie's grandfather was, she wrote, "a good farmer.

No one in the countryside could build a better fence or make a better haystack or tell a better joke or sing a better song."

- It was a busy farm, and Grandma had cooked for hired hands and all that, and here we were, all of us little ones and besides.

And Grandpa, as I remember, would take us with him when he could.

Like if he was building fence, he'd take me and Billy in the wagon and we'd go along.

(wagon rattles) He taught me things.

I always figured I'd know all the names of all the trees in the forest if he'd just lived longer.

We'd ride in the big wagon behind the horses, the wagon with sides that you hauled things in, and he'd let me sit up there between his knees, and I had the reins.

I held the reins to the team of horses.

He had his hands around mine, but I held the reins.

(hooves clop) (wagon rattles) (birds caw) Birch Creek came through.

It never was right big except on flood time.

And some of the land was down across the road, across the creek.

And we had to go down, and the woods were there, the timber.

And it was in May of 1932.

We had the horse and wagon, and he was going down to the timber.

I think we had to go around the fence by the hill pasture and across the railroad track and down through the creek at the ford.

And I was big enough to hop out of the wagon and open the gate, and Grandpa drove through, and then I shut the gate and went across on the other side, opened the gate to wait for them.

(wind blows) They drove across the track, and then I heard train, and I heard my grandpa say, "Whoa, whoa," and so I thought things were all right.

But then the horses went rushing past me, and the train had come and hit the wagon and killed them both.

(train roars and rattles) - [Narrator] The train had been speeding to catch up on a late schedule, and the engineer failed to blow his whistle as required when he was approaching the crossing.

The family believed they had a claim against the railroad.

- I remember Aunt Sara and Aunt Gladys and Uncle Bill and Uncle Ellis all driving over to Coffeyville to talk to a lawyer, and I went along cause I didn't have anywhere else to be.

And the guy wouldn't touch it if it didn't get $100.

Well, it might as well have been a million.

Who had $100 in 1932?

(light melancholy music) - [Narrator] 1932, the height of the depression.

There were no pensions, no social security, no survivor's benefits.

Effie Patterson sold the farm equipment and livestock at auction for next to nothing.

Rosalie and her grandmother moved to the old 40-acre family homestead over the hill.

Rosalie spent the rest of her growing up years in the old stone house with her grandma.

- The old stone house was like half a mile from the school, and the school was on the corner, and there weren't very many kids.

(muffled chatter) See, I really liked the one room school house because you got to sit and listen to all the other classes ahead of you, and you got to hear 'em recite, and you heard all this stuff.

So, your education was was broadened quite a bit, I think.

In the front of the school room was this little platform, and you had curtains, and one of my earliest recollections was being pushed out between the curtains (laughs) to say my little poem or verse.

I must've always liked poetry, but we did learn.

We did learn poetry.

I was thinking, "Swallow them all, hook, line, and sinker."

- [Narrator] Her grandmother and her Aunt Sara became Rosalie's strong female role models as she grew up.

Sara Patterson had never married.

She became a nurse and educator and supported Rosalie and Effie Patterson during the depression.

Rosalie would later write of this time in her life, "In all those years, I never knew how poor we were.

I knew the richness, the warm, close community with our little rural school at the center, the aunts and uncles and cousins living in farms nearby."

- After we moved back to the old stone house, we had a cow, and I'd milk the cow so Grandma had milk.

I did the garden, mainly.

You raised a lot of things you ate in the winter time.

Lucky people were the people with land, and that's what we had.

If you had land, you never starved 'cause you grew a garden and you raised your food.

(slow poignant instrumental music) - August 27, 1938, Rosalie turns 14, the end of her childhood.

She'd graduated from the Birch Creek school house.

Now she would attend the high school in Caney, Kansas, a town four miles away.

But the family didn't have a car, and it was too far to walk, so Rosalie stayed with relatives in town during the week.

- The kids who were in town, wasn't a very big town, but they'd all grown up together, and they'd gone to school together, and here were you, had grown up in the country, and now you came along.

And you weren't a part of their social group, which was not very easy.

- [Narrator] She wasn't an outsider for long.

The 1942 yearbook tells it all.

President of the theater group, senior class treasurer, writer for the school newspaper and the school yearbook, baton twirler, leader in 4H.

A the end of her senior year, she was named a senior class star.

She graduated in 1942 with a dream.

- I wanted to be a journalist, and the only place you could be a journalist was to go to the University of Kansas because they had a school of journalism.

I always knew I'd have to leave Birch Creek.

There wasn't any future there.

All the children left.

- [Narrator] Many years later, Rosalie wrote about the lessons she'd learned from Birch Creek.

- [Woman] "Here among its rolling pasture lands, fertile fields, and tree-traced creeks lives a people who might've sprung from the sod itself.

So much are they a part of it.

These people are my people, and Birch Creek is my home.

I say it with pride, for they have shown me the way of friend unto friend, the golden rule in animation.

There are no dividing lines in Birch Creek.

Suffering and rejoicing together through the seasons bring a mutual understanding and sympathy which cares not for class, creed, color, or politics.

(bugs chitter) (soft pleasant music) - [Narrator] Summer 1942, one of the last summers Rosalie would live in Birch Creek.

It's a very special summer.

While she was in high school, Rosalie had met a young man named Eldon Peck.

- It was pretty neat.

They came to Caney to church 'cause they lived down on Cotton Creek.

We became very serious.

Eldon said his mother said she thought the only reason they moved over there was was so he and I couldn't get acquainted, which might've been.

Things happen in a strange way.

So I went off to the university, and I met so many people.

I made so many friends.

Here I lived in the country where the summers are long, and there aren't any people your age.

It was pretty intoxicating to get there and see what the world is all about.

- [Narrator] Nearly every weekend, Eldon hitchhiked the 250 miles to visit Rosalie.

(explosions boom) (plane engines roar) But Pearl Harbor had been bombed that previous December in 1941, and the country was at war.

- [Rosalie] So my first year at the university, that wasn't just a cloud.

It was like every day as the year went on, you'd go to class and more of your classmates would be gone.

The men were leaving to be in the units.

- [Narrator] In January of 1943, Eldon joined the Army Air Corps following the lead of his older brother.

Before he left for training in South Carolina, Eldon asked Rosalie to marry him, and she accepted.

They became engaged.

She sent him her glamor photo.

He sent Rosalie a photo of himself in his flight uniform.

At the end of the school year, Rosalie left the university and returned to Birch Creek.

She would teach in the little schoolhouse that next fall.

- When the war was on, going to college seemed irrelevant.

I just felt like I oughta be doing something more.

- [Narrator] Rosalie once again enjoyed the coming of fall to Birch Creek, all the time writing letters to Eldon and missing him.

Then one day in November, Rosalie's sister, Mary, arrived at the old stone house, carrying an urgent message.

Eldon had been seriously injured in an airplane training crash in South Carolina.

Rosalie took the long train ride to see him.

- Well, I still remember that train going from Memphis and then down south.

Remember the people, vignettes of people going through.

It was hard not knowing what I'd find when I got there, and I can still remember standing in this great open place with pine trees all around and, all of a sudden, just feeling the life draining out of me, and I think that's when he died.

(slow somber music) (wind blows) The rest of the winter, it was very lonely winter.

It was dark, and there wasn't anyone around to talk to, and I thought a lot about what I do.

There's one part of me that mystical and poetic and so forth and the other part that's active, socially active and wants to involved in politics.

It just has all my life pulled me one way or the other.

I finally decided whatever I did had to be in the world.

I was going back to the university, and I decided that I would go into sociology and learn about doing something that made the world better and helped people.

(soft gentle banjo music) - [Narrator] Fall of 1944, the height of World War II.

Back at the University of Kansas, most of the men were in the military, and women were taking over roles on campus that formerly were held by male students.

- In a way, it was like going to a women's college where there were all kinds of opportunities for leadership.

We ran the campus.

We elected the student council (laughs) president, and we were editors of the yearbook, and all of the major positions on the campus that had been always held by men, and women had an opportunity to do that, and I was right out there.

- [Narrator] Rosalie became president of the local chapter of the YWCA.

At the time, housing at the University of Kansas was segregated, and there was a lack of sufficient housing for the black students.

Rosalie and the other girls at the YWCA decided to take action.

- The Y owned the house, Henley House, right on the edge of the campus, and we had meetings there and everything in the downstairs, but we rented the upstairs rooms to graduate students.

It wasn't, I suppose, until I started living in Henley house that I realized what Lawrence was like, or this was the country in 1945 and 1946.

We thought that we should do something that was more in keeping with our principles and carry 'em into action.

We established an interracial living cooperative, and there were 10 of us.

Five of us were black and five of us were white.

We decided none of us would do what any of us couldn't do, and that was when I decided if I were black, I think it would've had a revolution.

- [Narrator] The girls held sit ins at the movie theater, in restaurants, and at the campus swimming pool.

- Within about two years after we started Henley, the university housing became non segregated.

It was open.

So it made a difference.

- [Narrator] August 1945, World War II ends.

Men returned from the war and flood the University of Kansas campus in the spring of 1946.

One of them is Ross Wahl.

Ross and Rosalie began dating and fell in love.

That same spring, Rosalie graduated from the university.

The Kansas yearbook selected her to be one of their seniors with a past.

She was elected to the Mortar Board Society for outstanding senior women.

In August of 1946, Rosalie and Ross were married.

They settled in a little shanty on the banks of the Carr river in Lawrence.

Their first son, Christopher, was born there in 1947.

A year later, looking for a job and new opportunity, the Wahl family moved to Minnesota.

(gentle bright music) (birds chirp) - [Woman] "That one who went through Thistles Pass needs shoes, else barefoot, stay on grass.

The shoes of the law."

Rosalie Wahl.

- [Narrator] A few years after they arrived in Minnesota, Rosalie and Ross moved to a small farm in Lake Elmo where the landscape resembled that of Rosalie's own Birch Creek.

By this time, the Wahl family had grown.

Rosalie kept a large garden and also for a time kept a milking cow in the barn.

For the children, there were picnics, potlucks, hay rides, and all sorts of outside activities.

As her children grew older, Rosalie once again became socially and politically active.

Since childhood, Rosalie had loved to read.

Bookshelves wallpapered every room in her Lake Elmo home.

Her passion propelled her into a battle for a county library system.

- It was just at that time that the government had given the money for regional libraries and so forth, so it was a good time to be trying to start something like that.

And we got this plan all made that was gonna give us the county library, and we went up to the county commissioners and made this big presentation.

- [Narrator] But in a closed door meeting after the public hearing, local businessmen persuaded the county commissioners not to approve the plan.

- You try to get the county board or the county commissioners or the legislators to do something they should do anyway to make the communities better, and then you wait, and they decide.

I went to law school after that.

I was tired of sitting outside of doors and then having the people on the inside, mainly men, be able to do this kind of thing.

I guess I wasn't thinking of any great career in law.

I wasn't thinking of exactly what I'd do.

It just seemed like law was a tool.

It was a tool that you could use to do a lot of things that needed doing, and it was one way to get inside of those doors, (laughs) the key to those doors outside of which I'd spent a lot of time sitting.

- [Narrator] In 1962 at the age of 38, Rosalie enrolled at William Mitchell College of Law.

Taking care of her family while going to law school was no easy task, but Rosalie refused to give up, even when she gave birth to her fifth child, Jenny, during her second year in law school.

She graduated in 1967 and went to work as a public defender handling criminal appeals in the Minnesota Supreme Court.

- Well, one of the things that I just got part of my bone from constitutional law and so forth was that you shouldn't take anybody's life, liberty, or property without due process of the law.

And so it was to the best possible presentation in regards to their case with the facts you had and argue as hard as you could.

- [Narrator] Rosalie's daughter, Sara, remembers her mother's work as a public defender.

- She had so many arguments in front of the Supreme Court, and it was always an uphill battle representing a criminal defendant who'd been convicted by a jury.

And there was one case I remember in particular where she argued, and she gets so intense, just really into it, and she was always very, very, very prepared.

And I remember the word got back to the public defender's office before she did after the argument, and her comment had been, "You mean to tell me that only the innocent get a fair trial?"

- People trusted her enormously.

They trusted her with the things that were threatening their lives.

She really lived with those cases.

She cared deeply about those people.

- I really liked the members of the court.

It was always scary.

I'd argue there and I'd watch 'em go off afterwards and think, "It would really be interesting to follow them in there and see what they do with this case, how they handle it."

(leaves rustle in wind) (birds chirp) - [Narrator] During these years, Rosalie was confronting painful challenges in her family.

During World War II, Ross Wahl had fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

He was one of the only two survivors from his company.

16 years later in the early 1960s, Ross's post-traumatic stress symptoms led to alcoholism.

At the same time, the couple's oldest son, Christopher, began exhibiting erratic behavior.

He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The strains on their 25-year marriage were too great, and in 1972, Rosalie and Ross were divorced.

(muffled chatter) In 1973, William Mitchell Law School hired Rosalie to teach one of the first clinical trial practice courses in the country.

Sara Wahl attended William Mitchell while Rosalie taught there.

- She was a wonderful teacher.

She just was just very down to earth.

And she actually was there doing things with people.

She would go down to the, they call it the pit in Ramsey County when they did the clinics, and they represent indigents coming in on misdemeanors.

- Her students at William Mitchell adored her because they saw her as really living the committed life of being a lawyer but having high ideals and using the law to practice those ideals.

(slow dramatic string music) - [Narrator] It was now the 1970s.

- The woman's movement, it was in a resurgence, and the women were becoming politically active all across the board.

- I was a young woman in the 70s, and I saw it really as quite an exciting time.

There was so much energy, and we were really lucky in Minnesota, the coming together of women from all over the state from both parties with a lot of brains and a lot of intelligence.

- [Narrator] Women in both parties, Democratic and Republican, began to question the amount of power women had in their parties.

- Women were called on in election time to make the coffee, have teas or coffees for candidates, do the door knocking, drop the literature, do all the work.

But then when it came time to be the decision makers or party leaders or be inside the smoke filled rooms, the women were left out.

- [Narrator] In the late 1960s and early 70s, Koryne Horbal was the state chairwoman of the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party, the DFL.

- I was kept out of all meetings.

All the men would come in and decide who are the candidates and how things were going to be done in the party.

Women had no power in the state of Minnesota in the political parties, and it was time to change that.

- [Narrator] Horbal and other women in the party conducted a study to determine how much power women had in the DFL.

They called their report "Present but Powerless?"

- It was a waking up call to all the women in the DFL.

- [Narrator] The women established the DFL Feminist Caucus in order to promote women's issues in the party.

- Before that, I was always called the Lovely Enable Koryne Horbal at all the meetings and big dinners and so on.

But after I did that study, they didn't (laughs) call me the Lovely Enable any longer because I became a power that they had to deal with.

- [Narrator] Carol Connolly was a founder of the local chapter of the women's political caucus.

- The only way to change the culture would be to begin to include everyone, and we had all worked very hard to include people of color, and we realized that we had done nothing much to include women.

- So there were clear goals of what women around the country, women around the state wanted to achieve on a variety of issues, whether it be educational opportunities, pay equity, sports for girls, reproductive rights, or women into the legislature or women into the judiciary.

- [Koryne] So the courts became very, very important on a lot of the issues that were identified as women's issues.

- We made it our mission to get as many women as we could appointed to the judiciary, and that was like pie in the sky at the time that there would ever be a woman appointed to the Supreme Court.

- I owe so much to the women who knew that they had to organize and be smart and put some power behind putting a woman on the Supreme Court.

Now we take it as common sense to have that kind of gender balance, but it was considered so radical in those days.

- I felt we had to be as radical as we knew how to be in order to accomplish this.

(muffled chatter) (light upbeat music) - [Narrator] In the early 1970s, Rosalie and other women lawyers founded Minnesota Women Lawyers.

One of their first actions was to send out a questionnaire asking women lawyers in the state whether they wanted to be considered for judicial appointments.

- We thought in all our innocence that the reason there weren't more women judges, we just thought the governor didn't know about us and that all we had to do was just send him a list.

- [Narrator] When her copy of the questionnaire from the women lawyers arrived, Rosalie waited a year before sending it in.

- Because I really didn't know how to answer that question.

But would I be willing to be a judge?

There comes a point when, if you're urging the appointment of women, you just have to put up or shut up.

And so then I decided, "Yeah."

I said, "Yes, I'm gonna be."

- As I entered class that day, my father was unemployed, and I spoke no English.

And yet today, I have taken the oath of office as the 34th governor of Minnesota.

- [Narrator] The year was 1977.

Rudy Perpich has just become the new democratic governor of Minnesota.

- Governor Perpich was the first governor who attended a DFL Feminist Caucus meeting, and Koryne Horbal said, "Will you promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court?"

And he said, "Yes," and there happened to be a reporter there.

And so when the vacancy occurred, she immediately wrote a story saying, "Governor Perpich, of course, has already made a promise that he will appoint a woman to that position."

- Rudy was always an outsider, and I think that that's why he had that understanding of women, that they were outsiders, too.

He liked women.

He was absolutely crazy about Lola, and she influenced him a lot.

- [Narrator] Pamela Alexander was attending law school when Perpich became governor.

- I think he was really committed to making the court look like the population, and he was very committed to that, but he was also committed to the fact that he knew that women could do stuff.

After all, he was married to Lola.

(laughs) So he knew that the women could do this job.

- You can do more for people in holding office than you can in any other profession.

- I think he was truly committed to the excitement about advancing women's issues, women's opportunities that were around in the 70s.

- So he'd made this promise to have a woman, but which woman?

You know there's going to be one, but you don't know who it's going to be, and so there's this long period where people speculate about the different candidates.

- At the beginning, no one could really think of anybody.

People didn't know who the women lawyers were or what they'd been doing.

And I think at the outset, there were about 18 names, and then they gradually were sifted down till there were seven and there were five, and it was kept appearing in the paper from day to day.

- [Narrator] Included in the list of six finalists was 52-year-old Rosalie Wahl.

- The focus of the appointment process was the big women's meeting in St.

Cloud.

This was the year that the Congress appropriated money for every state in the union to have a women's meeting, and women from all over the state were to come together and to discuss all the issues and to come up with their recommendations and their agenda of what needed to be done with regard to women's issues and so forth.

- [Narrator] The day before she left for the women's meeting, Rosalie was asked to meet with Governor Perpich.

- And so I went.

Then I was shown into his office.

He was there by himself.

I'd never met the governor.

(laughs) Talk about political appointments.

This wasn't one.

We had a very little conversation there.

He asked me a couple of questions, and then he led me next door to a little conference room he had, and we went in there, and there was his inner advisors, and I don't know if it's his kitchen cabinet or what.

And all I remember I was pretty excited, but I wasn't worried about any.

I wasn't even thinking.

Things just carry through, and we just had a nice conversation, and then I said goodbye and left.

- [Narrator] The next day, Rosalie and her daughter, Sara, drove up to St.

Cloud.

When they entered their motel room, the phone was ringing.

- And it was Ray Bohn.

He said, "Oh, just wondering where you were.

Well, the governor still hasn't made up his mind."

About that time, I was gonna say to tell the governor he could take it, and no, no, I don't wanna say that.

- [Narrator] The call came a few minutes later.

Rosalie and Sara headed to the auditorium, which was packed with women.

- [Joan] We've heard a lot of comments so far in this meeting about women striving for equality.

And the appointments that Governor Perpich is making tonight are going to help to make that a reality.

Associate Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, the first woman to be appointed a member of the Minnesota Supreme Court, Rosalie Wahl.

(crowd cheers and applauds) - [Rosalie] I'm honored and very humbled to have been chosen to serve on the Supreme Court of the state of Minnesota.

Every person, poor or rich, black or red or brown or white, male or female, has a right to equal justice under law.

I endeavor with other members of the court to make this dream a reality.

A good many years ago when my then four children were in school and I had gone with some trepidation to law school to prepare myself to share the economic burden of supporting those children, a poem came to me, which expressed my feeling at that time of what it meant to be a woman.

"Foot in nest, wing in sky, bound by each, hover I."

Now I know it is not necessary to hover.

Now I know it is possible to soar.

Now I know it is possible to extend the nest, to include our children wherever they are and nourish there the values which were sprouted by the hearth.

A sense that every individual in the human family is a unique and precious being, a sense of justice and fair play and a sense of compassion where justice ends or fails.

I pledge to you, and I hope you pledge to me that wherever we are, we will never cease to work for those goals.

Thank you.

(crowd cheers and applauds) - The whole house stood right up, and that was the beginning of Rosalie the beloved right there.

- I've been in a lot of fun events where the women's community has felt a major hurdle has been crossed.

I think that was one of the big, really big ones.

That was a huge, huge day for the Minnesota women's community.

(soft pleasant music) (muffled chatter) - Rudy did tell me before he appointed Rosalie that Bob Mattson, who'd been attorney general, had stood in front of his desk and said, "If you appoint a woman, I will run against her."

- When she was appointed, there was, as I remember, a silence, and it took some of the people in the community about six months to decide how they were gonna handle this.

And, of course, a number of the men stepped forth, and we're sure the public was not gonna allow her to stay in her position.

- [Esther] He was really concerned about the reelection because he knew that that would happen.

He didn't know that there was going to be this swarm of men run against her.

- She had three men run against her, two of them sitting judges, and one was Robert Mattson.

At that time, it was virtually unheard of in the legal profession for a lawyer to run against the sitting judge.

It just wasn't done.

You would be ostracized if you did.

- Whenever women are first in power and so on, they feel that this is the time to go after her because she's vulnerable.

It wasn't so much about her decisions or anything else, but I think they just saw an opportunity.

- I don't feel particularly vulnerable.

I just think that from a political point of view, anybody who that, wants a seat on the Supreme Court, the person to run against is the person who hasn't yet run statewide, and that happens to be me, and I happen to be a woman, and they're gonna have a good race.

- [Narrator] Her opponents accused Rosalie of lacking sufficient experience to be on the court.

- She'd actually been arguing before the Minnesota Supreme Court much more.

She had much more experience as a litigator than her challengers did.

It was a mean and it was a dirty race.

She had voted against a conviction of a rapist believing that the evidence was insufficient or the police had had misconduct or whatever, and so immediately, Mattson ran an ad saying, "Wahl lets rapists loose."

(muffled chatter) (tense string music) - [Narrator] The stakes in the election were high.

- Women were very crucial in this campaign because the women in the state knew that if I couldn't be elected, no governor would appoint a woman because it would just be throwing an appointment away.

- [Sally] What was at stake was really the future of women in the Minnesota judiciary.

- Nobody could've done as good a job in that reelection campaign.

She worked so hard.

- Rosalie was a great candidate.

She could step into any room.

She would just give a great, fabulous speech.

People would love her.

I thought, "We are so lucky.

She is the perfect person," and she was and is.

(muffled chatter) - [Narrator] In the primary, Rosalie defeated two opponents, and in November, she soundly defeated Robert Mattson.

On election night, Rosalie and her singing group celebrated by singing a Methodist hymn, "He Who Would Valiant Be."

They changed the he two she.

(upbeat pleasant string music) - Chief justice Sharon, Governor Perpich, friends, I am awed and honored to assume the office and the responsibilities of the office of associate justice of the Supreme Court of Minnesota.

It was just like going into a wide place.

Here was all this elbow room and here was a job I'd always wanted and didn't know existed.

I remember one of the funny things about being a woman, when I came here, I'd been working with criminal defendants.

And you go down there, and in order to be understood, a lot of times, you use rough language, and so I started cleaning my language up.

When I came up to the court, I said, "Gosh, they really are polite around here, and they really talk so nicely."

And a year or so later, Fallon Kelly was saying to Walter, he said, "Boy, we really cleaned up our language when she came."

(Rosalie and interviewer laugh) So they must've made a little preparation, and they may have been waiting to see what would happen, but they were very helpful and very supportive.

- [Narrator] Robert Sharon was chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court when Rosalie Wahl was appointed.

- I thought it was a good thing to have a woman on the court to let us know how issues look from a woman's perspective, and she was able to do that to good effect.

- [Narrator] Douglas Amdahl joined the Supreme Court in 1980, subsequently becoming its chief justice.

- Made a very good judge, and it broke the all male, which should be broken.

It should be many women as there are men.

- One thing about being a woman on this court and even being the only woman was that my mere presence reminded all my colleagues of what they knew and needed to remember, and it did.

Just presence is helpful.

And growing up male and growing up female in this society are two different things.

Even the same experience may be experienced very differently depending on who you are, and that can help the court know what affect a decision is gonna have.

(soft pleasant music) (muffled chatter) The work of this court cannot rise above the level of the practice of law throughout the state.

High is that level is, we know that it can be higher, and we will make it so.

- [Narrator] But Justice Wahl's vision of equal justice was being threatened by the gender biases of the judicial system.

Even a justice on the Supreme Court was not exempt from sexist attitudes, as Justice Amdahl recalls.

- I never heard anybody say during argument, but I heard it plenty away from argument.

"What's a woman doing on the court?

"Why is she there," so forth.

And I told 'em, "She is there because she is a damn good lawyer."

- [Narrator] The bias against women led to many courtroom incidents during the 1970s.

In 1978, Pamela Alexander, a legal aid attorney, was in court representing a client accused of prostitution.

Alexander asked the judge to schedule a hearing on behalf of her client.

- He was known as a jokester, so he said to me, "Oh my goodness, look at her."

And he said, "Just think, if you were in her business what money you could make."

And then he said, "And then you could have judges like me be your friends."

And I was like, "Excuse me?

(laughs) What did you say?"

- I remember one of the leading partners, and I remember who it was, came up to me, and I was sitting in the courtroom.

I was the person who swore in the witnesses and did the legal research.

And I remember him leaning over to me, and I thought it was something about the case that he had going on.

He said, "I would love to be the father of your child."

- [Narrator] Harriet Lansing formed an all female law firm in the early 1970s and was one of the early women lawyers to appear in court on a regular basis.

- What I encountered was the slings and arrows of everyday indignities, problems that you would encounter with judges, with other attorneys, and they take their toll.

There's no question about it.

- [Narrator] Justice Walsh pushed for the creation of a task force to study gender fairness in the courts.

- [Rosalie] It was the judiciary examining itself.

It was like an internal examination of to see what we were doing, to see if there were things we were doing or not doing that made justice come out skewed, depending on what your gender was.

- [Narrator] Federal judge Michael Davis was a state court judge at the time the Gender Fairness Report was issued.

- It was a firestorm that shook the foundations of the judiciary.

- Well, a two-year study commissioned by the Minnesota Supreme Court has uncovered some disturbing findings for women in the state.

- [Female Reporter] Tonight, the court released the result of a two year study it commissioned.

The report that the issue of equal credibility before the law was raved consistently at public hearings.

Attorneys and judges had certain courtroom and chambers incidents suggest women face credibility issues men do not.

- I just talked with the Minnesota Supreme Court associate justice Rosalie Wahl.

She headed that taskforce that conducted a two year study.

She says, "Educating our lawyers and judges is the start as well as looking to the legislature to change some laws."

- No, we're going to do something think about it.

In Minnesota, we are problem solvers.

You don't just talk about things in an abstract sense.

(muffled chatter) (slow gentle piano music) - [Narrator] During her 17 years on the court, Justice Wahl decided over 500 cases.

Her commitment to equal justice and opportunity permeates those decisions.

Equal access to athletic programs for high school girls, equitable spousal maintenance terms for older displaced homemakers in a divorce, elimination of sentencing guidelines that resulted in unfair racial bias.

For many years, Justice Wahl chaired an American Bar Association Committee on legal education.

- She completely transformed clinical legal education in the United States.

Her work on the American Bar Association Committee and her cleverness in working within the Bar Association really transformed how students learn about law through practice and through practice that's socially engaged.

- [Narrator] Toward the end of her service on the court, Justice Wahl chaired the Task Force on Racial Bias in the Judicial System.

It was one of her most difficult assignments.

- It was just so hard to sit there and just listen and listen and have people tell you how they had been treated in the judicial system.

And we knew that there were people who wouldn't wanna believe it because we're into denial about the fact that we treat anybody differently.

- [Narrator] Judge Michael Davis served on the Race Bias Task Force with Justice Wahl.

- It couldn't have been done without Justice Wahl because she was able to bring people together from diverse viewpoints and to be able to get them to talk and to say, "We do have a charge.

We have a purpose here.

Let's fulfill that."

- There were times on the Race Bias Task Force I thought we were not gonna get anywhere.

Nobody wants to say, "I'm doing something wrong."

And she came in and said, "No, we all are.

So we're all gonna own our piece, and we're gonna try to fix it."

- Because of her position on the Supreme Court at that time and because of her personal power, her persuasiveness, her reputation for fairness, her reputation for a commitment to the community, she could initiate these projects, and she could have these projects affect the law in Minnesota, which was really an enormous benefit.

(soft pleasant guitar music) - Her influence on the male-dominated society to make changes and to make changes so that would open the doors for all, that is crucial for people to understand.

- [Sally] I don't think we can overstate what it was to be the first woman to go on our state Supreme Court and to do a great job.

It was absolutely huge.

You were constantly under scrutiny, both by your colleagues, by all the law clerks, by everybody in front of you, and then you had to do such a good job that you convinced the governor to put more women there.

- [Narrator] In 1991, the Minnesota Supreme Court became the first state Supreme Court in the country to have a majority of women on the bench.

There is little doubt that it was Rosalie Wahl's success as the first woman on the court that made the later appointment of women possible.

- [Harriet] Rosalie wasn't called to the law so much as Rosalie really called the law to her and, in a sense, called it to account.

- From the time I started out, I was interested in doing what justice we could.

I think the work with gender and race to the extent that we can become conscious of the fact that we may be treating people differently for those reasons and not being as even handed as we can and to the extent that the system changes somewhat in response, that may be the most important thing.

- [Narrator] When Justice Wahl retired from the court in 1994, retired Chief Justice Amdahl wrote her a letter which sums up the influence that she had on the judicial system and on our society.

- [Michael] "You have kept the faith.

Those who have little else, often not even hope, now have a champion with a loving heart and an iron will to protect and advance their interests.

You opened the door to fairness, equality, human rights, and humanity that will never totally close again."

(wind rustles leaves) (birds chirp) - We should go- - They're pretty.

They're very nice.

- Let's go to - Okay, let's go.

- Gertrude and Sara first.

Here, you wanna hang onto my arm?

(muffled chatter) - What was the song?

♪ Who so beset us round ♪ with dismal stories ♪ ♪ To but themselves confound ♪ our strengths more is ♪ ♪ No foe shall stay our might ♪ ♪ Though we with giants fight ♪ ♪ We will make good our ♪ right to be a pilgrim ♪ Well, all the injustice and all the cruelty and the harm that's done to people by other people, the mechanism of our system that crushes people, them is giants, aren't they?

(slow poignant string music) (inspiring music) - Funding for this program is provided in part by, the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

The Katherine B. Andersen Fund of the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, Darby and Geri Nelson, and other Friends of Minnesota Experience.