Today, the papers are filled with sagas of the increasing numbers of U.S. women practicing law, and the number continues to grow. So it seems reasonable to wonder if the saying might be changed to: "First, kill all the women lawyers!"

"For more than a decade, women have been streaming into the legal profession in unprecedented numbers," said Deborah Graham in a recent issue of the American Bar Association's ABA Journal.

One of the best informed observers of women lawyers is Barbara Aronstein Black, a legal historian and law professor who last year was named dean of Columbia University School of Law in New York. Black is the first woman to head an Ivy League law school.