L-J Patterson continues her series on unique women who have forged significant pathways through our legal landscape and turns the spotlight on Madeleine Heggs
Sixty per cent of law students and 63% of medical school students were listed as female in a 2004 higher education survey (The Observer, 6 June 2004)—a far cry from the 1940s and 1950s, when university places offered to women for these subjects were extremely rare. Further, it was a general expectation that women would give up their profession on marriage. This, against the backdrop of post-war life and economy, was the time in which Madeleine Heggs began her long and successful law career, one that would lead to her appointment as social security and child support commissioner: the first woman—and only woman for 20 years—to be so.
When Heggs was appointed as a commissioner, the other 13 commissioners in England and Wales were silks or Chancery silks, benchers or senior juniors. Not only was Heggs the first woman to be chosen, she was the first practising solicitor.
Her law career began in 1949 when
