Women in Leadership showcases the dynamic talent of three Michiana women.

Pioneers in business, industry, or leadership positions in their community, demonstrating their struggles and triumphs.

Women in Leadership, a local production of PBS Michiana WNIT, is presented in partnership with Mr. Jerry Hammes.

Mr. Hammes is proud to present this program in memory of his late wife, Dorene Dwyer Hammes and all the women who continue to impact our community for the better.

Additional funding provided by: NIPSCO, the South Bend Clinic, and 1st Source Bank.

Thank You!

Three Michiana women have lived through those same changing times.

Each choosing the career path followed by Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg: Aladean DeRose, Karrah Herring, and Jeanne Jourdan.

I wanted to study law because I believed that I wanted to be a lawyer.

It was '72.

The world had changed and I thought that I could get a job and do some social justice kind of thing with a law degree.

When I was smaller, I wanted to be a doctor and I actually went to Purdue as a pre-med student.

When I got into Purdue, I got accepted as a pre-med student the first year, did a lot of science and math.

And I was like, you know, I don't know if this is for me, especially not the math portion.

And I started taking some communications courses.

And so I ended up majoring in communications with an emphasis on public relations.

And while I was taking some of those courses, I joined the Pre Law Society because of one of the courses I took about women in law.

And I'm like, this is intriguing.

And I talked to some friends who were kind of interested in law.

And so it shifted, like my sophomore year of college, it shifted from pre-med to communications.

I don't know that I ever really wanted to study law before I studied law.

And then when I studied it, I loved it.

I was passionate about it.

It was, it was so intriguing.

The ideal of justice is just an enormous concept and it's one that I keep with me.

But up to that point, up to law school, I didn't know what I wanted to be.

I really, I really didn't.

And then I was propelled to go into law by things that I saw in the world around me.

Times were changing.

And I did want to be a part of that.

And one of my friends did a great deal of work with the American Civil Liberties Union.

And the kind of cases that he became involved in appealed to me as a good step into social justice work.

And then I got a part time appointment as a public defender.

And from that point on, I did mostly criminal work until I became a judge.

A trailblazer, Jeanne M. Jourdan was a product of her time.

In the early 1970s, when women were asking, what do I do besides what I'm doing now?

She answered her own question by enrolling in the University of Notre Dame Law School.

I graduated from college in '61 and got married that year and had my first child in '62.

I had my last child, fifth child, in 1970, so you can see there's less than eight years between my children.

I stayed home for 10 years and at 32 I started law school.

And I practiced law for six years: three as a public defender and three as a deputy prosecutor.

And then I went on the bench.

And soon she began her own string of firsts: first female public defender in St. Joseph County, first female deputy prosecuting attorney to regularly do trial work, and in 1981, the first female superior court judge in St. Joseph County.

Being a judge is far less stressful than practicing law.

Court starts when you sit down and say it starts, it ends when you say.

You don't need to worry about whether or not your witnesses will show up, whether they'll do a good job.

You just have to worry about following the law, making as many right decisions as you possibly can.

I think the biggest misperception people have is that judges are the people with the power.

And in fact, whoever is the prosecutor of the county is the man with the power because he makes the decision or his office does as to when charges are going to be brought.

Once the charge is brought, the judge is pretty much circumspected by the law.

And whatever you really might like to do, you don't get to do when it is in opposition to the law.

Retired after 18 years on the bench, Jeanne turned her attention to teaching law students.

What I taught at Notre Dame Law School and also for the National Institute of Trial Advocacy were trial skills for lawyers.

It wasn't the law.

It was more how you would present yourself, the way to form the questions, how to stand, not to say "uh," "duh" a lot, things like that.

And so my own practice was a big help.

And I took a course on how to do this according to a formula that the National Institute uses.

So it was great fun to be with younger people.

And, for a while, I coached the trial team and several times they won a national championship.

And that was just wonderful.

Later, when I saw people struggling, I would tell them things like, you know, here's what I did.

I went took this course as a public defender.

I'll help you try to get a scholarship.

So it doesn't, doesn't cost you anything to take, of course.

I would say sometimes to some women, if you'd like to talk about how it went with me, not the legal part, but the part about you and your skills, I would be more than happy to spend the time talking with you.

While much has changed for women since Jeanne went to law school, she's observed some constants.

You know, it's really funny, I expected a huge difference, thanks to Title IX.

I expected that women would be much more relaxed about making mistakes, because the way you teach trial skills is you have somebody perform for a few minutes and then you essentially do a critique and try to help them, coach them into not making the same mistake over and over.

And women were, started out hard on themselves in 1977.

They were hard on themselves in 19, 2019 when I stopped.

So I didn't see a huge generational change.

I think this is a wonderful time to get into the legal field for a woman.

There are traditional jobs that women take frequently, but the world has really opened up so that practically every area of the law is now open to women.

So one gets to have a much greater choice.

When I first started to practice law, it was in the mid 70s.

There had been two women who practiced law before the group that began in the 70s, and they practiced with their husbands and had perhaps less than a full time job.

Now, at least half of law school population are women and none of them, well, I shouldn't say none, because obviously there are people who practice with their husbands, but for the most part, women are pursuing an independent career, which began pretty much in the 70s and just has increased as time has gone by.

You take courses in law school and you think you're going to love it, and then you find out very quickly that it's not your cup of tea.

And then I spent some time doing a judicial externship with Judge Jane Miller here in South Bend at, for St. Joseph County.

And she actually is retiring soon.

But I spent some time with her in criminal court and drug court.

And it was incredibly intriguing.

But it also was not my cup of tea.

And so, as I started to transition into my career at Notre Dame, my eyes were open to this world of employment law and all the intricacies and complexities that happened within an organization and how people have to be protected within the organization.

But also the organization has to be protected.

Following graduation from Purdue and law school at Valparaiso, Karrah Herring, soon found her way to the University of Notre Dame as the Director of Public Affairs.

I'm going to think back to when I first started with the University of Notre Dame because I was there for almost a decade, it's a big portion of my career.

I would say the successes that I'm most proud of there, when I think about the workplace culture enhancement work that I did, right?

There was a piece of compliance to my job where we had to go in and do investigations under Title VII or Title IX if people felt like they had been harassed or someone had violated a policy.

And that was not the fun aspect.

People didn't want to see me coming, right?

When I was doing that.

But I think about the proactive training sessions that we did around respect and fairness and civility and cultivating a culture where people feel like they can thrive and be successful.

To me, that was really positive to see people feel like their workplace culture was transformed because of proactive training sessions, that we were able to do.

Another win for me, and this was really important because as a woman of color, a black woman and particularly, I'm constantly thinking about the intersection of my race and gender.

And so when I came into the organization Human Resources with within Notre Dame, we had some good diversity.

But we had an opportunity to enhance that a little bit, right?

To me, that was a really big win to be able to bring more diversity into the workplace because it's deeper than just racial and ethnic diversity.

It's really diversity of thought, diversity of perspectives, because it opens up the conversations for people to think about things or discuss things that they maybe never would have thought that they needed to discuss in the workplace, right?

One of my favorite things about my career as it has progressed has been my transformation.

To watch myself come into a leadership position early on in my career and being very passionate about making sure women's voices are heard and people of color are heard and having to find a way to kind of temper that passion with wisdom and patience.

And before long, her passion, wisdom and patience had a high profile Indiana eye, Governor Eric Holcomb, who named Karrah the state's first Equity, Inclusion, and Opportunity Officer.

I really believe that God opened up this opportunity for me during this time in our nation's history to have an impact, because he knows that I'm still that little Karrah as a child who wanted to be a voice for my sister, that I want to be a voice for other people.

So I feel incredibly blessed that Governor Holcomb saw something in me to bring me onto his team and to help lead this with his team for the state.

And I'm hoping that we put together such an incredible blueprint and legacy that's sustainable for years to come, that other states start to look to us to say, you know, we need to do this, too.

We need to join in on this opportunity to really increase equity for all.

And really help us realize that true American dream where all of us can live our best quality of life and really experience this country in the way that it was meant to be experienced.

So some of the challenges I faced, and this is not specific to any particular organization, but I think just as a black woman working in environments where typically people who look like me are the minority, right?

That we're not the majority, we are not the people that are in positions of power.

I think some of the challenges that I face in that regard was the ability to find my voice and feel like I could speak up and share my perspective without feeling uncomfortable or feeling like I couldn't be my true, authentic self.

It took me some time to get there, and obviously I've been able to do that a little bit more in more recent years.

But I would say the very early stages of my career, that was a struggle.

And I think women in general struggle with that sometimes regardless of race or ethnicity, because we're often in male dominated spaces.

I felt like Wonder Woman, like I could just come in and do that.

And you really have to take time to understand the culture that you're operating in, you have to take time to understand how to cultivate relationships and communicate with people the way that they want to be communicated with.

And so for me, that watching my own growth has been incredibly interesting and being able to be transparent about that and say I didn't always get it right.

And while Wonder Woman can offer inspiration, Karrah has this advice for young women thinking about following in her footsteps.

So the advice that I would give someone who wants to go into to law, into the legal field, is I would say, get a mentor early on, someone who's been through the process.

It's so much bigger than just going to law school and then taking the bar and going and jumping into the workforce.

But let me, let me make sure you understand what you're getting yourself into, because there is a weeding out process.

And so you have to be prepared on how to approach that.

The second thing is, I would tell folks thinking about the legal field, if you don't like to read, don't even waste your time.

And the final piece is, you know, you really got to think about what type of law you want to practice.

And so I encourage people all the time.

What are you passionate about?

What are you interested in?

Is it health care?

Is it education?

Is it mental health?

Is it young people?

And after school programing?

There's so much out there to get involved with, and when you can figure out what it is that you love and enjoy and then turn that into service for someone else, it really, if we all could just do that, it humanizes one another.

I consider myself a champion of the underdog because I've always had, I think since the time I was a child, I have always hated injustice whenever I've seen it.

Every time I see it, it rankles me.

And that, I guess, in fact, is another motivation for law school, because that is, the law is a place where justice can be, it's never fully achieved, but where it can be approximated and where advances can be made to assist those who have less and who are not at the, who are not at the table.

Aladean DeRose feels fortunate to have been a lawyer in the era of the Civil Rights Act.

And then I was propelled to go into law by things that I saw in the world around me.

I was working for a business downtown Indianapolis, and I had been given a job that was a good, interesting type of job.

I had to do a research project to discover who needed airplane travel from Indianapolis, business travel.

But when that job was over, the company wanted to keep me on, but couldn't find a real place for me.

And so, sort of fit me into this quasi-secretarial role in which I talked daily with the other secretaries in the office about how much they were earning and how much, with all the work that they were doing and learned that the salaries were very low.

And I would go into a male, an officer's, a male technician's office and would see the male with his feet up on the table, kind of just sitting back and looking like he was not doing much of anything.

And I, and I saw the secretaries out there just slaving away.

So it just seemed a little bit unfair to me.

And I thought, I need to do something about this.

So I tried to get the secretaries at that time to consider asking for wage increases, but they weren't interested in that.

So I went to law school.

Now, forty years later, she serves in the city of South Bend's legal department.

I've been with the city part-time.

I'm the only part-time attorney, but I've been there part-time for over thirty years.

It's been a long, long, fascinating, interesting, and rewarding experience.

I also have a private practice and my private practice is probably more family oriented.

It involves family law, it involves small business law, wills, estates, that type of thing that really relate more to families.

I have done quite a bit of employment discrimination law.

I got thrown into that as a youngster again, just because I was there.

And the judge said, you will represent this client who had no money.

And, sure!

I would count my successes as things that may not appear to be successful to other people, because I know how much work went into a particular case that may not have great national or even local significance.

One that comes to mind is a class action matter that I undertook as a very young lawyer, not even knowing what a class action was, I think I might have been five years out of law school, when I took this on.

And it had to do with a fraud that was committed by a grain storage company against farmers who brought their grain to store.

The farmers were given little slips when they would bring their grain to the company and the slip would say, we have the right to sell your grain at any time.

They did not see that.

They understood that it was there for storage.

And so the owner had sold their grain at a time when the grain prices were low.

When they came to ask for the grain to be sold, it had already been sold and they lost money.

And there were several farmers that were part of this grain company's customer base.

So I think I spent three or four years on that litigation, which then went to trial and eventually they all got paid.

So it was, in the end, it all worked out.

Before turning to law, Aladean studied foreign language with an eye on becoming a U.N. translator.

Learning a second language at an older age puts us at a disadvantage compared to Europeans who may know six or seven languages.

So anyway, that was my background.

And the study of languages, I think helped me with the study of law because I've always felt that law itself has its own language and that it is its own, has its own keys and symbols and that you have to learn them as you would French or Spanish or something else.

It's just a different way of speaking, a different way of communicating.

And so you learn that with the practice of law.

I ended up in South Bend as a result of a husband who had a job here in South Bend and I did not.

So I came up here and then found a female attorney who was willing to take me under her wing.

It didn't last very long, but it was at least a beginning.

And then I found that the real world for someone who does not, who is just looking for a job, as a lawyer, as a female at that era, in that era, is a really tough thing.

But I, I found someone else who was willing, again, to take me in as his mentor.

And this was a male attorney, and learned very well through him.

And then I set out on my own.

Although my law school class had 20 percent female students, the practice of law in St. Joseph County had fewer than one percent female practitioners.

And those females, the two most, the two eldest female practitioners at that time, had both worked with their husbands in the practice of law.

They could, they probably could not have hung out a shingle on their own and have been and been accepted.

They needed the coverage of their husbands.

These were women who were lawyers in the 19, late 1940s and late in early 1950s, one of whom was Elizabeth Fletcher Allen, the wife of J. Chester Allen, who was a distinguished male lawyer.

She happens to be the first African-American lawyer, I believe, in the state of Indiana.

And she was she was living at the time that I began practicing law.

So it was, it was a difficult time.

I love the younger generation.

I think that they are full of ideas.

They have much more confidence than we had because they're certain of themselves.

They grew up at a time when equality was foremost in schools, in their formative years.

They were encouraged to believe that they could do anything they wanted.

And I think we have some very talented young women lawyers, as well as young male lawyers.

So I like the young generation.

Judge.

Government Official.

Attorney.

Three accomplished law professionals, creating positive outcomes for a wide cross-section of Michiana.

I think I'd like to be remembered as a lawyer who made a difference in the practice, in the way law is practiced.

Not necessarily that I'm a trailblazer, but that I furthered justice, the rights of those who have fewer rights and that one can get similar results in a peaceful, in a more and a more civilized way.

I was born and raised in South Bend.

I went to Purdue.

I went to Valpo and I've stayed here for my career.

I want this to be the best place that it can be so all of us can have a really great, great quality of life.

And I think we're on track to do that.

So I hope if that happens, I'll be a happy old lady if I can look back and that's that's happened.

In law school, I am remembered as the woman with the five kids.

And then other women who wanted to go to Notre Dame Law School for about a decade were encouraged to go talk to me if they lived anywhere near South Bend and had children, because they would say, well, there's this woman, you know, who had five kids and she got through.

Maybe you could talk to her and find out what it was like.

That probably was the high point of people remembering me as a law student.

As a judge, I hope that people remember that I did my best to be respectful to everybody and to follow the law.

Women in Leadership, a local production of PBS Michiana WNIT, has been presented in partnership with Mr. Jerry Hammes.

Mr. Hammes is proud to support this program in memory of his late wife, Dorene Dwyer Hammes and all the women who continue to impact our community for the better.

Additional funding provided by.

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This WNIT local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

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