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In 1978, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Patricia A. Sullivan became the third woman to join the then-Edwards & Angell firm in Providence. A few years later, she became the first associate to get pregnant, launching the storied firm into unknown territory.

Sullivan recently recalled in chambers thick with files of telling only her longtime secretary about her big news. Her secretary, in turn, told another secretary, who just so happened to tell her boss, an executive committee member.

Connie Howes picked up golf as a young lawyer — not for the love of it, but as a strategy to help generate clients in a profession dominated by men.

"So I played golf poorly," Howes said in a recent interview reflecting on her legal career. Howes, of Providence, is one of 176 women being honored as trailblazers in the legal profession by Roger Williams University School of Law.

Howes was the third woman to join the Providence firm Tillinghast, Collins & Graham not long after she graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1978. Over the ensuing years, two other female associates added to the ranks.

"We had a substantial minority, I guess you would say," she said.

Arlene Violet made history in 1985 by becoming the first female attorney general in Rhode Island — and the nation.

She brought with her gumption cultivated as a nun with the Sisters of Mercy, can-do spirit learned at home, and insight from years working with the inner-city poor.

But before she took the historic title as the state’s first and still only female chief law enforcement officer, she ranked among a handful of trailblazing women to head to law school at a time when they were vastly outnumbered by men.

“My family always raised us that we could do anything, so when I went to law school. I didn’t think anything untoward about going there,” Violet, 75, of Barrington, said in a recent interview.

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