Forty years ago, it was considered unusual for a woman to become a justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio. However, women have come a long way in the legal world, according to some female Ohio justices and seeing a woman behind the bench today is not exactly an eye-opener.

Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton said she began her legal career in the early 1980s as a trial attorney for a firm in Central Ohio.

"I couldn't take my chief executive clients to eat in the dining room of the Athletic Club during lunch. As a woman, I wasn't allowed to eat downstairs," Stratton said.

Despite minor setbacks in establishing client-attorney relationships, she became one of the firm's most valuable attorneys, racking up the most billable hours and bringing in the most new businesses, Stratton said. However, she added, the firm couldn't agree on hiring a woman as partner.

"There were three of us (she and two men) who were working for partnership, and then someone told me one of the partners just wasn't comfortable with me - and I am pretty easy to get along with. I do not have a hard-edged, hard-nosed personality," Stratton recalled, laughing. "I solved the problem by just taking another job."

Stratton said she didn't let the situation get her down, and instead focused on the thing she's always valued most: hard work. She worked her way through the judicial ranks, becoming elected in 1989 as the first female judge of the Franklin County Common Pleas Court, elected a justice of the Supreme Court in 1996, and re-elected to the Supreme Court in 2008.

"I often joke my revenge is that most of those folks have to call me 'Your Honor' now," she said.

Serving as a Supreme Court justice, Stratton said her position is one of the few where her gender has truly been a non-issue. In fact, she said she can only recall one court decision that was influenced by her gender: battered women's syndrome.

"There were a couple of cases when Justice (Alice Robie) Resnick was there, and she and I were very strong on (battered women's syndrome) issues, and we felt that we had to make our male counterparts understand," said Stratton.

Stratton said she believes women have more opportunities to get involved in the legal field today.

Due to educational opportunities, lawsuits dealing with gender discrimination, and law firms' flexibility for mothers, legal professions have become more open to women, she said. Young girls are believing they can do anything when they grow up, and female high school graduates are setting their sites high, she added.

"It's dramatically changed from my early days. My law school class was 30 percent women and there were very few firms hiring women," Stratton said, adding that prior to her generation, women were rarely given the opportunity to become educated and work outside of the home.

"It went from not having a chance, to 'Can I do it?,' to 'Of course I can do it.'"

Justice Maureen O'Connor agreed that women today are less hesitant about diving into the legal arena, and are more aggressive when it comes to running for political offices.

"In the last 20 to 25 years, women started running for political office in larger numbers," O'Connor said, adding that since the 1980s, more women have populated the municipal, common pleas and appellate courts, and this has led to the election of more women Supreme Court justices.

O'Connor became the 148th justice to the Supreme Court in 2002, giving the court its first-ever female majority, along with Justices Resnick, Stratton and Deborah L. Cook. She was re-elected to the Supreme Court in 2008.

Before the 1980s, O'Connor said, there were very few female judges nationwide.

"Women didn't run against women," she said. "That was one of the things you just didn't do early on, when women were running for political offices."

O'Connor explained that women often chose not to run for judicial positions in which other women were running because they wanted to support their female counterparts. However, gender has since become less of a focal point within judicial elections, she said.

"I think that indicates that we have come a long way. ...I think that is a very strong indicator that gender is no longer an issue," O'Connor said.

In her own career experiences - a practicing attorney in the early 1980s, a Summit County magistrate in 1985, a common pleas court judge in 1993, a Summit County prosecuting attorney in 1995, and lieutenant governor of Ohio in 1998 - O'Connor has, for the most part, received equal respect as her male colleagues, she said.

"There have been times where people have referred to Justice O'Connor, and people were probably expecting a man. I think that's still the case sometimes," she said.

Although more women are entering the legal field, and more women are becoming judges, there have been only seven women among the 151 Ohio Supreme Court justices in the court's 207-year history, according to the Columbus Bar Association.

Florence E. Allen served as the first Ohio justice - 1923 to 1934 - and was the first woman elected to a judicial office in Ohio, the first woman U.S. assistant county prosecutor, and the first woman appointed to a federal appeals court judgeship. Fifty years later, Blanche Krupansky served on the court (1981 to 1983).

Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger became the only person elected to all four levels of the Ohio judiciary when she was elected the 150th Supreme Court Justice in 2004.