Barnard College is proud to present a fireside chat with author and attorney Harriet Newman Cohen ’52 and Barnard College president, Laura Ann Rosenbury.
The event will celebrate Cohen and her new Memoir, “Passion and Power: A Life in Three Worlds,” an in depth and unsentimental exploration of her life as a divorce attorney and how she’s navigated the male-dominated legal world from the 1970s to today.
The book depicts Cohen’s journey in three worlds: raising a family at a time when men held all the power, graduating from law school on the cusp of the “divorce revolution,” and re-fighting all the old battles over women's rights and women’s health in this time of reaction and retrenchment.
“Reinvention, it turns out, is a universally uplifting theme,” Cohen said. “As well as agency.”
Cohen, 93, relates her own experience with candid insights into how a legal system that often rewards bad behavior and irrational decision-making shapes the culture at large and impacts those trying to navigate their way towards a better life. With similar candor and humor she discusses the numerous celebrities she and her firms have represented–from Annette Bening and Laurence Fishburne, to Linda Lavin, Andrew Cuomo, Tom Brady, Paul George, and many others.
The book describes a number of cases in which Cohen was involved in almost novelistic detail, including the groundbreaking “Nuclear Family,” a case involving a lesbian couple’s efforts to maintain custody of their two daughters and the focus of a recent three-part documentary on HBO. It also recounts the case of Cohen’s groundbreaking and successful 1975 effort on behalf of a transgender woman to amend her New York City birth certificate to reflect who she truly was.
As a student at Barnard, Cohen majored in Latin and Greek and minored in music and went on to earn a graduate degree the following year in Latin from Bryn Mawr College. At age 38, with four children, a failing marriage and no money, she entered Brooklyn Law School, riding the tsunami of second wave feminism, determined to make her voice heard.
Cohen played a major role in the “Divorce Revolution” reforms that changed the fundamental legal and cultural relationship between men and women, and became a nationally recognized voice for women’s and children’s rights.
In 2021, at the age of 88, Cohen embraced the changes of the post-Covid legal landscape and, with her oldest of four daughters, Martha Cohen Stine, Esq., founded a new law firm: Cohen Stine Kapoor LLC.
Another one of her daughters, Amy Z. Cohen ’76, is a professional flutist and the office manager of the firm—a firm that, according to Cohen, is the only mother-daughter matrimonial law firm in New York she knows of—a point of pride for her.
The Fireside Chat will take place on Thursday, April 9 from 6:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. in Sulzberger Parlor in Barnard Hall and is open to all members of the Barnard community.
Register for the event here.