The call came from Peter Sonderby several weeks after his wife, Judge Susan Pierson Sonderby of U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Northern District of Illinois, had been interviewed about her rise to prominence in a male-dominated profession.
“I wondered if you might be interested in seeing her at home,” he said. “I don’t know if I got the point across very well when we spoke before, it’s just that this is a woman capable of doing so much more than what you’d think, just seeing her at work. The point is, she could have been any number of things. She could have been a decorator, or a businesswoman.”
Susan Sonderby had waxed fondly about her love of travel, of the pieces she had brought back from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Morocco and other places to make her modern Chicago lakefront high-rise apartment homey, and about how she loves to entertain.
And of course she mentioned how she had beaten out a whole contingent of singing and baton-throwing pageant contestants, with a clever act that showcased her sewing talent, to become Joliet’s first Junior Miss 30 years ago.
It was amusing nevertheless to hear the judge’s spouse asserting she was as good at putting together mauves and tans as at interpreting the intricacies of federal bankruptcy law.
But, feminists, forgive him. Sonderby was just trying to point out this wasn’t a woman who’d berate homemakers for having tea or baking cookies, and that being a bankruptcy judge doesn’t automatically mean you have a frosty demeanor and a frown permanently affixed to your face.
Growing up in Joliet in the 1950s and ’60s in a tightly knit, traditional family fostered in Susan Pierson a love of all the things girls were supposed to do. But at the same time, the bright student who told her parents in 5th grade she wanted to be a lawyer knew her life might be different. Even early on she knew there would be contradictions.
She entered John Marshall Law School in Chicago in 1970, but not to find a husband. “That’s what everybody thought,” said Sonderby, 47. “Nobody expected me to finish. When my mom was framing my law school graduation invitation, all her friends were framing their daughters’ wedding invitations.”
Indeed, in 1973, when she graduated, only 9 percent of the country’s law school graduates were women. While women make up 40 percent of law school graduates today, their numbers in the field’s prominent positions are still small.
Of 319 federal bankruptcy court judges nationwide, 50 are women. In the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals’ bankruptcy division, only one other woman, in Milwaukee, serves with Sonderby.
Women like Sonderby “were considered to be trailblazers (in the early ’70s),” said Ellen Mayer, director of the Commission of Women in the Profession for the American Bar Association in Chicago.
Though there has been some progress in federal judgeship appointments, Mayer said, “gender bias in the courtroom is a hot topic right now. Women judges tend to be challenged more.”
That’s why, Sonderby admits, she runs a tight ship in the courtroom.
“I conduct myself in a businesslike manner,” she said from her chambers in the Dirksen Federal Building, complete with mahogany-stained furniture and floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with books.
“I realize I have to gain respect of lawyers and litigants,” she said. “Some older colleagues can chit-chat or joke. I don’t think I can get away with it. I don’t think I would be considered credible.”
Yet Sonderby isn’t one to sit back and moan about equality among the sexes. She’s more of a doer. While she bristles at the idea of the government filling quotas–“I like to think they thought I was good material,” she said of her 1986 appointment to the federal bench–she acknowledges her gender has helped her too: “I’ve always tried to use the opportunities being a woman provided to open more doors and advance my career. At the same time, I think I’ve done a good job.”
The accolades have been piling up since Sonderby, while still a law student, clerked for State Sen. George O’Brien by working as a special assistant attorney general in the consumer protection division, in 1972.
Even before that, she was on the move.
“She was never a baby. She was a grownup little girl,” said her mother, 71-year-old Shirley Pierson. George Pierson, Susan’s 75-year-old father, now semi-retired, owns Norwalk Tank Co., a materials supply business in Joliet he runs with son Ron. She has two other siblings: Bob of New Lenox, owner of Barrett’s, a wholesale hardware business in Joliet, and Sharon Cavanaugh, a 2nd-grade teacher who lives in Channahon.
“She was 2 1/2 when she got up in front of the church and said her Christmas piece,” continued Shirley. “She’s always been an energetic, move-mountains kind of person.”
In high school, said Shirley, her daughter worked in Kline’s Department Store in Joliet, where the manager had some raincoats that weren’t moving. “Susan said, `Let me try,’ and she sold every one of them.”
Judy Manthei met Susan Pierson in French class sophomore year at Joliet Central High School and remembered, “Even then she was very determined to go on with a career.” Manthei earned a master’s degree in education and had her own career, staying in Joliet. But of her friend, Manthei said, “You knew she was going to do something different.”
Pierson’s experience in consumer protection while a student and as a partner at O’Brien’s firm after graduation from law school led to a position as assistant attorney general in charge of the Consumer Protection Division in Springfield in 1978. She presided over litigation involving scams big and small, supervised 85 employees, administered a million-dollar budget, appeared on a regular local television segment about consumer fraud and drafted consumer legislation.
While her career had taken off, it was also the most difficult time of her life. She had married high school friend Jim DeWitt in 1978, but within the year DeWitt was diagnosed with a fatal blood disease. Two years later, he died.
“He was gone, which I didn’t expect at age 31,” Sonderby said. DeWitt had been in the travel business, and the couple used to dash off to London for a few days or make time for hang-gliding.
“I remember people saying, `Boy, are Jim and Sue lucky.’ I was used to controlling life and getting what I wanted, and suddenly there was something I couldn’t control,” she said. “Suddenly life changed.”
Sonderby isn’t sure if she came to the realization then or if she’d harbored it all along, but she knew living life to its fullest was something she was going to think about every day from then on.
Sonderby gave a speech to the Joliet Woman’s Club in 1990 that embodied her philosophy. She called it “Eat More Ice Cream” from a phrase in an essay called “The Station.”
In it, the author, Robert J. Hastings, writes about the journey of life and implores us to “. . . eat more ice cream, go barefoot more often, swim more rivers, watch more sunsets, laugh more, cry less.”
Sonderby kept traveling, kept working and moved from Springfield to Chicago in 1983 to accept an appointment as U.S. trustee to supervise and administrate bankruptcy cases. She received a special Justice Department achievement award in 1984 for turning the Chicago office into what was termed the nation’s top operation.
In 1986, she was asked to apply for a vacancy on the Northern District bench and was chosen from among more than 100 applicants to fill the position. That year she also received a Justice Department Executive Office of the U.S. Trustees Director’s Award. The list is long of her other accomplishments, affiliations, speeches given and funds raised for varying causes.
Sonderby says she wasn’t suffering personally for the lack of a family life she had always assumed would be there. There wasn’t much she could do about it. “I hadn’t met anyone,” she said. That changed in the late ’80s, when she became acquainted with Peter Sonderby at a meeting of the Law Club of Chicago.
“It’s mostly old men,” said Peter, 54, a dry-witted attorney in private practice in Chicago. “It’s not a group you would ordinarily expect would serve the function (of matchmaking).”
One wouldn’t expect a wedding shower at the venerable Union League Club of Chicago, thrown by a bunch of middle-aged male judges, either, but it happened after the couple became engaged in 1990.
“We set it up completely and fooled her,” said Chief Bankruptcy Court Judge John Schwartz. “None of us had been to a wedding shower, but it was wonderful fun. I got her earrings that glowed in the dark.”
That’s about as wild as it gets at the Union League Club, but think “bankruptcy judges” and out-of-control probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.
Sonderby’s job is sobering. She deals with people’s livelihoods every day, handling more than 3,700 cases each year.
Several years ago a man who’d come before Sonderby was able to raise the money to keep his house after her ruling, and he sent her a picture of his family celebrating Easter together, crediting her with giving him a chance.
Tough decisions don’t always have a happy ending, but Sonderby took her position because “I like to feel I’m helping people.
“I find most people want to do what’s right; they want to make every attempt to pay off their debts. And sometimes their problems are created by resources out of their control. People lose their jobs. They have medical problems; it’s often no fault of their own.”
Peter Sonderby acknowledges his wife could be making well over double her $122,912 salary as a partner in private practice.
“The money’s not the same, but her job has compensating advantages,” he said. “I kind of like power women.”
Being a judge commands a certain amount of respect and power, but Sonderby learned about the limits of power and control a long time ago. She’s doing what she does, she says, to help people.
The judge reaches to her desk for a note sent at the holidays by a former clerk, a woman. “I miss being part of chambers,” it began. The note went on to thank Sonderby for showing her “how to be a professional in a male-dominated career, but still be compassionate.”
