Grace Day has been a pioneer for women lawyers. She was the only woman in her class when she earned her Juris Doctor degree from the University of South Dakota in 1949. In 1972 she was the first woman president of the St. Joseph, Mo., Bar Association. Next week she will be presented with the Woman of the Year award by Missouri Lawyers Weeky. The 13th Annual Women’s Justice Awards, which honors 35 female attorneys in Missouri, will be held in St. Louis on Wednesday, April 27.

“I feel very honored,” said Day from her office Polsinelli Shughart office in St. Joseph. “I feel like it’s an award for years of my interest in the law.

“Some of it has been difficult, some very exciting and some very interesting and it’s a culmination of all the years I’ve had in the practice,” continued Day, who has volunteered as St. Joseph’s Temple B’nai Sholem’s executive secretary for 61 years, the entire time she has lived in the Missouri town. She also serves on the small congregation’s cemetery committee.

She’s been practicing law since 1949, moving to Missouri in 1950. She said her studies and her career have been a long journey. While she was in law school, she said the other students and faculty “made it made it well known I wasn’t an acceptable party because I was a woman.”

Because of her gender, she said it was very hard for her to find a job. The one she finally found paid $50 per month, but it turns out she wasn’t more than what she called “a glorified secretary.”

Soon after, she opened her own private practice.

“Little by little I grew my practice. It wasn’t easy,” she said. “I wasn’t from the St. Joseph area so I did a lot of free criminal work to get my name known.”

Eventually Day began practicing family law and she stuck with that. She was in solo practice for 46 years before joining Polsinelli Shughart at the age of 69.

“I was very worried what would happen with my practice if I died,” she said. I thought I would be here a year or two. Now I’ve been here 15 years.”

Over the years she has spent a lot of time volunteering. Most notably she served as international president of B’nai B’rith Women (now known as Jewish Women International), serving a two-year term immediately following that of the late Evelyn Wasserstrom from Kansas City. She has also served as president of St. Joseph United Jewish Fund and was the first woman elected to serve on the board of the St. Joseph Area Chamber of Commerce.

Magazine honors Levit, too

Nancy Levit, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, is one of four women who will be recognized as Legal Scholars at the Missouri Lawyers Weekly 13th Annual Women’s Justice Awards next week in St. Louis.

Levit holds both a Curator’s Professorship and the Edward D. Ellison Professorship UMKC. She teaches Defamation & Privacy, Employment Discrimination, Gender & Justice, Jurisprudence, and Torts, and is the co-advisor to the UMKC Law Review.

Professor Levit has been voted by the students as the Law School’s Outstanding Professor of the Year three times and she has received the Elmer Pierson Faculty Teaching Award three times as well, the N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creative Activity, the UMKC Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2011 and the Missouri Governor’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

She will be profiled in Professor Michael Schwartz’s book, “What the Best Law Teachers Do,” forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2012. She is the author of “The Gender Line: Men, Women, and the Law,” and the co-author (with Richard Delgado and Robert L. Hayman, Jr.) of “Jurisprudence — Classical and Contemporary,” the co-author (with Robert R.M. Verchick) of “Feminist Legal Theory: A Primer,” and the co-author (with Douglas Linder) of the recently released “The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law.”