| Criminal defense work is rife with conflict for the growing numbers of women attorneys. The topic of this dissertation is how women defense attorneys use ideologies in defense of their work, and how they deal with their emotional stress. My data suggest that the management of emotional conflict by women defenders progress in stages. Key themes run throughout: The conceptual overlaps between ideology and emotion and ideological work and emotion work; and the connection of ideological work and emotion work to the identity formation, transformation, and reinforcement that compose moral careers.; Like other moral careers, those of women defenders are marked by a sequence of changes in the way they conceive of themselves. I identify three phases in the line of development that correspond to number of years in practice: Identity Formation: Early Career (one to ten years), Identity Transformation: Mid-Career (11 to 15 years), and Identity Reinforcement: The Seasoned Woman Defender (16 plus years). I argue that distinct strategies of emotion work are connected to the specific phases. Through their transformation in identities and accompanying ideals, we see how women defenders come to believe in order to be able to feel what they try to feel. |
