A new start after 60: I got divorced, became a lawyer – and began fighting for other women

After a spell as Isabella Rossellini’s hand model, Elizabeth Barbour went to law school at 54. Now, she is working on 50 domestic violence cases and says her career is a privilege, not a job. Elizabeth Barbour didn’t start studying law until she was 54 and had a school-age daughter. “But once I decide to do something, I’m hard to stop,” she says. Law is an atypical later-life career choice. It certainly bore no connection to Barbour’s first and second vocations, as a hand model and then a real-estate developer. “Law school was hard. It was disheartening,” she says. “I was literally everybody’s mother’s age. I didn’t have a cohort of friends. I was like a foreigner. I felt really isolated. But three years of being pummelled with all this information really did expand my bandwidth.”.

One day, after a negotiation exercise, the professor told her: “I’ve never had a student be able to work the table like you did.” She spent time with family-law attorneys and “began to intuit that this would be my area”. After graduating, she worked for a practice that dealt with high-net-worth individuals. “But that’s just an attorney helping you to argue over money,” she says. “I didn’t want to do that.”.

She passed the bar at her second attempt. Soon after, at 60, she got a job with the Legal Aid Society in her home town of Roanoke, Virginia. By then, her marriage had ended. In retrospect, she says, going to law school was “a declaration of selfhood”. Now 68, Barbour is working on 50 domestic violence cases. The work is emotionally draining – and rewarding. “These amazing women have been kicked around the block and are able to say: ‘Enough.’ When they come to me, they are ready for a change. I can give them legal help and play an active role in their life as they are transitioning from one place to another.”.

Barbour considers her career a “happy accident”. Until she was 54, she had “a freewheeling kind of life – but never without direction”. Although she was the eldest of three daughters, she “almost felt like an only child”, which fostered a strong sense of independence. Even so, she still accepted the assumption that she would “get married, change my name and be a housewife”. At high school in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Barbour “got involved with some women’s consciousness-raising meetings. I learned that I could grow up and plot my own adventure. Part of that message was: ‘You can go to law school or be a doctor.’ The part I heard was: ‘Go do your own thing.’ I went out and did my own thing and didn’t really think what my career would be.”.

After travelling through South and Central America, Barbour got her first proper job as a hand model with the Ford agency in New York. Her campaigns included Palmolive washing-up liquid. When Isabella Rossellini was the face of Lancôme, Barbour says, “I was her hands”. From there, she moved to Telluride in Colorado, where she met her ex-husband. They ran a business renovating houses and selling them. “I’m from a building family,” she says. “My great-grandfather showed up in this town early and became a builder.” From her office window in Roanoke, she can see the Calvary baptist church, which her family helped to build.

In childhood, Barbour had been “put on notice that not everybody had it easy”. Her mother “always volunteered with people who were disadvantaged”; Barbour would be at her side “some place where people were gathering food”. From an early age, Barbour was aware that she wanted to adopt: “I just had this little inkling that that was what I needed to do.” Her daughter is 26 and works as a paramedic. “The same kind of work,” Barbour muses. Her mother, 92, still helps in a hospice.