Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America’s First Women Lawyers

Preface

ix Preface REBELS AT THE BAR describes the life stories of a small group of nineteenth -century women who became the first female attorneys in the United States. In 1865, at the conclusion of the American Civil War, the idea of equal rights found new expression. In the optimistic decade that followed , a handful of women acted on their aspirations to become lawyers . It was a radical ambition. Law was an all-male profession, and most Americans believed that any woman who did not need to work outside her home, or farm, ought not to. Nevertheless, the idea of equality was powerful, and these women marched forward reading law with fathers and brothers, knocking on law school doors, and petitioning county, state, and federal courts for bar privileges. Progress was usually determined by where the women lived and which law school deans, and judges, they encountered. Columbia University’s School of Law refused to admit women when they first applied in 1868 and continued the ban for decades, while not long after the close of the war Washington University in St. Louis, Union College (incorporated in 1891 into Northwestern University), and the University of Michigan permitted female law students to matriculate. In progressive counties and states, judges accepted motions to admit women attorneys to the bar, or did so because of new state laws. In 1869, this opened the way to Arabella Mansfield in Iowa, and shortly thereafter, Lemma Barkaloo and Phoebe Couzins in Missouri, and Ada Kepley in Illinois. Elsewhere, however, courts declined to extend bar privileges to women, using the dodges of the common law, statutes employing the pronoun “he,” woman’s proper place, and God’s intentions. When Myra Bradwell appealed her exclusion from the practice of law by the state of Illinois, U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Bradley, x Preface in a concurring opinion, rejected her claim of Fourteenth Amendment rights, declaring it “the law of the Creator” that woman’s destiny should be limited to the “noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”1 In 1875, two years after the Bradwell decision, Wisconsin Supreme Court chief justice Edward Ryan also invoked Victorian mores in denying Lavinia Goodell’s petition for admission to the bar. He wrote that licensing her would mean “a sweeping revolution of social order” and cautioned that it would be “revolting” that “woman should be permitted to mix professionally in all the nastiness of the world which finds its way into courts of justice.”2 Ultimately, when women faced resistance of this kind, they won admission to law programs and bar privileges only by lobbying state legislatures or, in the case of the federal courts, Congress. In 1877 Lavinia Goodell prevailed at the Wisconsin legislature. In 1879 Congress passed the anti-discrimination legislation long lobbied for by Washington , D.C., attorney Belva Lockwood, a bill that opened the entire federal bar to qualified women lawyers. Rebels presents the individual but interwoven stories of the women whom historian Virginia Drachman has called “sisters-in-law.” It describes their struggle to train and to qualify as attorneys, exploring, in particular, what this first generation of American women lawyers did, after the initial jousting, with their hard-won professional privilege. Their story is one of nerve and courage, success and frustration. This first generation did everything that law and custom did not prevent to eliminate barriers to equality. They believed that gender equality was guaranteed by natural law and the founding documents of the nation. Yet these women were never given the opportunity to wear the black robes of a judge; they were not invited into the developing areas of corporate or railroad law; and, although male lawyers filled the ranks of legislatures and foreign diplomatic missions, presidents refused to appoint women to diplomatic offices just as the public refused to elect them to assemblies and senates. The first generation did practice civil and criminal law, solo and in partnership, in both back office and courtroom. They were deeply involved in reform movements, lobbying extensively on the major Preface xi issues of their day—including suffrage, temperance, race (where Caucasian women lawyers were not always on the side of racial minorities ), prison conditions, and international peace and arbitration. They authored countless books, articles, and newspaper columns. They pursued parallel careers as lecturers. In 1876 Belva Lockwood tried but failed to open a law school for women in Washington, D.C.; twenty...