Assistant US Attorney Ella Mae Backus: "A most important figure in the legal profession in the Western District of Michigan"

The Michigan Historical Review 42.2 (Fall 2016): 1-30©2016 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved Assistant US Attorney Ella Mae Backus: “A most important figure in the legal profession in the Western District of Michigan” By Ruth S. Stevens Ella Mae Backus, described by the Flint Daily Journal while still in the early years of her career as “one of Michigan’s best known women attorneys,” worked for the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan from 1903 to 1938.1 After she died in 1938, at age 75, her life was celebrated with a memorial at the federal court in Grand Rapids, where leading members of the federal court and Grand Rapids bar bore witness to her importance both to the US Attorney’s Office and the Grand Rapids legal community. Yet, despite the widespread respect she enjoyed while she was alive, her life has received only brief mention in historical accounts.2 Backus’ accomplishments were remarkable, especially for a woman who came of age in the nineteenth century. Women were first admitted to the bar in Michigan in 1871, eight years after she was born, and these early female attorneys had to overcome numerous hurdles.3 Their presence in the legal profession was seen as a direct challenge to the prevalent “separate spheres” ideology and notions of appropriate feminine behavior. They often faced overt discrimination because of their 1 “Fred C. Wetmore is Removed,” Flint Daily Journal, 31 December 1913. 2 Ellen Arlinsky and Marg Ed Conn Kwapil, A Grand Profession, A Grand Tradition: A History of the Grand Rapids Bar (Grand Rapids, MI: Grand Rapids Bar Association, 1995), 31; “History of the Western District of Michigan,” Office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, www.justice.gov/usao-wdmi/about/history. 3 For more on early female attorneys in the United States see Virginia G. Drachman, Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Jill Norgren, Rebels at the Bar (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2013); Mary Jane Mossman, The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions (Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2006); Virginia D. Drachman, Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887 to 1890 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Karen Berger Morello, The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America: 1638 to the Present (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986). 2 The Michigan Historical Review sex and battled stereotypes about the type of legal work appropriate for women. The first female attorneys often concentrated their practices more on office work, and they were instructed to avoid litigation, the courtroom, and especially criminal law, which was thought to involve matters too coarse for females.4 Difficulties were even greater for those who entered the legal profession without the support of a husband.5 Backus came from a family of limited means. Unlike most early female attorneys in Michigan, whose families had the financial resources to send them to law school, she acquired her legal knowledge solely through self-study. She came to a legal career indirectly after she was hired as a stenographer in a Traverse City law office. There she began to study law simply to make herself more useful to her employers, but with their encouragement she decided to continue the course of study and become a lawyer. In 1895, after four years of working full-time as a stenographer and reading law, she was admitted to practice law, joining the very small number of women in the United States in the 1890s who overcame existing legal and social barriers to enter the legal profession. Backus’ admission to the bar and practice in Traverse City were just a prelude to a long career in government service. In 1903 she was appointed to the position of Clerk of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan in Grand Rapids. Over the course of her thirty-five-year career there she became the backbone of the office, a person depended on for her knowledge...