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

9. Law as a Woman’s Enterprise

185 ◊9÷ Law as a Woman’s Enterprise Equality of rights and privileges is but simple justice. —Belva Lockwood, 1888 FIRST-GENERATION WOMEN ATTORNEYS trained in the law in order to stretch themselves intellectually and to expand what were, otherwise , limited economic opportunities. Women attorneys also valued law as a tool of reform—not all, to be sure, but many. They supported woman suffrage and understood their personal struggles to be part of the larger fight to achieve an equal place in society. Woman lawyers, like other pioneering female professionals, engaged in endless debate over what they should or should not do, what was good, bad, normal, or eccentric. In 1881 Belva Lockwood saw that male attorneys in the District who had begun using bicycles (adult tricycles) were completing their work more quickly. Practical, and a health enthusiast, she became the first woman in the capital to buy and use a bicycle, a daring and, some felt, immodest act. With resolute determination, she accepted the verbal harassment that came from showing a bit of ankle. She rode about freely and accomplished her work more efficiently. President Grover Cleveland, understanding cycle technology’s power of sexual equalization, issued what Lockwood called “an edict,” telling the wives of his Cabinet officers that he did not wish them to ride bicycles.1 Among themselves, women lawyers puzzled over questions of professional decorum and workplace relations as well as personal issues 186 This postcard is one in a series, circa 1910, mocking scantily clad women as candidates for public office. (From the suffrage collection of Dr. Kenneth Florey.) Law as a Woman’s Enterprise 187 of health and fitness. The best record of their soul searching survives in the letters of the Equity Club, the group to which Lelia Robinson and Mary Greene were so devoted. The original members from Michigan had recruited “sisters-in-law” who, like California attorney Laura de Force Gordon, felt a “want of Professional companionship . . . [and] assurances of that close sympathy born of mutuality of interests, which women alone can extend to a woman.”2 Three dozen women trained in law responded to the invitation of their Ann Arbor colleagues to participate in a discussion of the personal and the professional. The club operated through the simple device of shared letters. Belva Lockwood sent off her first and only Equity Club letter on April 30, 1887. It typified her spirit in this period, expressing confidence in her professional accomplishments as well as the belief that other women would do well to practice law. Her field was, she said, “far from being a dry study, as many have supposed, but on the contrary , possesses a peculiar and fascinating attractiveness.”3 She also talked about the differences between city and small-town practice. She argued that in large cities an attorney could choose a specialty “and find a practice lucrative enough to fully employ her time.”4 She wrote that “the drafting of Wills, Deeds, Leases and Bills of Sale forms a very pleasant specialty for a woman in a large city where she can draw from a large enough population to secure good custom.”5 In small-town America, however, it was, she felt, necessary to engage in general practice. Many of the male attorneys she had met on the lecture circuit supplemented a general practice with work in real estate. Lockwood seldom lost an opportunity to speak on behalf of her reform causes, and this letter was no exception. She made two recommendations . She urged the elite Equity Club women to lobby to withdraw from state government the power to legislate domestic law, and to nationalize it instead, so that there would be a unified federal code that applied to all Americans. She also advocated that public schools in the United States establish a new curriculum for girls, one that would educate them in the principles of the state domestic law that she wished to nationalize. “Women,” she wrote, “have always been the 188 Law as a Woman’s Enterprise chief sufferers of bad legislation.” Referring to guardianship, property, and divorce law, she contended that if schooled early in these “ground principles, a woman would be better able to protect herself and children .”6 Lockwood, the former schoolteacher, trusted schools to be agents of change, as did Mary Greene. In a variety of ways, women lawyers struggled with the public perception that they were mentally and physically...