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

3. Myra Bradwell: The Supreme Court Says No

26 ◊3÷ Myra Bradwell The Supreme Court Says No Lex Vincit —Myra Bradwell, Chicago Legal News IN 1894, WHEN IT MATTERED VERY LITTLE, the men of the Illinois State Bar Association showered praise on Myra Bradwell. A quarter of a century before she had sought their professional favor and many of them had withheld it. Now she lay on her deathbed receiving tender expressions of respect. Attitudes had loosened and tempers cooled since 1869 when the Chicago businesswoman, wife of Judge James Bradwell, sought to be licensed as an Illinois attorney. Born in Manchester, Vermont, in 1831, Myra Colby had a New England pedigree and, from the age of twelve, under the watchful eye of four older siblings and activist abolitionist parents , an Illinois upbringing. She attended various schools until the age of twenty, taught briefly, and in 1852 eloped with Bradwell, who, scraping by as a manual laborer while working at a legal apprenticeship, was not viewed by the Colby family as a promising prospect.1 For a short time the couple ran a school in Memphis, Tennessee, and James continued to read law. Two years after their marriage the Bradwells moved, with their first child, to Chicago. In 1855 James was admitted to the Illinois bar. In the mid-1850s the people of Chicago were busy, with the help of the railroads, building their young city into an important metropolis. Myra Bradwell 27 Transplanted New Englander Mary Livermore, later a friend of Myra Bradwell’s, described Chicago at that time as a “somewhat astonishing [place] in which mud, dust, dirt, and smoke seem to predominate .” Only Michigan Avenue was paved and had decent sidewalks.2 The impact of the railroads, however, transformed Chicago from a muddy, rough place whose people thought of themselves as part of the West into a vibrant urban crossroads soon known, humorously to some, as “Hog Butcher for the World.” A five-thousand-mile network of tracks, reaching in all directions brought business, industry, and ambitious newcomers like the Bradwells. Myra and James were anxious to tap into the economic and social possibilities of a town free from the confining mores and practices of America’s older cities. James Bradwell initially formed a law partnership with Frank Colby, his brother-in-law. In the years before the Civil War, despite the birth Myra Bradwell (1831-1894). (Reprinted from A Woman of the Century, ed. Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore [Buffalo, NY: C. W. Moulton, 1893].) 28 Myra Bradwell of two more children, Myra helped James in the office and made the decision to read law with him. She did not wish to become “an independent practitioner.”3 Rather, Myra said, it was the separation of interests and work that drew couples apart.4 She wanted to remain close to James and argued that divorce courts would not be needed if couples labored side by side, with wives jointly supporting the family. James, always proud of Myra, felt the same way. Bradwell’s professional aspirations made her the target of gossip , but it took a war to alter her path. At the start of the Civil War Myra stopped reading law, became pregnant with her fourth child, and joined other women in war relief work. She presided over the Chicago’s Soldiers’ Aid Society, an organization that raised money for Union soldiers and their families. Bradwell also volunteered to help Mary Livermore and Livermore’s friend Jane Hoge when they proposed that the women of Chicago could organize and run a giant two-week-long fair that would benefit the wartime medical care provided by the Union’s Sanitary Commission . In Chicago and the nation’s capital, the women met disbelief that their “fair sex” would be capable of carrying out so grand and complicated an enterprise. Livermore reported that the men of the commission “laughed incredulously at our proposition to raise twenty-five thousand dollars.”5 In fact, at the end of the 1863 Northwestern Fair’s two-week-run, net receipts reached eighty thousand dollars.6 The women had commandeered buildings all over Chicago. They ran a wildly popular art gallery, sold donated goods from all over the United States that included rare fabrics, laces, mowing machines, reapers, ploughs, food, and much more. The most noteworthy item was the original manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s “Proclamation of Emancipation,” which the president gave as a token of his goodwill. It...