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BARRED FROM THE BAR -- A HISTORY OF WOMEN AND THE LEGAL PROFESSION |
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3. TWO STRIKES: GENDER; THREE STRIKES: RACE Man has been trying to do the housekeeping in the Temple of Justice for years all by himself, with the result of cobwebs all over the place. ... It needs women's wit, women's fairness and women's sense of right and righteousness to put the legal fabric in order and repair. -- Phoebe Couzins at the founding meeting of the Alumnae Association of the Women's Legal Education Society in 1895 [1] On the brink of the twentieth century, the situation for women aspiring to be lawyers remained discouraging. In 1880, after a decade of one-by-one victories, there were only about 200 women lawyers. By 1910, with the population exploding, there were only 559, less than 1 percent of the vastly expanded legal profession. [2] In medicine, women did somewhat better, despite new obstacles placed in their way. Fresh scientific discoveries had revolutionized medicine in Europe in the 1880s. Americans who studied abroad returned home and pressed for the "professionalization" of medicine. In the East, a group of wealthy women offered half a million dollars to Harvard if they would accept women into their medical school. Harvard turned them down, but Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, accepted the conditions and built a new medical school in 1893. As other schools dropped their own barriers, women soon composed one quarter to one third of the nation's medical school students. Because of the increase in coed medical education, all except three of the seventeen women's medical schools closed their doors. It appeared at first that women's decisions to enter coed institutions had been wise. During this so-called "Gilded Age," the number of women doctors rose from a 2,423 in 1880 to more than 7,000 by 1900. [3] As the federal government expanded in the decades following the Civil War, Washington, D.C., drew thousands of people into government jobs, among them a sprinkling of women. African-American men composed more than 10 percent of nearly 25,000 federal employees, although most of them held the lowest-paying clerical positions. The number of white male lawyers skyrocketed. They seemed to be everywhere, representing businesses and banks, in private practice, elected as congressmen and senators, in the federal courtrooms. Even a few African American male lawyers were seen, although in the entire nation there were less than 700 black members of bar, most of them graduates of Howard University. But the "Gilded Age" left would-be women lawyers out in the cold. White women lawyers remained a rare sight, while African American and Hispanic women lawyers were simply never seen. The rift between abolitionists and suffragists after the Civil War, as well as the new post-Reconstruction racist atmosphere, helped to erect a towering wall of invisibility around black and Latina women. Even the administrators at Howard and other black colleges, who had taken a leaf from Frederick Douglass's book and supported women's rights, made an exception when it came to admissions to law school! Howard Medical School, on the other hand, from the day its doors opened, admitted all qualified students -- black, white, male, female. [4] Mexican American women, many of whose ancestors had settled the Southwest and California long before the Mayflower arrived, could not even dream of careers. In 1848, as the women in Seneca Falls met to discuss women's rights, the U.S.- Mexico War was ending. Before and after that war, Mexican Americans lost their land and their rights, either through the violent attacks of newly arriving white settlers or the chicanery and corruption of the courts. Many Mexican Americans went to work as agricultural laborers on ranches they once had owned. Latinos throughout the nation became what has been called "the invisible minority," an unfortunate status imposed on them until the 1970s. [5] For African Americans, lack of educational opportunities remained a major barrier. In most southern states before the Civil War, it was illegal to even teach the alphabet to slaves. Only a few managed secretly to learn to read and write. Slavery, after all, had been "justified" by a solid "scientific" rationale of black inferiority. An educated slave not only disproved the theories of mental deficiency but also made black men and women more likely to read "dangerous material" and run away or organize struggles for freedom. In the non-slave states, too, black children were banned from attending schools, even those supported by taxes collected from their parents. Private schools were also carefully watched in case their directors developed "funny" ideas about integration. The most famous such administrator was a white Quaker woman, prudence Crandall, who ran a school for young ladies in Canterbury, Connecticut. In 1833, when Crandall enrolled one young black girl, Sarah Harris, in her school, the parents of the other students quickly removed their children from classes and organized a boycott. Local physicians and shopkeepers refused the school their services. When Crandall stood her ground and bravely held classes for seventeen black children, the Connecticut legislature passed a law prohibiting Connecticut citizens from teaching any "person of color" not living in the state. Crandall was jailed for "harboring vagrants." Crandall continued to defy the law and was arrested and tried three times. At her third trial she was convicted when the judge instructed the jury that blacks were not to be viewed as citizens even if they lived in a free state. The conviction was later reversed on a technicality, and Crandall struggled to keep her school open until a firebombing forced her to close it down. Despite the obvious hardships and dangers, other brave women followed in Crandall's footsteps. In 1850, Myrtilla Miner made plans to open a teachers' training school for black women in Washington, D.C. Miner realized that before black children could be widely educated, black teachers would have to be prepared to do the job. Frederick Douglass tried to talk her out of it, fearful of seeing "this little woman harassed by the law, insulted in the street, the victim of slave-holding malice, and possibly, beaten down by the mob." [6] But despite Douglass's fears, Miner went out fundraising. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the best-selling author of the most famous antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, donated the then huge sum of $1,000. In the fall of 1851, Miner Teachers College enrolled six young students and soon expanded to forty. Like Crandall's school, Miner's school was constantly under attack. In 1860, as the movement to end slavery grew stronger, an arsonist set fire to the building, destroying much of it. The school continued for a short time, but Miner's health had deteriorated. She died in 1864 at the age of forty-nine. Among Miner's last graduates was a young girl who would go on to become the first African American woman lawyer in the United States, Charlotte E. Ray. Prior to her accomplishment, two black women were known to have appeared before courts in their own behalf. Mumbet, a slave woman who used the name Elizabeth Freeman, took her demand for freedom to a Massachusetts court in 1783. Under the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, she won her claim that as a native-born American, she was a free woman. The first woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court was also an African American, Lucy Terry Prince (1730-1821). When a white colonel attempted to take the Prince family farm in Vermont, they went to court, lost their case, and appealed. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Lucy Prince decided to argue it herself in 1796 -- and won! Chief Justice Samuel Chase said that Prince had made a better argument than he had heard from any lawyer at the Vermont bar. [7] Charlotte Ray was born in New York City on January 13, 1850, one of seven children in a free black family. [8] Her minister father, Charles Bennett Ray, was a conductor on the "Underground Railroad." Her parents, like those of so many pioneer women lawyers, ardently believed in the education of daughters as well as sons. Immediately after the Civil War, chances to receive an education improved for African Americans when the federal government's Reconstruction programs made schools and hospitals a priority. Volunteer black and white teachers headed south to work in the Freedman's Bureau educational campaign, trying to make a dent in the 95 percent illiteracy rate. More than a quarter of a million children attended over 4,000 schools during the all too brief era of Reconstruction. [9] Several black colleges were also opened, including Fisk University, Hampton Institute, and Howard University. When it came to higher education, black men by far were the major recipients of the short-lived benefits. By 1890 only thirty black women held college degrees. Charlotte Ray was hired as a teacher in the teacher's training department at Howard in 1869, but her real ambition was to study law. She applied to Howard Law School as "C. E. Ray" (to disguise her sex) and managed to slip through the gender barriers. Once having admitted her, Howard was too embarrassed to expel one of its own teachers. A year later, the annual report of the law school mentioned that C. E. Ray, "a colored woman ... read us a thesis on corporations, not copied from books but from her brain, a clear incisive analysis." [10] Several of the black men in Ray's class of 1869-1872 went on to establish successful practices, many in the Washington, D.C., area. Charlotte Ray did not do as well, even though she was among the top students in her graduating class. With a specialty in corporate law, she passed the bar examination in the District of Columbia and was admitted to practice on April 23, 1872. But she was unable to attract enough clients from the business world to earn a living. After five years of struggle, in 1879 she gave up and went back to New York City, where she taught in a Brooklyn public school. Ray died in 1911, nine years before women were allowed to vote. In the 1880s three other black women graduated from Howard Law School. Only one of them, Mary Ann Shadd Cary -- a sixty-one-year-old principal in one of Washington, D.C.'s segregated schools and a leader in the abolitionist movement -- earned a modest living practicing law until her death in 1893. Elsewhere, the picture was the same for African Americans. Ida B. Platt graduated from Chicago Law School in 1892, a year before Myra Bradwell's death, but was barred from practice by the Illinois bar. Lutie Lytle, was admitted to the Tennessee bar, but little is known about her activities. Just as the doors to Howard Law School were opening a crack for women, Reconstruction ended and the long dark night of black codes and Jim Crow began. With government financing withdrawn, the all-black colleges had to limp along as best as they could without federal support. As the virus of racism spread to every section of the nation, the slim gains of African Americans deteriorated quickly. By the 1920s, instead of the paltry 115 black women doctors that practiced at the turn of the century, there were only about sixty- five! In the legal profession, not another word was heard about a black woman lawyer for decades. The two factions of the women's movement that had split over the question of black male suffrage right after the Civil War reunited in 1890. But two years later the "moderates" of NAWSA passed a resolution that made it clear that the organization would fight for the voting rights of white women in open preference to suffrage for black and immigrant women and men. When the Supreme Court reversed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and three years later handed down the "separate but equal" decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), there wasn't even a whisper of protest from the suffrage movement. Blacks were legally free, but their economic conditions had changed very little. Most black women were stuck in agricultural or domestic work. African American women, like women everywhere, were told that young men deserved schooling first. As one scholar phrased it, "Many a male Negro received education or a start in a small business through the laborious efforts of the woman in the household over the washtub or ironing board." [11] Anna J. Cooper, a turn-of-the-century African American teacher in Washington, D.C., had plenty to say about black men's lack of interest in the education of black women. While our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into 16th-century logic. [12] Phoebe Couzins, Utah's first woman lawyer, was one of the few white women who spoke out forcefully on the rights of all women: "Black women are, and always have been, in far worse condition than the men," she said. [13] But most of the pioneer women lawyers, activists in numerous reform movements, especially suffrage, shied away from the controversial issues of race. Myra Bradwell's Chicago Legal News made scant mention of the problems of aspiring black women lawyers. Then, in 1884, when Ada Kepley was denied admission to the bar in Chicago at around the same time that a black man was admitted, Bradwell wrote "The woman in the race to obtain the legal right to practice law in Illinois has been outdistanced by the Negro." Bradwell's biographer speculated that "Perhaps Myra's intention ... was not to appeal to racial sentiments, but merely to demonstrate that her own sex was, in some respects, enslaved to a far greater degree than was the Negro race." [14] But that doesn't explain Bradwell's lack of interest in black women, who lived under the double oppression of racism and sexism. Bradwell, who kept close tabs on women law students and graduates throughout the nation, must have known that white women, when they were unable to pursue law studies elsewhere, often were admitted to Howard University. For a long time black women understandably gave up on entering the legal profession. If a woman like Charlotte Ray could not earn a living despite her obvious talents, it seemed impossible for any black women to succeed. Furthermore, the economic and psychological survival of millions of African Americans must have seemed a far more important "cause" than entry into the professions. Most employers as well as the early labor unions barred African Americans from jobs and membership. Not only schools but many hospitals turned them away -- even the children. Ku Klux Klan members were never punished for beating and lynching black people. With the days of the abolitionist movement long past, allies were few and far between. Many better-off white women spent much of their time in women's clubs, dedicated to a wide variety of social reforms. By 1890 the club movement had grown so large that a General Federation of Women's Clubs was formed to coordinate their work. Although a few black women continued to press for suffrage, most African American activists concentrated on the far more urgent concerns. The crusade for anti-lynching legislation, led by Ida B. Wells, a black woman born to slave parents only a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation, must have seemed a far more worthwhile cause than suffrage or efforts to break into the professions. Ida B. Wells's anti-lynching work led to the formation of black women's organizations in 1892. They appealed for cooperation between the black and white women's groups, but made no headway. In 1900 at the convention of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the credentials committee excluded the black delegate sent by a leading African American women's club. [15] Many of the pioneer women lawyers had been motivated to study law in order to change the lives of less fortunate women. On a Saturday afternoon in February 1887, a group of women lawyers gathered for their regular Equity Club meeting. Their subject was: "What Is Our Duty As Women Lawyers in Society?" Most of them agreed with the opening statement: "I believe that as Women Lawyers ... we must make a special effort, also, outside of our profession, for other women besides ourselves." [16] Clara Foltz, California's first woman lawyer, was a shining example of that philosophy. She spent her entire professional life fighting for equal justice for all. [17] Poor people accused of crimes were assigned unpaid court-appointed attorneys who were supposed to devise ways to collect their fees from their often penniless clients. The only lawyers willing to work for the usual zero fee were recent graduates who needed practice in courtroom procedures, older lawyers who had bad reputations, and, of course, women lawyers. There was no money available for private investigators, expert testimony, or any of the other advantages enjoyed by more prosperous defendants. Without these "frills," conviction by an experienced and often well-paid public prosecutor was almost a certainty. Foltz drafted legislation creating a government-funded public defender system providing legal representation to poor defendants. Her bill was not enacted in California until 1921 and did not become national law until the mid-1960s! Foltz also was instrumental in the creation of California's prison parole system as well as laws separating juvenile offenders from adult prisoners. Like other women lawyers, Foltz was a frequent target of press ridicule. But she told friends that most painful of all were the "wounds which women inflicted upon me ... who even refused friendly recognition of my efforts." [18] Nevertheless, several of the pioneer women lawyers chose to buck the prejudices against women in criminal law courts and urged others to do the same. Martha Strickland, admitted to the Michigan bar in 1883, spoke out against the exclusion of women from juries. The U.S. Constitution entitled defendants to a jury of their peers, yet, Strickland said, "... women ... are called upon every day to submit their dearest rights of happiness, property and life to the judgment of persons differently constituted, mentally and physically, from themselves ... so ... that the maxim ... 'put yourself in his place' is impossible." [19] As long as women could not register as voters, of course, they were not called for jury service. It also was almost impossible for them to "mount the bench." By 1900 only five women had been appointed or elected to even minor judicial roles. Two decades later there were only fifteen. The suffrage movement's attempts to win the vote state by state bogged down quickly except in a few far-flung areas. In the territory of Wyoming in 1870, for example, a constitutional amendment granted women's suffrage. Amidst alarmist predictions of bloodshed, only a few women dared to vote, but newspapers reported that "rough mountaineers maintained the most respectful decorum whenever the women approached the polls." [20] Wyoming women began serving on juries as well. Myra Bradwell commented in the Chicago Legal News, "To all well educated, ambitious females, who have no legal ties to bind them, we would say, emigrate to Wyoming." [21] That same year when the justice of the peace of South Pass City, J. H. Barr, resigned, Esther McQuigg Morris was appointed to his post. Morris, a milliner by trade, had played an important role in drafting and winning passage of Wyoming's Women's Suffrage Bill. Barr quickly changed his mind and demanded a court hearing. Esther Morris's appointment was upheld, but that did not end the turmoil. Her husband, John Morris, a local saloonkeeper, came into court and created a noisy ruckus over his wife's new job. Esther Morris fined him and when he refused to pay, she packed him off to jail. Morris performed her job admirably for almost a year, and then stepped down, most probably because of the turmoil at home. Not one of the many cases she handled was reversed by a higher court. In 1889, Wyoming applied for admission to the Union, maintaining its woman suffrage provision in its newly drafted state constitution. Susan B. Anthony listened from Congress's visitors' gallery while speakers argued that the Supreme Court Minor decision of 1874 prohibited women from voting in any state. The territorial delegate from Wyoming wired his legislature that they might have to drop their suffrage provision. "We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without the women," the return message read. [22] After a close vote, Wyoming was admitted to the Union. Esther Morris, the first woman judge in the nation, presented the new flag to the governor. A handful of other women also were named as justices in small towns. In 1884, Ada Lee, a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, was elected on the joint ticket of the Republican, Democratic, and Greenback parties as circuit court commissioner. As thirteen suits to oust her pended, she tried over 200 cases and completed her term. That same year, Marilla Young Ricker, the first woman lawyer in New Hampshire, was appointed U.S. commissioner. Aside from her regular duties, Ricker made weekly Sunday visits to prisoners and pushed hard for prison reform. Every year from 1870 on, Ricker demanded the right to vote before the selectmen of Dover, New Hampshire. Hopes for a constitutional amendment granting women suffrage were not high. A friend of Susan B. Anthony had introduced the "Anthony Amendment" in 1878, a simple statement that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." Tabled year after year, the proposal reached the Senate floor in 1887. After days of long speeches by senators predicting the death of the American family, the amendment was defeated 34 to 16. The suffrage movement lost steam as many of its activists realized that the state-by-state approach was not working. The same was true for women struggling to enter the legal profession. The Ivy League schools showed no sign of lessening their hostility toward the enrollment of women, and more and more the job market demanded "elite" diplomas. A handful of white women persisted in pounding on the locked doors of Yale, Columbia, and Harvard. Alice Rufie Jordan showed up in the registrar's office at Yale in 1885, armed with a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Michigan as well as her Michigan license to practice law. As she entered, the wild call of "fire," the typical greeting at all-male institutions whenever a woman came on the scene, swept over the area. Told she could not register, Jordan stood her ground, pointing out that the Yale catalog said not one word about the exclusion of women. Jordan paid her fee and began attending classes. The university returned her tuition. Jordan kept the money and still showed up for courses taught by faculty members who agreed to grade her work. Journalists came from other East Coast cities to cover the Jordan story. A reporter from the New York Herald was on hand when Jordan presented her assigned practice case during her second year at Yale. He had little to say on her performance but commented "she was attired in rich black silk that glittered with bead work." Jordan actually earned a degree, but future Yale catalogues corrected the "error." In 1890, the first woman lawyer in Massachusetts, Lelia J. Robinson, requested and received Yale's catalog with a notation that "the marked paragraph on page 25 is intended to prevent a repetition of the Jordan incident." [23] Most of the pioneer women lawyers apparently decided to stay away from losing battles and concentrate on carrying out the tasks set forth by the Equity Club lawyers. When a poor woman needed an attorney, she could almost always find a woman lawyer to help her out. Despite the important role they played on behalf of the poor, women lawyers continued to be subjected to ridicule. The more socially concerned they were, the more the press railed against them. One woman in particular, Kansas lawyer Mary Clynen Lease, became a favorite target of newspapermen. They labeled her the "Wichita Cyclone," "Ironjawed Woman of Kansas," and the "Red Dragon." "Beware of her," journalists warned their female readers. "She advises you to defy the law of the land." Lease's father, a Union soldier, had died in a Confederate prison during the Civil War. At the age of fifteen, Lease started working as a teacher to support her widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters. At eighteen she went to Kansas to take a higher paying job. In 1873 she married and soon was raising four children. All around her she saw farmers working terribly hard and yet growing poorer as railroad and storage companies made fortunes storing and shipping their wheat. Many of them lost their farms as banks foreclosed on their mortgages. When the farmers organized to fight back, Mary Lease began to wish she had the legal training to help them. Lease studied law with a sympathetic local attorney and passed the Kansas bar examination in less than a year. She refused all fees, saying it is a "duty to help the poor and work for social justice." [24] Lease often appeared as a speaker at rallies of the new farmers' Populist movement that spread through Kansas and ran many candidates in 1890. In one of her most quoted speeches, she told her cheering audience, The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Yet 10,000 children starve to death every year in the United States. The common people are robbed to enrich their masters.... What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more hell! [25] Politicians seldom debated her points but instead snickered. When Senator John Ingalls of Kansas made the public comment that "Mrs. Lease had better be home mending her children's stockings," Lease campaigned against him throughout the state and had the satisfaction of seeing him go down in defeat. In 1900 Mary Clynen Lease moved to New York City, worked as a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and ran a free legal services office for poor immigrants. Even the small gains made by women in the professions frightened enough men to produce a countermovement to squelch their feeble progress. In the late 1880s, a new field, called home management education, an obvious child of the Cult of Domesticity, was introduced at many coeducational colleges. Women were urged to major in this new home economics program -- where they learned the latest "scientific" methods of housecleaning -- rather than select the "male" fields of anthropology, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, and law. [26] The women's rights movement had almost completely faded. There was no organization prepared to fight the new wave of efforts to "keep women in their place." As more wealthy women had joined the early professionals' quest for the vote, the struggling suffrage movement had become more conservative. A new generation of younger women took over the organizational reins of NAWSA and stayed away from controversial issues, hoping to keep the movement "respectable." They had no experience in the antislavery movement and little interest in other social issues. During the 1880s and 1890s, as industrialization leaped forward and workers were needed, ships filled with European immigrants -- Poles, Italians, Russians arrived in New York harbor. Some, like the Russian Jews, were fleeing persecution. Labor recruiters for new industrialists had encouraged others to come, promising jobs and a new life. Many stayed where the boats docked, crowding into the tenements of the Lower East Side, East Harlem, and Brooklyn. Others moved on to Pittsburgh, Chicago, any cities where steel plants and meatpacking plants were springing up. There were jobs waiting in the mushrooming factories, but few schools and health services and little decent housing. State referenda on women's suffrage failed seventeen times, winning in only two states, Colorado and Idaho. In 1896, Congress debated the Anthony Amendment and defeated it handily. It was not raised again until 1913. In a few places, women were allowed to vote on school taxes and bond issues, and even occasionally in city elections. But as late as 1880, in New York State school board elections, men threw stones and spat at women voters. By 1891, nineteen states permitted women to vote in school elections and elect a few women to school boards.
Belva Lockwood helped found the Equal Rights Party in 1884. Belva Lockwood joined with other California women and formed the Equal Rights Party in 1884. Lockwood ran for the U.S. presidency with Marietta L. Stow as her running mate. Despite a broad campaign mocking her in the press, supporters managed to get the party on the ballot in six states and she received over 4,000 all-male votes. She repeated the effort four years later with Marilla Young Richer as her vice presidential candidate. But Lockwood and her supporters realized, of course, that women would never be elected to high office if they could not participate in elections. Liquor interests were a major source of opposition to women's suffrage because many of the women who fought for voting rights also supported the Women's Christian Temperance Union, headed by Frances Willard. Willard was known for her notorious racist remarks about alcoholism among African Americans. Several pioneer women lawyers devoted much time and energy to the anti-alcohol crusade. [27] Women flooded into the WCTU in every state, eventually more than 200,000 of them. The liquor interests worried that if women voted, they would push through prohibition legislation. They spent a small fortune opposing women's suffrage state referenda. A few of the middle-class and wealthy clubwomen devoted their spare time to a new cause -- the education and "Americanization" of the new immigrants, especially the many young women. This early work would eventually burgeon into a flourishing settlement house movement in several cities. Mrs. Leonard Weber, the wife of a prominent doctor, at first believed that courses in cleaning and cooking were the most beneficial offerings for the new arrivals. But she soon discovered legal and economic problems plagued most immigrant women far more than lack of recipes. Few of the immigrant women had the slightest knowledge of their legal rights in the United States, whether it was in cases of desertion and child support, or even things as simple as signing an agreement with a landlord. Mrs. Weber and Dr. Emily Kempin Spyri, a renowned law professor from Switzerland, opened a legal clinic, the Arbitration Society, where the women could come for assistance. They had many volunteers but few knew enough about the law to be of much help to the hundreds of women who flooded into their makeshift office. There were no women lawyers in the entire city of New York and only one in the whole state. Lemma Barkaloo, Lavinia Goodell, Belva Lockwood, all native New Yorkers, had left the state, finding it too difficult to further their careers there. But Weber and Kempin were not about to give up. They appealed to administrators at the University of New York (later New York University-NYU). In 1890, the Women's Legal Education Society opened its doors in a building in Greenwich Village, offering adult education classes. For a yearly fee of five dollars, women could study the rudiments of law. At the end of each year, examinations were held and women were given certificates of completion at graduation ceremonies. Reporters arrived to cover the first such ceremony, where several women made speeches on serious legal subjects. As usual, descriptions of the clothing and physical appearance of the women took the center stage in the next day's newspaper articles. One New York Times headline read "These Women Know Law but Don't Look At All Like Typical Lawyers." The story went on to describe the "pretty white dresses" and one speaker who "looked as charming as the proverbial sweet girl graduate." The New York Continental pronounced that "the valedictorian is pretty, piquant and lovable, rich in all the feminine graces and lives in the most artistic surroundings." [28] This type of coverage was the norm then, even as it is today. In 1893, the Brooklyn Chronicle profiled eight Brooklyn women who had completed the law course in exactly the same way. The headline read "Law Has Charms", and typical comments followed: A good deal of unusual cleverness is contained in her pretty little head with its wealth of dark braids. Mrs. Ruth Feriss Russell (wife of Professor Russell) is very pretty and exceedingly girlish, notwithstanding her legal knowledge.... [29] Dr. Kempin also taught a course in Roman law at the University of New York. Turned down for a full-time post, in 1891 she returned to Switzerland to teach full-time at the University of Berne. [30] Now well established, the adult education program she helped establish continued to grow, becoming part of NYU's Division of General Education in 1934. By the third year of the program, more than fifty women were enrolled in each class. Rumors spread that the women were becoming lawyers, but the Women's Legal Education Society did not offer a law degree. It was true, however, that almost every woman who went on to study for the law had attended classes in the makeshift Greenwich Village schoolroom. There was a nearby place for them to study law without leaving home. The University of New York Law School began admitting women in 1890. The Women's Legal Education Society raised money for scholarships to the law school. The prize went to winners of an essay contest. Many of the women who went on to graduate from the University of New York Law School volunteered time to the society to help other poor immigrant women. Just about all of them devoted their careers to helping other less fortunate people. The first three women graduates of the University of New York Law School were Melle Stanleyetta Titus, Cornelia Kelley Hood, and Katherine Hogan. Titus, New York City's first woman lawyer, enrolled in 1891. She graduated with high honors, and in a few years became the first woman admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York as well as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She continued to give free time to the Women's Legal Education Society. Cornelia Kelley Hood worked for the Legal Aid Society and Consumers League and set up law classes for Brooklyn women. Katherine Hogan specialized in labor law and worked for a citywide association of women teachers, engaged in a struggle to win the same pay scale as the male teachers. Hogan was later credited for pioneering the idea of "Equal Pay for Equal Work." [31] In 1893, the year of Myra Bradwell's death, the Chicago Columbian Exposition (World's Fair) became a symbolic battleground between the new back-to-the-kitchen forces, women's rights advocates, and African Americans. At the entrance to the fairgrounds, black men and women handed out leaflets entitled "The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition." Frederick Douglass had initiated the protest when fair organizers banned an exhibit on the accomplishments of African Americans. As president of the first black women's club in Chicago, Ida B. Wells had initiated a fund-raising project to pay for the brochures. [32] Inside the fairgrounds, women milled about to see a scientific kitchen exhibit, demonstrating the new world of cooking appliances, stoves, and refrigerators. Women lawyers, including Phoebe Couzins, the first woman graduate of Washington University Law School in St. Louis, Missouri, had a small table at the Women's Pavilion with information on the accomplishments of professional women. She was reportedly upset by the lack of interest in the pioneering work of women lawyers. In 1895, Couzins and several graduates of the Women's Legal Education Society formed an Alumnae Association to encourage other women to study law. Couzins gave the opening speech, making no effort to conceal her anger: And I tell you young ladies that when you get into the realm of the law you will discover ... that man has been trying to do the housekeeping in the Temple of Justice for years ... all by himself, with the result of cobwebs all over the place.... Legal fiction is piled upon legal fiction and precedent on precedent until the whole storehouse of law is in a helpless confused condition. It needs women's wit, women's fairness and women's sense of right and righteousness to put the legal fabric in order and repair. [33] Her anger flowed from a real concern. Despite all of the work of the pioneer women lawyers, during that same year of 1895 four out of five law schools were still refusing to allow women to study, no matter what their qualifications. Even in the nation's capital, where new jobs in law firms opened every year, women had made little progress. Delia Sheldon Jackson, a Wellesley graduate, whose father was superintendent of education for Alaska, could not find a law school willing to accept her. Since it was still possible to study for the bar without a legal degree, Jackson asked Ellen Spencer Mussey, a woman lawyer who had graduated from Howard University, to allow her to study in her small office. Mussey offered to form a women's law class if Jackson could find two other interested women. The following year the Women's Law Class held its first session, taught by Mussey and another Washington attorney, Emma Gillett. Gillett had studied with Belva Lockwood and then also graduated from Howard in 1883. Three years later Mussey and Gilbert encouraged their students to push for admission to Columbian College in the nation's capital. The trustees refused to even interview the women. So Mussey and Gillett created the first women's school of law, Washington College of Law. Three of the seven trustees were sympathetic men. Mussey was named as the only woman dean of a law school in the world. In the spring of 1899, six women received their law degrees. Despite this small victory for women in law, their numbers had increased very little. They remained in the backwaters of society, still the "other." At a graduation speech at the East Florida Seminary for Women in Gainesville, Florida, in 1898, Judge Horatio Davis expressed what was still the generally accepted attitude toward women when he said, "Seek to be good, but aim not to be great. A woman's noblest station is retreat." [34]
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