Lavinia Goodell, Lawyer vs. Edward Ryan, Chief Judge of the Wisconsin Supreme Court
FROM THE SQUARE - NYU Press Blog, March 1, 2017
The history of American women’s struggles to overcome discrimination and to assert their rights often reminds the historian of reenactments of the story of David and Goliath. Small, brave, and clever the ancient Israelite David insists upon fighting Goliath, the giant Philistine. David fells Goliath with his sling and a rock. Victory is his.
At the conclusion of the American Civil War, a small number of women, let’s called them modern-day Davids, acted on their aspirations to become attorneys. It was a radical –cheeky- ambition. Law was an all-male profession. Nevertheless, these women sought ways to learn the law by apprenticing with sympathetic male relatives or progressive community leaders, or at the small number of law schools which let women matriculate.
Learning the law was only the first hurdle. At the end of a period of “reading the law,” a student wishing to have a legal practice and to represent clients in court was obliged, by custom and local laws, to be admitted to the bar. Progressive judges accepted motions to admit women in some counties and states. Elsewhere, however, conservative justices refused to extend bar privileges to women lawyers, employing the dodges of the common law, use of the male pronoun in relevant statutes, social expectations, and “the law of the Creator.”
Lavinia Goodell was born in 1839 when her father was well on his way to becoming a nationally known proponent of abolition and temperance. Reform activities and “moral bearings,” framed the life of the family. By the age of nineteen Lavinia imagined law as a profession through which she could do good and not lose her moral bearings. In 1870 she followed her parents west from New York to Janesville, Wisconsin and in 1872 began reading law using books lent by local attorneys. The family’s good name as reformers and temperance activists burnished Lavinia’s image as a decent and proper Christian woman. After studying for two years Goodell successfully passed an oral examination and became a member of the Rock County (circuit court) bar. She joined a professional sorority of ten or so women in the United States who had been admitted to a local or county bar. Like most of these women, she established a solo private practice attracting clients from Janesville and the surrounding county. She was also appointed by a local judge to represent criminal defendants in his court. In 1875 she won a liquor violation case against nearby saloon keepers. The defendants appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Lavinia Goodell met her Goliath.
The chief justice of that court, Edward G. Ryan, immigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1830. He settled in Milwaukee, a smart and politically ambitious newcomer who espoused strong positions on many issues. At the 1846 Wisconsin constitutional convention he voted against married women’s property rights and woman suffrage. Time did not soften his views about women’s proper place: the home.
Normally, members of a circuit court bar were granted the automatic privilege of admission to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Before Goodell, of course, these lawyers were all male. In the summer of 1875, when the saloon keeper case was appealed, Goodell petitioned the state Supreme Court for admission. Rejection of her petition would seriously limit her ability to attract clients and earn a good living. Ryan made her wait for an answer until February of 1876. Then, in an opinion authored by the chief justice, Goodell’s hopes for equal professional treatment were dashed. Licensing Lavinia Goodell, Ryan contended, would mean “a sweeping revolution of social order.” Nature had not, he wrote, “tempered woman for juridical conflicts.” He believed that her admission would be “revolting,” that her presence in courts of justice would result in “a public spectacle.”
Goodell responded with her version of a sling and rock, an eloquent and well-reasoned legal brief that she circulated to a number of newspapers and suffrage associations. Next, she gathered the names of local attorneys who supported women lawyers’ right to bar admission. Most critically, when the next session of the state legislature opened, she threw herself into the task of winning support for the anti-discrimination bill that she had drafted.
When that bill passed, it mooted Ryan’s decision. Goodell was jubilant. Like David--a person of small social standing, but brave and clever--she had bested a giant, in this case one of the most powerful men in the state of Wisconsin. After her victory, Goodell wrote to her sister, “Judge Ryan takes it quite hard that I beat him.”
At the conclusion of the American Civil War, a small number of women, let’s called them modern-day Davids, acted on their aspirations to become attorneys. It was a radical –cheeky- ambition. Law was an all-male profession. Nevertheless, these women sought ways to learn the law by apprenticing with sympathetic male relatives or progressive community leaders, or at the small number of law schools which let women matriculate.
Learning the law was only the first hurdle. At the end of a period of “reading the law,” a student wishing to have a legal practice and to represent clients in court was obliged, by custom and local laws, to be admitted to the bar. Progressive judges accepted motions to admit women in some counties and states. Elsewhere, however, conservative justices refused to extend bar privileges to women lawyers, employing the dodges of the common law, use of the male pronoun in relevant statutes, social expectations, and “the law of the Creator.”
Lavinia Goodell was born in 1839 when her father was well on his way to becoming a nationally known proponent of abolition and temperance. Reform activities and “moral bearings,” framed the life of the family. By the age of nineteen Lavinia imagined law as a profession through which she could do good and not lose her moral bearings. In 1870 she followed her parents west from New York to Janesville, Wisconsin and in 1872 began reading law using books lent by local attorneys. The family’s good name as reformers and temperance activists burnished Lavinia’s image as a decent and proper Christian woman. After studying for two years Goodell successfully passed an oral examination and became a member of the Rock County (circuit court) bar. She joined a professional sorority of ten or so women in the United States who had been admitted to a local or county bar. Like most of these women, she established a solo private practice attracting clients from Janesville and the surrounding county. She was also appointed by a local judge to represent criminal defendants in his court. In 1875 she won a liquor violation case against nearby saloon keepers. The defendants appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Lavinia Goodell met her Goliath.
The chief justice of that court, Edward G. Ryan, immigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1830. He settled in Milwaukee, a smart and politically ambitious newcomer who espoused strong positions on many issues. At the 1846 Wisconsin constitutional convention he voted against married women’s property rights and woman suffrage. Time did not soften his views about women’s proper place: the home.
Normally, members of a circuit court bar were granted the automatic privilege of admission to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court. Before Goodell, of course, these lawyers were all male. In the summer of 1875, when the saloon keeper case was appealed, Goodell petitioned the state Supreme Court for admission. Rejection of her petition would seriously limit her ability to attract clients and earn a good living. Ryan made her wait for an answer until February of 1876. Then, in an opinion authored by the chief justice, Goodell’s hopes for equal professional treatment were dashed. Licensing Lavinia Goodell, Ryan contended, would mean “a sweeping revolution of social order.” Nature had not, he wrote, “tempered woman for juridical conflicts.” He believed that her admission would be “revolting,” that her presence in courts of justice would result in “a public spectacle.”
Goodell responded with her version of a sling and rock, an eloquent and well-reasoned legal brief that she circulated to a number of newspapers and suffrage associations. Next, she gathered the names of local attorneys who supported women lawyers’ right to bar admission. Most critically, when the next session of the state legislature opened, she threw herself into the task of winning support for the anti-discrimination bill that she had drafted.
When that bill passed, it mooted Ryan’s decision. Goodell was jubilant. Like David--a person of small social standing, but brave and clever--she had bested a giant, in this case one of the most powerful men in the state of Wisconsin. After her victory, Goodell wrote to her sister, “Judge Ryan takes it quite hard that I beat him.”
Newseum, Washington, D.C.: Jill Norgren, October 18, 2016
“A Reflection on the Life and Legal Career of Belva Lockwood
Join me if you will in a moment of time travel: The day is March 3rd, 1879. A 48 year old woman walks, or rides, from her home on F Street, Washington, D.C., to a nearby courtroom on Capitol Hill. It is not just any court. It is the Supreme Court of the United States. The woman has attired herself in a plain black velvet dress. Friends, family, and male members of the D.C. bar accompany her into the courtroom along with an unusual number of journalists.
The woman is attorney Belva Lockwood. Her entrance is a triumphal one: she has come to be sworn in as the first female member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar. She sits, and after some time, motions to admit begin. Signaled by the clerk, Lockwood rises and, together with former Congressman and women’s rights activist Albert Gallatin Riddle, moves to the inner rail immediately before Chief Justice Morrison Waite. Riddle begins: “I move to admit to the bar of the court Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood, a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the District, in good standing and having an extensive practice in all branches.” He pauses and then praises his protégé. Waite directs Lockwood to step to the clerk’s desk to take the oath ---which she does, kissing the Bible and signing the name of the first woman to be admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court’s marshal calls for order amidst cheers and congratulations.
Belva Lockwood, born Belva Ann Bennett, had a life story at once improbable and quintessentially American. She was a smart, book-loving farm girl who started teaching school in Niagara County, New York at the age of 14. Very little time had passed before she was complaining to her minister’s wife about the lower wages paid to her because of her sex. Thirteen years later, now a graduate of Genesee College, she experienced similar wage discrimination as a teacher despite being a young widow with a six year-old daughter to support.
Lockwood did not shy from controversy. She lost her battle for equal wages at the Lockport Union School but, working with New York State activist Susan B. Anthony, went on to introduce elements of a curriculum meant for boys into her teaching of girls. This act marks the beginning of Lockwood’s adult life as a women’s rights activist concerned with access to quality education, equal employment opportunities, fair wages, and woman suffrage.
New York State did not hold her long: in 1866 Lockwood, increasingly fascinated by politics, moved to the nation’s capital.
Lockwood came to Washington and forged a new identity. In 1866 the District was a frontier, a town in search of its identity. Journalists had few kind words for the city that Belva decided to make her new home. Mary Clemmer Ames described Washington as a third-rate southern town, physically crude and dirty. Horace Greeley cautioned that morals there were deplorable.
In an autobiographical article written years later Lockwood said that she “came to Washington… to learn something of the practical workings of the machinery of government, and to see what the great men and women of the country felt and thought.” Lockwood was a teacher but she did not wish to make this work her life’s career. As a schoolgirl she had been assigned to read the speeches of American statesmen and discovered, she later wrote, that “in almost every instance law has been a stepping-stone to greatness.” She had rebellious dreams.-she had been born a woman, “with all of a woman’s feelings and intuitions,” but, Lockwood confessed, she “had all of the ambitions of a man, forgetting the gulf between the rights and privileges of the sexes.”
In the late 1860s, in an urban environment such as Washington, women had few job opportunities, most of which were poorly paid: teacher, nurse, journalist, boarding house keeper. Law and custom kept the fair sex from pursuing much else but Lockwood was determined to join the small corps of women in the United States whose activism centered upon challenging the restrictions of law and custom. Thus, by 1884 Belva Lockwood had obtained a law school degree, been admitted to the local bar, and successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress for an anti-discrimination bill guaranteeing qualified women lawyers the privilege of becoming a member of the federal bar. Eighteen months after becoming a member of the Supreme Court bar she became the first woman to argue a case before the justices of that Court. Most days she handled general law cases, pension claims, or filed for letters of guardianship from the D.C. court. A few times she took on rather colorful breach of marriage contract suits.
In 1884 Lockwood announced as a candidate for the U.S. presidency, becoming the first woman to run a full campaign for that office. She traveled the country, supporting her campaign through paid speeches. She tallied slightly less than 5,000 votes. Yet people took notice: newspapers and magazines wrote about her; total strangers named daughters after her. As late as 1958 her photograph and story were used in an advertisement for U.S. Savings Bonds.
Americans love the story of a self-made person: Individuals who use grit, determination, and hard work to achieve their dreams. And yet we know that no one makes it on his or her own. Belva Lockwood was no exception. She drew family into the work of her enterprises. She remarried in her late 30s. Ezekiel Lockwood, a dentist and lay minister many years her senior, had few worldly goods but he believed enthusiastically in his wife’s work on behalf equality of opportunity. His presence beside her --as she challenged the status quo--- gave her the respectable status of a married woman, while his connection to veterans gave her a pensions claim clientele.
Lockwood was also a joiner. In Washington she joined the Universal Franchise Association and a local branch of the Universal Peace Union. In 1870 she became a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Lockwood approved of the organization’s pursuit of a federal constitutional amendment guaranteeing woman suffrage. But the National also attracted her because its founding members championed equal educational and employment opportunities for women.
Networking with members of these groups provided Lockwood with the friendships and collaborations necessary to advance her agenda of legal reform. So, too, did her ability to meet and lobby members of Congress. Her first serious immersion in congressional politics came in 1870 when she authored and lobbied what became the Arnell bill, legislation to bar employment discrimination and unequal pay in federal agencies. In the same year she wrote two memorials on woman suffrage intended to influence Senate debate on a new District of Columbia governance bill.
Lockwood believed in the power of law to change society. Throughout her long life she lobbied the federal and the D.C. governments on a wide-range of policies including women’s right to elective office (school trustee), the nationalization of state domestic law; protection of polygamous Mormon women’s right to vote; and the appointment of women in criminal justice positions; Best known, of course, was the legislation that she lobbied to open the federal bar to her and other qualified women lawyers.
I argue that throughout her adult life Lockwood benefitted from outside helpmates. This included members of the fourth estate. Public knowledge of the woman and her politics occurred largely because of the attention given to her by the press. Writers for local and national newspapers as well as women’s rights publications followed her work, particularly in the 1870s and 1880s reporting on her speeches and lobby activities as well as her presidential campaigns in 1884 and 1888.
And here, perhaps as a surprise to many of you, the story of Belva Lockwood joins with that of Myra Bradwell. Mrs. Bradwell was, of course, a lawyer. Most people assumed she would practice with her attorney husband. But certain of her experiences during the Civil War convinced Bradwell that she also wanted to have a business which she would control. In October of 1868 she became the editor and publisher of a legal trade paper, the Chicago Legal News. The News was an immediate success, quickly building a solid subscription list of lawyers and businessmen. In the tradition of some of the older trade papers, Bradwell did not ignore social and political news. She wrote about corruption in the court system as well as championing the need for reform of the state’s married women’s property law.
Bradwell and Lockwood were members of the first generation of women lawyers in the United States. In the Chicago Legal News Bradwell also noted the accomplishments of these women as well as her own exclusion from the Illinois bar. She wrote about Lavinia Goodell’s fight to become a member of the Wisconsin bar, and she covered the unfolding story of Washington lawyer Belva Lockwood’s fight to become a member of the federal bar.
Bradwell and Lockwood knew each other from suffrage circles. In the early 1870s Lockwood had followed Bradwell’s legal case and carefully read the Supreme Court opinions. She knew the language of the right-granting statute that Bradwell had drafted in Illinois and, when the time came, Lockwood lobbied Congress for a similar law applicable to the federal judiciary.
For her part Bradwell wrote about Lockwood on a number of occasions. Tonight we are most interested in the two articles that she published about Lockwood’s fight to open the federal bar to women. In March of 1878 the Senate Judiciary Committee gave Lockwood’s bill an adverse report, arguing that the power to determine admission to the U.S. Supreme Court bar was reserved to that Court. Alarmed, Bradwell wrote a long editorial deploring the decision of the committee. BUT when Lockwood and her congressional allies finally prevailed a year later, Bradwell again picked up her pen, this time/ to congratulate her friend: “Ten years ago the passage of such a law would have been impossible…Great credit is due Mrs. Lockwood.” In this editorial Bradwell also openly linked her support for equal professional opportunity and woman suffrage, writing “If women are allowed to be physicians, clergymen, and last, but not least, lawyers…why should they not be allowed to vote?”
What a story: two smart, fearless women advancing the rights of their sex through their writing, their lobbying, and by their legal challenges to the denial of equal rights.
Join me if you will in a moment of time travel: The day is March 3rd, 1879. A 48 year old woman walks, or rides, from her home on F Street, Washington, D.C., to a nearby courtroom on Capitol Hill. It is not just any court. It is the Supreme Court of the United States. The woman has attired herself in a plain black velvet dress. Friends, family, and male members of the D.C. bar accompany her into the courtroom along with an unusual number of journalists.
The woman is attorney Belva Lockwood. Her entrance is a triumphal one: she has come to be sworn in as the first female member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar. She sits, and after some time, motions to admit begin. Signaled by the clerk, Lockwood rises and, together with former Congressman and women’s rights activist Albert Gallatin Riddle, moves to the inner rail immediately before Chief Justice Morrison Waite. Riddle begins: “I move to admit to the bar of the court Mrs. Belva A. Lockwood, a member of the bar of the Supreme Court of the District, in good standing and having an extensive practice in all branches.” He pauses and then praises his protégé. Waite directs Lockwood to step to the clerk’s desk to take the oath ---which she does, kissing the Bible and signing the name of the first woman to be admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court’s marshal calls for order amidst cheers and congratulations.
Belva Lockwood, born Belva Ann Bennett, had a life story at once improbable and quintessentially American. She was a smart, book-loving farm girl who started teaching school in Niagara County, New York at the age of 14. Very little time had passed before she was complaining to her minister’s wife about the lower wages paid to her because of her sex. Thirteen years later, now a graduate of Genesee College, she experienced similar wage discrimination as a teacher despite being a young widow with a six year-old daughter to support.
Lockwood did not shy from controversy. She lost her battle for equal wages at the Lockport Union School but, working with New York State activist Susan B. Anthony, went on to introduce elements of a curriculum meant for boys into her teaching of girls. This act marks the beginning of Lockwood’s adult life as a women’s rights activist concerned with access to quality education, equal employment opportunities, fair wages, and woman suffrage.
New York State did not hold her long: in 1866 Lockwood, increasingly fascinated by politics, moved to the nation’s capital.
Lockwood came to Washington and forged a new identity. In 1866 the District was a frontier, a town in search of its identity. Journalists had few kind words for the city that Belva decided to make her new home. Mary Clemmer Ames described Washington as a third-rate southern town, physically crude and dirty. Horace Greeley cautioned that morals there were deplorable.
In an autobiographical article written years later Lockwood said that she “came to Washington… to learn something of the practical workings of the machinery of government, and to see what the great men and women of the country felt and thought.” Lockwood was a teacher but she did not wish to make this work her life’s career. As a schoolgirl she had been assigned to read the speeches of American statesmen and discovered, she later wrote, that “in almost every instance law has been a stepping-stone to greatness.” She had rebellious dreams.-she had been born a woman, “with all of a woman’s feelings and intuitions,” but, Lockwood confessed, she “had all of the ambitions of a man, forgetting the gulf between the rights and privileges of the sexes.”
In the late 1860s, in an urban environment such as Washington, women had few job opportunities, most of which were poorly paid: teacher, nurse, journalist, boarding house keeper. Law and custom kept the fair sex from pursuing much else but Lockwood was determined to join the small corps of women in the United States whose activism centered upon challenging the restrictions of law and custom. Thus, by 1884 Belva Lockwood had obtained a law school degree, been admitted to the local bar, and successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress for an anti-discrimination bill guaranteeing qualified women lawyers the privilege of becoming a member of the federal bar. Eighteen months after becoming a member of the Supreme Court bar she became the first woman to argue a case before the justices of that Court. Most days she handled general law cases, pension claims, or filed for letters of guardianship from the D.C. court. A few times she took on rather colorful breach of marriage contract suits.
In 1884 Lockwood announced as a candidate for the U.S. presidency, becoming the first woman to run a full campaign for that office. She traveled the country, supporting her campaign through paid speeches. She tallied slightly less than 5,000 votes. Yet people took notice: newspapers and magazines wrote about her; total strangers named daughters after her. As late as 1958 her photograph and story were used in an advertisement for U.S. Savings Bonds.
Americans love the story of a self-made person: Individuals who use grit, determination, and hard work to achieve their dreams. And yet we know that no one makes it on his or her own. Belva Lockwood was no exception. She drew family into the work of her enterprises. She remarried in her late 30s. Ezekiel Lockwood, a dentist and lay minister many years her senior, had few worldly goods but he believed enthusiastically in his wife’s work on behalf equality of opportunity. His presence beside her --as she challenged the status quo--- gave her the respectable status of a married woman, while his connection to veterans gave her a pensions claim clientele.
Lockwood was also a joiner. In Washington she joined the Universal Franchise Association and a local branch of the Universal Peace Union. In 1870 she became a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Lockwood approved of the organization’s pursuit of a federal constitutional amendment guaranteeing woman suffrage. But the National also attracted her because its founding members championed equal educational and employment opportunities for women.
Networking with members of these groups provided Lockwood with the friendships and collaborations necessary to advance her agenda of legal reform. So, too, did her ability to meet and lobby members of Congress. Her first serious immersion in congressional politics came in 1870 when she authored and lobbied what became the Arnell bill, legislation to bar employment discrimination and unequal pay in federal agencies. In the same year she wrote two memorials on woman suffrage intended to influence Senate debate on a new District of Columbia governance bill.
Lockwood believed in the power of law to change society. Throughout her long life she lobbied the federal and the D.C. governments on a wide-range of policies including women’s right to elective office (school trustee), the nationalization of state domestic law; protection of polygamous Mormon women’s right to vote; and the appointment of women in criminal justice positions; Best known, of course, was the legislation that she lobbied to open the federal bar to her and other qualified women lawyers.
I argue that throughout her adult life Lockwood benefitted from outside helpmates. This included members of the fourth estate. Public knowledge of the woman and her politics occurred largely because of the attention given to her by the press. Writers for local and national newspapers as well as women’s rights publications followed her work, particularly in the 1870s and 1880s reporting on her speeches and lobby activities as well as her presidential campaigns in 1884 and 1888.
And here, perhaps as a surprise to many of you, the story of Belva Lockwood joins with that of Myra Bradwell. Mrs. Bradwell was, of course, a lawyer. Most people assumed she would practice with her attorney husband. But certain of her experiences during the Civil War convinced Bradwell that she also wanted to have a business which she would control. In October of 1868 she became the editor and publisher of a legal trade paper, the Chicago Legal News. The News was an immediate success, quickly building a solid subscription list of lawyers and businessmen. In the tradition of some of the older trade papers, Bradwell did not ignore social and political news. She wrote about corruption in the court system as well as championing the need for reform of the state’s married women’s property law.
Bradwell and Lockwood were members of the first generation of women lawyers in the United States. In the Chicago Legal News Bradwell also noted the accomplishments of these women as well as her own exclusion from the Illinois bar. She wrote about Lavinia Goodell’s fight to become a member of the Wisconsin bar, and she covered the unfolding story of Washington lawyer Belva Lockwood’s fight to become a member of the federal bar.
Bradwell and Lockwood knew each other from suffrage circles. In the early 1870s Lockwood had followed Bradwell’s legal case and carefully read the Supreme Court opinions. She knew the language of the right-granting statute that Bradwell had drafted in Illinois and, when the time came, Lockwood lobbied Congress for a similar law applicable to the federal judiciary.
For her part Bradwell wrote about Lockwood on a number of occasions. Tonight we are most interested in the two articles that she published about Lockwood’s fight to open the federal bar to women. In March of 1878 the Senate Judiciary Committee gave Lockwood’s bill an adverse report, arguing that the power to determine admission to the U.S. Supreme Court bar was reserved to that Court. Alarmed, Bradwell wrote a long editorial deploring the decision of the committee. BUT when Lockwood and her congressional allies finally prevailed a year later, Bradwell again picked up her pen, this time/ to congratulate her friend: “Ten years ago the passage of such a law would have been impossible…Great credit is due Mrs. Lockwood.” In this editorial Bradwell also openly linked her support for equal professional opportunity and woman suffrage, writing “If women are allowed to be physicians, clergymen, and last, but not least, lawyers…why should they not be allowed to vote?”
What a story: two smart, fearless women advancing the rights of their sex through their writing, their lobbying, and by their legal challenges to the denial of equal rights.