Rebels at the Bar

by Jill Norgren

  Initially thankful not to be a pariah, Goodell nonetheless wanted intellectual companionship. She enjoyed her legal reading and the fact that she paid no tuition but, intellectually isolated (lonesome, she said), Lavinia desperately hoped for a community of people with whom she could talk over Blackstone, Kent, and the other jurists. She continued to hope for hands-on experience in an office, like a male student, cautiously sounding out Janesville’s attorneys, hoping, without success, for an apprentice’s desk. She wrote facetiously that these men had no “particular prejudice against strong minded women, but that the superior masculine mind, has a terror of being laughed at.”35 A practical woman, she was appalled that even when there were no male apprentices in town, the attorneys would not take her on although they needed help copying papers, and keeping their offices open when they were in court. Goodell was outright furious when she saw that these lawyers “would sooner hire shiftless, incompetent boys, that are continually bringing them to grief, than take my services gratis, when they know how steady I am, and anxious to learn.”36

  All of this gnawed at Goodell’s pride, and challenged the idea of fair play instilled by her parents and their reform movement friends. Most of all, however, her failure to win an apprenticeship troubled her because she wanted to become the best possible lawyer, with the best possible training. When the members of one Janesville partnership took on a young gentleman scholar only a few months after telling Lavinia that they had no work for her, she was openly envious of the apprentice’s good fortune, sitting in his nice little anteroom “with every advantage, getting an insight into practical law, through their cases learning more in a week than I could in a month of unaided study.”37 Strong-willed and cheerful, she sized up the rebuffs, called them “a good tonic,” and predicted that adversity would stimulate even greater effort on her part.38

  Goodell was not without hope, or allies. The two local attorneys who lent her law books occasionally, privately gave her bits of instruction and advice. They admired her intelligence but did not wish to be identified in public as supporters of women’s rights. As they got to know Goodell better, the same men employed her every once in a while as a clerk when, in Goodell’s words, “an indolent boy leaves.”39 Predictably, infuriatingly—they let her go as soon as “any kind of young boy” appeared.

  By February of 1874 Lavinia felt that she would be ready in June to be examined for the bar. She related to Maria that, summoning much courage, she had “consulted a popular lawyer here, and told him definitely what I wanted to do, and that I wanted him to help me. Have never been so frank before but concluded to make the plunge, hit or miss.”40 Her candor won a pledge of aid from local attorney and civic leader Pliny Norcross, who, in June, would sponsor Goodell for the bar by filing her application.

  The winter and spring of 1874 passed quietly with small pleasures, and a few vexations. Some mornings she cleaned house, then permitted herself, after lunch, to rest on a bed and read “Revised Statutes.” The discovery that the mother of a Sunday school student was a suffragist delighted her, while in the same weeks she chafed and complained about faint-hearted temperance supporters.

  And then it was June, and time for battle. Goodell was ready to be examined by a panel of local attorneys and Judge Harmon Conger but was told that Conger and the lawyers were busy trying a case in justice court, “and can not attend to it.”41 Days later she pushed Norcross to submit her application but he “failed” her.42 Norcross explained that other lawyers, who knew the judge well, reported that Conger intended to refuse her admission, on account of her sex. He asked if she would prefer to back out. “Steamed up” by this piece of news and in a “martial state of mind,” Goodell said that she would be admitted to the bar of Wisconsin and that if Judge Conger “refused me, I would make him very sorry for it before I had done with him.”

  Goodell first thought she would apply at once, despite what she had been told, face Conger’s judgment, and “then make a row about it.” Then she stopped to reflect and decided to proceed more cautiously. Norcross agreed to interview Conger in private to find out what he intended to do. For her part, Goodell agreed to hunt up precedents. She wrote to suffrage leader Lucy Stone and several women lawyers in different parts of the country intending to compile a list of judges who had permitted women to be examined, as well as legislation explicitly allowing qualified women to be admitted to the bar. She also tried to find out if Milwaukee law student Lilly Peckham had applied to the bar before her untimely death.

  Several days passed with no call asking her come to the courthouse. Norcross had learned that Judge Conger was nervous, uncertain whether he was allowed to admit women. Finally, word came that the judge would be examining “a couple of young men from Beloit within a few weeks [and if she had] a mind to come in and be examined with them [she] might!” Rolling out a bit of cheek, the would-be candidate commented, “Very kind! I shall do so … study up … and come down on him with what thunder I can command.”

  Goodell did not feel she could lower her defenses. Contemplating the possibility of rejection at the courthouse, she noted, “[I]f he refuses me I shall try all the other courts in the State, and if I can not get admitted shall have a bill introduced into the next Legislature and make a fuss generally till I get in.” Like other women in her position, Goodell did not fail to observe that making a fuss might be for the best, as it would “advertise me.”

  Happily, all of this proved to be unnecessary, and on June 18 Lavinia shot off an ecstatic letter, as she often did, to Sarah Thomas: “The middle aged, grey headed individual who now addresses you is an honorable member of the Wisconsin bar.”43 On the previous night, after the court had adjourned, she and a young man from Beloit, “also nervous and friendly,” were summoned before the judge and several “old and able lawyers.”44 The judge, admitting that he initially doubted the legality of admitting a woman, told of having studied up on the question. He gave everyone in the room, including Goodell, a chance to express an opinion. Her letters and diary do not mention whether any of the attorneys, or Conger, knew about the Illinois law that had been lobbied by the Bradwells—and Alta Hulett’s subsequent admission—or that nine months before, in Washington, D.C., Belva Lockwood had become a member of the local bar. Whatever Conger had learned “studying up” on the issue apparently helped him to overcome his reservations, and after rigorous questioning by three attorneys and Conger, Goodell and the nervous young man received favorable evaluations. They were sworn in as members of the Rock County (circuit court) bar, and signed their names on the roll of attorneys. Goodell was thirty-five years old. Without knowing the names of all of the other rebels, she had become one of the ten or so women in the United States admitted to a local or county bar. The Rock County Recorder and the Milwaukee Sentinel posted short, positive notices about the lady whom the Recorder predicted would “no doubt be a shining light among the legal profession. Success to her.”45

  Sixteen years had passed since Lavinia first told Maria of her desire to become an attorney. Once licensed, she did not miss a moment in establishing herself. Hours after being sworn in she rented professional rooms near Norcross’s office and arranged for them to be painted and papered and for street signs to be made advertising her practice. She also had business cards printed. Weeks later Lavinia resolved to add “Miss” on these cards because correspondence directed to “Mr.” had been coming to her office.46 Like any male attorney new to the profession, she was reasonable about her finances. Decades before, the future Supreme Court chief justice Salmon P. Chase had been modest in hoping to earn eighty dollars after a year of practice.47 Four decades later, Goodell wrote, “If I pay expenses the first year or two I shall be satisfied.”48

  At the end of June Goodell sent a happy but somewhat curious letter to Maria, a wife for more than twenty years: “I feel very much as if I had been married, receiving so many congratulations, and sending out cards. Don’t see but it is just as good! I think I stand quite as good a chance of future ha
ppiness and prosperity.”49

  Goodell had good reason to be pleased. She reported that the majority of women in Janesville were “delighted and enthusiastic” with her pathbreaking accomplishment, although a few tried to “snub” her.50 Some men saw her success as a joke, and one facetiously called her his “sister-in-law,” but most local people accepted it “in a more rational light,” and the sheriff took pleasure in calling her “squire.” The Janesville press had favorable notices and Gerrit Smith, an old family friend and social reformer, sent her twenty dollars for the purchase of law books. Learning that she had done better in the exam than most candidates, Goodell could not help but cluck, “I think it is pretty good if my admission raises the standard of scholarship.”

  By July her office was ready—furniture in place and looking pleasant. Indeed, the space was so pleasing that after debating with herself, Goodell decided not to “furnish a spittoon for the use of future clients.”51 She had never seen a law office without one but decided “not to mar my pretty rooms with such an unsightly object.”52

  Thus, with the hissing “quite faint, and the applause loud and long,” along with thoughts of Blackstone—who was said to have waited four years for his first case—Goodell sat back and watched for clients, writing that she would be “consoled” if she did not get a case at once.53

  Goodell left no office logbooks. Her letters, however, suggest the slow shaping of a general law practice typical of a solo male practitioner without family or political connections, or a specific expertise. One week after her admission to the bar, she earned a dollar completing a title search. Debt collections followed. She prepared guardianship papers for a “country client,” but he failed to come back to get them.54

  In early August Goodell had her first taste of a significant case—or cases. Temperance women in nearby Fort Atkinson wanted action taken against two men for the illegal sale of liquor. The local prosecutor was a “liquor man,” and so they approached Lavinia, hoping she would have the courage to take on the saloon keepers.55 Goodell was pleased to accept the two cases. They promised good fees and the work was a perfect fit for the child of nationally acclaimed temperance activists, herself a strong advocate of the temperance pledge.

  After making preliminary preparations in Janesville, Goodell boarded a train for the twenty-five mile journey to Fort Atkinson, rounded up her witnesses, and sailed through her arguments in the local justice court. She wrote Maria that it “was real fun. I knew just what to do and was not a bit frightened and do not think now I should be afraid to run any case through Court, having time enough before to prepare.”56 In her words, she “beat” in both cases, and was paid twenty dollars and train fare.

  When the defendants—Goodell called them “the Dutchmen”—appealed the verdict, Lavinia’s clients retained her to argue at the court in Jefferson, where she won the first case and lost the second. Goodell wrote that it was “exciting” and that the liquor men had tried to win by circulating false information that there was to be a postponement.57 Goodell uncovered the ruse and wrote Maria with no little amount of pleasure that they were “taken back when they saw us women.” The courthouse was full of men and Goodell admitted to being “considerably scared” but added charmingly, “not so much as Mr. R——[opposing counsel][who] was so flustered and nervous and ‘mad,’ that it tickled me immensely.”

  Maria confided in her sister that she would find it “dreadful” to confront men in court on her own.58 Lavinia shot back that she did not find it difficult to work in the company of men, and that so far “masculine lawyers have been a good deal more afraid of me, than I have of them,” perhaps because they were “teased about being beaten by a woman.”59 She was referring to her success against her mentor, Pliny Norcross, in a case involving a shipment of rotted peanuts.60 Norcross barely forgave Goodell for whopping him in front of his colleagues.

  * * *

  In 1875, a bright and ambitious Wisconsin lawyer appealing a client’s case before the state supreme court could not avoid Edward G. Ryan, the new chief justice. Lavinia Goodell came before Ryan’s court that year as the first woman lawyer in Wisconsin seeking admission to the high court’s bar. The liquor suit she won in Jefferson had been appealed to Ryan’s court along with an estate settlement case. Goodell was “quite delighted at the prospect” of appearing there, but first she needed to be admitted.

  Edward Ryan immigrated to the United States from Ireland in 1830, a twenty-year-old with seven years of Jesuit education followed by a bit of legal reading, a man determined to become an American citizen and a member in the New York bar.61 As a newcomer, Ryan taught, read law, and joined the Democratic Party. Five years later, he was a citizen and a member of the bar. He then moved west, first to Chicago, then Racine, Wisconsin, and, finally, Milwaukee. He practiced law, sought judicial appointments with mixed success, and impressed everyone who listened to him that he was smart, loved a platform for his ideas, and was in no way scared off by controversy.62

  Ryan was interested in politics and first earned public notice at the 1846 Wisconsin constitutional convention. As a delegate, he espoused strong positions on many issues, including regulation of banks and opposition to the direct election of judges. He voted against a proposal that would grant women suffrage and another that would provide a state constitutional guarantee for married women’s property rights. In Ryan’s reading of the Bible (Mark: 10), neither was necessary because upon marriage “the two shall become one.”63 Husbands were obliged to protect wife and family.

  Wisconsin Supreme Court chief justice Edward G. Ryan (1810-1880) opposed Lavinia Goodell’s application to become a member of the state supreme court bar, arguing that admitting women would create a “sweeping revolution of social order.” (Photograph WHi-24975 courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society.)

  Traditional views about women’s rights dominated most Americans’ thinking in the 1840s and 1850s. The very fact that there was support for such reform, however, demonstrated to conservatives like Ryan that there was a chink in society’s social armor. After seeing how proponents of women’s rights—among them Mathilde Anneke, Amelia Bloomer, and Clarina Nichols—were winning converts on the local lecture circuit, Ryan decided to fight back by writing a talk of his own.

  The lecture, “Mrs. Jellyby,” thirty-one pages when later typed, took hours to deliver.64 Ryan used a minor character from Dickens’s Bleak House—a woman who neglects her family in order to engage in philanthropy and argue for women’s rights—as a device to draw in the crowds and mock “strong-minded women” who, in his telling, endangered society by urging members of the fair sex to abandon their proper, pure, God-given role. Ryan did not present men as intellectually superior. Rather, he argued that each sex was endowed with unique abilities and roles. Reproduction, he insisted, “is the duty of all God’s creatures.”65 Almost anticipating Lavinia Goodell and the inapplicability, in her case, of coverture, Ryan admitted that there were “old maids,” but immediately restated that “marriage is the duty and natural condition of both sexes … and we are to reason with the sex and not with its exceptions.”66 A woman could “accomplish her social destiny” only by marrying because it is “the achievement of her sphere of action, her compact of duty with society, the seal of her life.”67 Delivering the coup de grâce, he pronounced that “every position of woman in Society, which essentially severs her from home, or gives her functions or interests conflicting with the duties of home, or lessens her peculiar adaptation to the refined charities of home, is a prostitution of her sex and a heresy to nature. … [and she an] apostasy to her sex.”68

  Governor William R. Taylor appointed Ryan to fill out the term of Chief Justice Luther Dixon on June 16, 1874, a day before Lavinia Goodell was admitted to the circuit court bar in Janesville.69 Ryan’s private law career had careened between singular successes—he appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court eleven times between 1865 and 1872—and periods when his office door seldom opened.70 His unyielding views and hot-he
aded disposition affected business, and eventually caused his wife to leave him. He was said to have “colossal frailties” of temper; those who wished to be kinder described him as possessing a “petulant temper.”71 Still, Ryan’s views on ethics and the need for honest government as well as his stance on banks, railroads, and credit got him through the vetting process and put him on the bench that would decide whether Goodell would be admitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court bar and, therefore, permitted to represent her Fort Atkinson clients at the appeal of their liquor case.

  Although Goodell did not know it, she stood no chance of admission. Customarily, male attorneys who had been admitted to a circuit court bar were granted the privilege of admission to the high court bar without pause. But Goodell was not male, and that was really all Edward Ryan needed to know.

  There was, in fact, little about Goodell or what she requested of the court that resonated with Ryan. He stood by the opinions expressed in his “Mrs. Jellyby” talk as much in 1875 as when he wrote the lecture in 1854. (He delivered it regularly until his appointment as chief justice.) As a leader of the state Democratic Party, he had strongly opposed temperance, dry candidates, and activists like the Goodells who supported both.72 Ryan viewed Lavinia as an old maid, an apostate to her sex as described so maliciously in “Mrs. Jellyby.”

  Goodell made her petition for admission in the summer of 1875 without revealing to Maria, or anyone else, whether she expected trouble. She did not let on whether she knew about Ryan’s conservative views, or whether he had ever given the “Jellyby” talk in Janesville. Instead, she continued with a busy year of practice, and lobbying on behalf of temperance laws.