by Jill Norgren
* * *
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the allure of the American West pulled thousands upon thousands of people out of rural towns and crowded cities. Men, women, and children uprooted themselves in search of land, commercial opportunities, work, and, in some cases, new identities. In March 1884 Lelia Robinson joined the ranks of the westward-bound hopefuls, setting out across the continent, alone, for the Washington Territory. She made no secret of her vexation at the limited professional opportunities open to her at home. However, she made the brave, dramatic move chiefly influenced by accounts of the “liberality of western views on the ‘woman question.’”36
When Robinson entered the Washington Territory in May of 1884, married women’s property laws had recently been reformed, and women had just been voted full suffrage rights, and could serve on petit and grand juries.37 In the view of historian Sandra VanBurkleo, at this moment Washington women “stood at the threshold of political and economic equality. … spouses had become co-sovereigns within households.”38 Married women, subject to coverture under the common law, had been uncovered. Opponents, however, saw the reforms as “unnatural” or “‘womanly’ contamination of the body politic.”39 They found the idea of household male-female co-sovereignty, or the smashing of the “unitary household head,” vile, and a wrongful interpretation of law.
Robinson hoped to build a large and interesting law practice, ultimately selecting Seattle as the place she would settle. She was probably oblivious when she first entered the city to the degree of the backlash that was developing against these gender reforms.
Life in Seattle drew out talents and inclinations Robinson had previously suppressed. It permitted a very public and outgoing persona to emerge, and to flourish. The networking Robinson pursued in Boston had not paid off professionally. She was sufficiently savvy, however, to obtain at least one letter of introduction. (There may have been more, but if her male supporters—C. R. Train or Thomas Higginson—wrote on her behalf, that paper has been lost.) The letter she presented in Seattle was written by Mrs. Robert Harris, wife of the president of Northern Pacific Railroad, to a prominent member of the city’s society, a “Mrs. Weed.”40 It opened doors. Two days after her arrival Robinson was invited to observe a session of the circuit court, sitting for its last week in Seattle. Women were seated in the jury box, ex-governors and ex-judges milled about, mingling, in the way of a still-small city, with most of the town’s attorneys. Robinson was delighted, and a bit shocked, by the women jurors. When court ended she was introduced to the presiding judge, Roger Sherman Greene, and well-known territorial jury lawyer John C. Haines. In these men she found professional mentors, relationships that had so persistently eluded her in Boston.
Roger Greene, born into a family of East Coast political blue-bloods, practiced law in New York City and Chicago before being appointed by President Ulysses Grant in 1870 as an associate justice on the Supreme Court of Washington Territory. He became a Republican Mugwump, and later a member and candidate of the Prohibition Party. He held Perfectionist Christian beliefs and, by the time Robinson met him, was chief justice of his court.41 He was a man of very strong opinions. He “believed scoundrels feared women’s moral power.”42 In 1884 he told a grand jury that “the opponents of woman suffrage are found allied with a solid phalanx of gamblers, prostitutes, pimps, and drunkard-makers.”43 Some Washingtonians found him eccentric, others said he was “maniacal,” still others called him a “fearless … social reformer.”44 The women’s movement had deeply engaged Greene throughout his adult life. It was natural for him to take a hand in building Robinson’s Seattle career.
Seattle, despite being a small community, had a remarkable bar.45 John Haines and Henry G. Struve belonged to that bar, and had a law firm that also included a new partner, 24-year-old Maurice McMicken. Struve, Haines & McMicken was the town’s premier firm. Struve had been a judge and would become mayor of Seattle. Haines was later appointed to the federal bench. They might have been “gray hairs” in the mode of Boston, but were not. Indeed, at the time Robinson met him, Haines was only thirty-four years old—about the age of Seattle. The partners demonstrated their liberality by offering Robinson a desk in their office. When she took her place at the firm she met Mary Leonard (later helped by Clara Foltz in Portland), who was reading law with Haines and also had a desk in the office. Leonard was a Swiss immigrant who had worked as a maid and seamstress in Portland. While in Oregon she had also been tried and acquitted of the murder of Daniel Leonard, her husband.46 Mary Leonard exuded moxie and Foltz liked her. For unstated reasons, Robinson did not. Still, Robinson served on Leonard’s bar examination committee and gave her a pass.
Judge Greene rode circuit, making it necessary for Robinson to wait until summer to be admitted to the local bar. When the judge made a quick trip to Seattle, he took up the matter. Greene noted Robinson’s Massachusetts experience and her Suffolk County bar membership, and swore her in. With the circuit court in session elsewhere, however, during the summer of 1884 Robinson, new and female, found herself with little work. Refusing to be inactive, she used her free time to learn stenography, most likely from the city’s only stenographer, Thomas Purdie.47 Later, giving practical advice to her Equity Club sisters, Robinson urged “every woman who studies law to study stenography also, for it will be invaluable in getting her clerkship opportunities, and if she practices west, it will give her the chance of filling in empty hours by reporting testimony in court. … excellently paying work directly in the line of [our] profession.”48
Robinson had her first shot at challenging legal research when Henry Struve requested that she work on an appeal brief of considerable interest, and controversy. In May Struve, also riding circuit, had objected to the inclusion of two women being sworn in for a Tacoma grand jury. At first glance, his willingness to take this position, one shared by partner John Haines, appeared at odds with the firm’s fair treatment of Leonard and Robinson. It was, of course, a business decision although the firm might have declined the case. Struve’s action highlighted a divide in liberal Territorial circles: enthusiasm for certain rights such as woman suffrage or women’s employment did not necessarily extend to support for women jurors.49 Although mixed-sex juries were now the law in the territory, part of the public groused openly and loudly about lady jurors. They spoke about the likely neglect of domestic duties, the rough and tumble of the courtroom, and the anticipation that women jurors would feminize justice, introducing new norms and letting emotion dominate reason.50
Whatever his private views, in court Struve contended that the two Tacoma women should not be sworn as jurors because they were married women living with their husbands. He said the jury service statute required that jurors be householders and that under the statute there could be only one householder, the husband. He also argued federal issues. He raised the Fourteenth Amendment and questioned whether Congress, in the 1853 Organic Act establishing the territory, intended to give the territory the power to enfranchise women, or to seat them on juries.51 Struve was overruled and appealed to the territorial supreme court. Robinson was assigned to research the law buttressing the argument that married women could not be considered householders.
Robinson wrote that the territory’s liberality had drawn her across the continent. Once in Washington, however, she began separating her support for woman suffrage from her feelings about women serving on juries. Early in her stay she said, “[W]hatever might be the policy and the desirability of women’s voting, it was carrying the matter a little too far to force them to do jury service.”52 However, by the time Struve put Robinson to work on the appeals brief, the women of Washington had won her over. She had observed mixed-sex juries at work and come to admire the comportment and decision-making skills of the female jurors. Researching the legislators’ intentions with respect to the term “householders,” Robinson understood that her “sympathies were on one side of the question, my work … on the other, as sometimes must happen.”53
She wrote a good brief, but in September Judge Greene’s court sustained the lower court. Struve appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on the constitutional issue. (In 1885, with a new member on Greene’s court, Struve’s position was upheld. Greene wrote a scathing dissent.)
Some attorneys continued to oppose women jurors. However, in her 1886 article “Women Jurors,” Robinson delighted in reporting that many male lawyers, initially opposed to the reform, had been “converted” by trying cases before women jurors.54 They found the women to be “intelligent, clear-headed, quick-witted, and reliable.” Attorneys like Struve and Haines sometimes tried to pander to the emotions of female jurors and had to learn that this was a mistake. Haines nearly lost a self-defense case with such a ploy. Robinson wrote that the experience “convinced the astonished lawyer that nothing but straight and square evidence could be made available with women jurors.”55
Judge Greene was the most consistently helpful of the men Robinson encountered in Seattle. Like the local judges sympathetic to Belva Lockwood and Wisconsin’s Judge Conger, who appointed Lavinia Goodell defense counsel in several criminal trials, Greene gave Robinson professional opportunities. As soon as he had developed a sense of her abilities, he appointed her a court referee in divorce cases as well as other civil matters. As a referee she took testimony from witnesses and made recommendations to the judge. The work was, she wrote, “sure pay and good pay.”56
Greene also believed that Robinson would make a good trial advocate and was not apprehensive that she would bring “gendered justice” into his courtroom. Indeed, as a deeply religious man, he welcomed what he believed were women’s unique moral sensibilities. Robinson’s other Seattle professional friends agreed that courtroom work was important for a woman, and joined Greene in urging her to do more than back office work.57 She did not hesitate despite the reserve she had shown in Boston. She did admit, however, to initial “fear and trembling.”58
Robinson’s Seattle debut as a trial advocate came in the October session of Greene’s court. At the beginning of the month he had appointed her to defend Ah Mon, who had been indicted for “bringing and aiding and abetting persons to bring in Chinese to the United States from British Columbia.”59 She represented Ah Mon at the arraignment, and prepared her defense in just a week. Robinson argued the case before a mixed-sex jury, making her the first female attorney to bring a case to trial before a jury of men and women. After three hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
Robinson was a true convert. After several trials she concluded that “the public, from whom business must come if at all, judges a woman lawyer as it does a man, largely by his success or non-success in court, and if one is never seen or heard there, one’s abilities are a matter of serious doubt.”60 The Ah Mon case established Robinson’s reputation. She received other referrals from Greene, and also handled three or four well-paying cases as a member of the Struve, Haines & McMichen firm, including representation of a husband in a high-profile divorce proceeding.61
Robinson also gave herself permission to speak in public in support of woman suffrage and women’s duty to vote. At a women’s meeting sponsored by the Congregational Church she drew upon her knowledge of Boston, where women had the right to vote in school elections but, she said, generally did not do so. She urged Seattle women to do better, and to accept the responsibilities that come with equal legal and political status. Reformer and newspaper publisher Clara Colby, a good friend of Belva Lockwood’s, came to Seattle from the Midwest the week of this meeting. The women were introduced and Colby also agreed to speak. She pulled out her best camp meeting voice and argued that “the nation was watching this Northwest corner. If the move is successful here, your actions and words will be mentioned and quoted all over the United States … [and] will prove an immense leverage in the hands of woman suffragists all over the land.”62 Robinson and Colby had great success, and at the close of the meeting “the women en masse expressed by a rising vote their determination to register and vote at the city election.”63
Perhaps spending the 1884 Christmas holidays away from her family triggered homesickness, or perhaps Robinson’s parents and sister had written to say that they would not, as planned, re-settle in Seattle. Whatever the reason, or reasons, on January 11, 1885, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that Robinson would soon leave on a trip to Boston.64 She attended a farewell party replete with food, music, and poetry, and was off for the East. Although her experience in Seattle had been a very positive one—“I was delighted with the place, climate, people, and the bright new civilization; succeeded well professionally,” Robinson wrote her Equity Club friends—she did not return to Seattle because “it proved impracticable for my family to join me,” and she had been “exceedingly heart-sick for lack of them.”65 This may have been all for the best as shortly the politics of women’s rights, liquor prohibition, illegal gambling, and the Grange tore into the precarious political and legal equality that had been established in the territory, ending the “liberality” that had drawn Lelia Robinson to the West. Judge Greene, who “thought of women as the embodiment of community virtue, and constructed himself as their divinely-ordained custodian, [became] a focus of charges of ‘unnatural’ feminization and degradation of the polity.”66 By 1888 women suffrage in Washington Territory had been revoked, and women no longer occupied seats in the jury box.67
* * *
Robinson returned to Boston in the winter of 1885. Illness of some sort plagued her for months. In the spring, she did not look about for a law office (or if she did, remained mum about it). Instead, Robinson decided to spend several months in Chicago working with the publisher of her manuscript Law Made Easy. She had labored on the book since 1882, and now had a lengthy document to refine and edit. A legal practice in Boston would wait. She loved the law but confessed that “the book has taken a deeper hold on my affections and my ambitions than the practice itself, and so it becomes, for a time … first in its claims on my time and attention.”68 The “claim” was not a small one. She followed the six months living in Chicago with a year on the road. One letter to the Equity Club was written from Texas. She was supervising the work of book agents responsible for selling Law Made Easy, and did not return to Boston until 1887.69
Robinson’s book, dedicated to her parents, was a remarkable achievement, both in concept and in substance. The concept was simple, yet daring and revolutionary. She did not write Law Made Easy for the “gray hairs,” or for law school students, but rather for the lay public. In forty-one chapters she laid out “those elementary principles of law which everyone must have in order to conduct the daily affairs of life intelligently.”70
In her September 1886 introduction, Robinson wrote that her book would enable the public “to keep clear of the legal pitfalls which yawn before unwary feet in this busy world of ours.”71 It would not be an “every-man-his-own-lawyer kind of book” that caused people to think they knew as much as a lawyer and, therefore, to get into legal scrapes.72 She avoided the unnecessary use of technical language and made certain to treat all subjects. She trusted that her previous experience in journalism would enable her to understand the public need, and that her legal training would enable her to meet it. She reported, tongue-in-cheek, that “no personal opinions are intruded and no hobby-horses ridden, in any part of this work.”73 This was, of course, untrue. Law Made Easy represented her deeply held view that lay people deserved a book through which they could inform themselves about “the every-day business of life.”74
Robinson told her readers that the text was written “with a view to consecutive reading” and suggested, indeed “beg[ged] all who take up the book at all, to read it through attentively from the first page to the last, at least once. Afterward, it may be used for reference on particular points.”75 The book sold well.
Boston once again became Robinson’s permanent home in the autumn of 1887. She had not practiced law in two and a half years and “from my former experience h
ere … dreaded the prospect.”76 Insecure about her recall of Massachusetts law, she entered into a general law clerkship—offered to her only because of her knowledge of stenography—in the office of “an old lawyer who [had] a tremendous business … that extends from the supreme court to the municipal criminal.”77 Her employer “was entirely unaccustomed to having a woman about the office,” and the arrangement ended after only three tiring months.78
Again, on her own, in January of 1888 Robinson found a little room in which to start up a solo practice. The space opened from the large offices used by two male attorneys who specialized in trust and conveyancing business (drafting and preparing deeds and leases that transfer an interest in real property). The room pleased her, in part because she had a view of the new courthouse being built across the square. She was given free rent, and in exchange occasionally worked for one or the other of her landlords. The arrangement permitted her to come and go without worrying about losing clients because the office was closed. Her colleagues made their large library available to her, and she learned the practical aspects of abstracting titles. To announce her new circumstances, Robinson sent out business cards and placed an advertisement in the Woman’s Journal, the publication of the American Woman Suffrage Association for which she often wrote articles.
From a distance, Robinson’s professional situation hardly spelled success. It was another beginning. Standing in her shoes, Clara Foltz would have felt stymied. Robinson was nonetheless happy with her practice and, as she saw it, the progress made by women lawyers. In April 1888 she wrote her Equity Club sisters that a great deal had changed for the better: “The Sun do move! … Half a dozen years seems to have cleared away the fogs of doubt and hesitation through which I was viewed, and the idea of a woman in the law is no longer an uncomfortable novelty.”79
