Rebels at the Bar

by Jill Norgren

  Robinson’s upbeat appraisal of women lawyers’ future was sparked by the positive change in the public’s view of her as well as two new alumna of Boston University’s law school. After Jessie Wright’s 1887 graduation, and Mary Greene’s in 1888, Robinson was no longer the sole alumna. She could set aside her feelings of being an oddity. In addition to her practice, Robinson took women as student-apprentices (they studied mostly at home) and began work on a new book, the law of husband and wife, again a primer for the lay public.80

  And Mary Greene became Lelia Robinson’s dear friend. In 1888, with Jessie Wright married and practicing in Topeka, they were Boston’s two lady lawyers. They shared many values, contented themselves with small solo practices, and loved to produce legal writing. In published articles and Equity Club letters they seldom passed up an opportunity to refer to one another, or to pass along a compliment.81

  Greene was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1857. The state had been founded by her ancestors. Greene came to Boston for law school following the death of her father. She was responsible for his widow and in her late twenties entered the program for the practical purpose of understanding the law and, thus, being better able to handle her own and her mother’s business affairs.82 In a letter written to Equity Club members while she was still a law student, Greene described herself as previously “most woefully ignorant of the very first principles of our Common Law.”83 She had also taken to heart the experiences of other widowed women who had been “duped and deceived in money matters by those who should have been their most trust-worthy friends.” While in law school Greene had something of an epiphany about business and estate practices. She felt that women with legal problems would prefer a sympathetic female attorney. She said that they would consult women lawyers and talk freely with them, in ways they would not with male attorneys. “Here,” she wrote, “was a field for women.” The thought pleased her, yet she also spoke gravely of “pioneers … [being] narrowly watched and keenly criticized” with a “slight misstep of one bring[ing] suspicion on all.”

  Law school had been uneventful and pleasant. Greene dealt more easily with the discussion of “delicate” subjects, presumably medical jurisprudence, than Kitty Waugh. She wrote that these discussions were “necessary parts of our legal course, and [must be viewed] in a business light, putting all false modesty aside.”84 She imagined woman’s position in medical school with mixed-sex classes as more far unpleasant. In addition to her classes, like Jessie Wright before her Greene spent her last year of school working in the law offices of prominent Boston attorney Alfred Hemenway. Like Struve and Haines in Seattle, Hemenway had fashioned a mentor’s role for himself, leaving Greene to say that not all Boston was conservative.85 As she prepared to graduate—magna cum laude—Greene said she was open to what business came along but wanted to make conveyancing her specialty. Over the course of her thirty-year career in law, she did just this, specializing in conveyancing and estate work.

  Judge Walbridge Field swore Greene in as a member of the Suffolk bar on September 28, 1888. Robinson’s friendship and example made waiting for clients less painful. Together they drafted legislation on matters of mutual interest. The women successfully wrote and lobbied for an amendment to the overly vague Massachusetts Act of 1883 (ch. 252 permitting women lawyers to be commissioned by the governor to administer oaths, take depositions, and acknowledge deeds). The change clarified their powers as well as giving such women lawyers the powers of a justice of the peace in many matters, such as taking affidavits and issuing summonses for witnesses.86

  Greene believed that women attorneys ought to go into court. She did not do so with any regularity, in part because of her legal specialty and also because Greene suffered from a lifelong throat ailment that sometimes left her ill for months. (In her sixties she moved to California to improve her health.) She did take charity clients. While some of her Equity sisters-in-law wrote positively of learning from these clients and growing as human beings, Greene did not like the experience: “I, in common with others, have suffered from the ingratitude of that kind of people. I do not mind the ingratitude for favors conferred so much as I do the insinuation … that I have not taken the pains in working up his case that I would have done if I had received money for it.”87 She seemed, however, to feel that it was her Christian duty to take such work.

  Greene was not alone. Washington, D.C., attorney Emma Gillett wrote that charity and sympathy were wearing. “Charity clients,” she said, “should be shunned unless in extreme cases. They have no more right to a lawyer’s services for nothing than a washerwoman’s, and when one takes charity clients to any extent she lowers her professional tone.”88 Robinson did not agree with Greene and Gillett. She counseled immigrant and working women at Boston’s Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, and held open hours from two to four o’clock at her office on Saturdays for women too poor to pay her fee.89

  Like Robinson, Greene had a sharp mind and a talent for writing. In 1889, while trying to attract clients, she became increasingly interested in legal scholarship. In less than four years she would travel to Chicago to deliver a major address in front of the leading jurists of the world.

  Greene’s first scholarly venture after law school involved the translation from the French of Dr. Louis Frank’s pamphlet, Woman Lawyer. Frank was a noted Belgian lawyer and reformer who, with lawyer Marie Popelin, co-founded the Ligue belge du droit des femmes (Belgian League for Women’s Rights). Lawyer Catharine Waite published the translation in her journal, the Chicago Law Times.

  Greene next turned to the question of contracts between husband and wife. Greene had started law school with an eye to the problems of widows. She quickly broadened the scope of her interests and, like Robinson, committed herself to the education, protection, and empowerment of all women. In 1889 Greene testified on the issue of husband-wife contracts before the Judiciary Committee of the Massachusetts legislature. She argued in support of a petition for the validity of such contracts. Her concern centered upon the impact of marital privilege interfering with the enforcement of contracts between spouses because they could not testify against one another. After testifying, Greene re-shaped her testimony as a scholarly article and published “Privileged Communications in Suits between Husband and Wife” in the prestigious American Law Review.90 She was the first woman to publish in that journal.

  She next wrote a series of articles, “Practical Points of Every-Day Law,” for the Chautauquan. Updated, her papers on the property rights of woman became a central topic in her 1902 book, The Woman’s Manual of Law.91 Business law, prepared and presented to women, also became the centerpiece of her adjunct teaching career. From 1889 to 1906, at Lasell Seminary, the school where Mary Hall taught for many years, Greene offered a well-attended a class titled “Business for Women.”92 Lasell was the first girls’ school to give courses in law. Earlier Greene’s mentor, Alfred Hemenway, taught Lasell students a class in “Principles of Common Law.”

  Lelia Robinson had a strong interest in networking with other professional women. Greene joined her in some of these activities. They were both devoted members of the Equity Club. Robinson reported once staying up until midnight to read a packet of club letters.93 She felt “really acquainted” with the other correspondents—“each one in her own little niche of my thoughts”—and in 1888 made the suggestion that the women come to know each other better through the exchange of photographs. Robinson meant this to have personal value, but she also wrote that there were advantages of a “practical nature to be derived from real familiarity with each other.” She made referrals for clients by letter and telegraph to attorneys around the country. It was “especially desirable that we women should be as familiar as possible with each other’s professional standing and experience, that we may be able to render mutual aid and support.” With men’s social clubs closed to women, and many bar associations still engaging in sexual discrimination, Robinson understood the need to build parallel institutions t
hat would serve women.

  In 1888 Robinson and Greene founded the Portia Club as just such an organization. Women lawyers and law students from all over Massachusetts, initially a small number, gathered once a month for an informal dinner. The meetings were held on Saturday afternoons in a private dining room of a downtown Boston hotel. The socializing of the Portia Club members was more immediate and intimate than that of the Equity Club members. By 1890 Greene felt free to pronounce the Portia Club “a flourishing institution with its monthly dinners and discussions.”94

  Among attendees at the dinners were eight new women students at Boston University Law School and attorney Alice Parker, a former resident of Lowell who had studied law, and passed the bar, in San Francisco, and had now returned to Massachusetts where she divided her time and professional activities between Lowell and Boston. She was the author of many amendments before the state legislature affecting the property rights of women. In Boston she shared an office with Robinson, whose practice had been steadily increasing, particularly in the probate area, where she had executed “a number of important wills” in most of which she was named executrix or trustee or both.95 Robinson had also done a little court work, including one criminal case, but seemed happy to be mainly in the office. Parker specialized in probate law and so the match was a good one. Influenced by Robinson and, perhaps, Greene, Parker wrote a series of articles for the Home Journal of Boston titled “Law for My Sisters.” These essays explored “the law of marriage, widows, breach of promise, wife’s necessaries, life insurance on divorce, sham marriages and names.”96

  Robinson’s practice was growing at the same time that she was investing considerable energy in two writing projects, one a short treatise and the other a collective biography of women lawyers. In 1889 she published The Law of Husband and Wife, Comp. for Popular Use. In contrast to Law Made Easy with its forty-one chapters, this new volume—dedicated to “The Portia Club”—covered, in seven short chapters, marriage, property rights, wife’s separate estate, wife’s support-separate maintenance, custody of children, claims of widows and widowers, and divorce. Like her first book, The Law of Husband and Wife also contained a compilation of abstracts of state statutes relevant to the law of husband and wife.

  A classic article, still in use, came out of her second project: a survey of the names and achievements of all women lawyers in the United States. The Equity Club as well as the Portias involved only a small number of women lawyers and law students. Robinson loved these groups, but she wanted female and male attorneys to know the full extent of women’s achievements in law—the 1890 census listed 208 women lawyers—and she hoped to encourage women lawyers around the country to know one another. She also had business motives, believing that more than one woman lawyer in any community eased the reception of all, and increased the work available to all.97

  Robinson wanted a national venue and decided upon publication in a new journal, The Green Bag: A Useless but Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers. The journal had cachet: Louis Brandeis contributed a history of the Harvard Law School to volume one, which also contained discussions of murder cases and lawyer jokes, news, and gossip. In 1889 Robinson began researching the names and accomplishments of American women lawyers. Through her list of Equity Club members, and correspondence with law school deans across the United States, she established a preliminary list of women graduates, working it into a more comprehensive document using a circular letter.

  In January 1890 Robinson brought out the results. Ellen Martin, a Chicago lawyer, had published “Admission of Women to the Bar” in the November 1886 issue of the Chicago Law Times. Martin’s essay was a start, but Robinson’s article was a far more complete and up-to-date biography of America’s female lawyers. In thirty pages she laid out crisply written stories of seventy-eight women and made various comments of her own on the state of the law for a woman practitioner. For years, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage had been profiling activist women in the volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage. Frances Willard and Mary Livermore would publish A Woman of the Century, consisting of biographies of leading American women, but not until 1893. Robinson’s article was a singular contribution, a significant step in giving women lawyers recognition and the prod, perhaps, that led Belva Lockwood to produce a far less ambitious article on women lawyers in July of 1890 for The Illustrated American in New York.98

  * * *

  In May 1889 Robinson invited her Equity sisters to discuss the pros and cons of whether it was “practicable for a woman to successfully fulfill the duties of wife, mother and lawyer at one and the same time? Especially a young married woman?”99 Fifteen months later she wrote to tell club correspondents that in April 1890 she had married. She claimed not to have been seriously contemplating marriage for herself when she put her earlier question to the club. Coy or not, she had happily entered into marriage with Eli Sawtelle, a piano dealer who liked to read philosophy, was “proud of [her] professional ambition,” and encouraged it.100 The groom gave Lelia a “fine new roll-top desk” for her office and took her to Washington, D.C., on their honeymoon where, on April 8, the bride was sworn in as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court bar, the sixth woman to take the oath. Pro-suffrage civil-rights activist Senator George Hoar of Massachusetts moved her admission as she stood next to Emma Gillett, who was also sworn to the high court bar on this day.

  Members of the Portia Club made the Sawtelle marriage their social event of the year. After the wedding they devoted the monthly meeting to a reception to which gentleman visitors were invited for the first time. Fifteen people sat down to dinner while Alice Parker presided, proposing toasts with comments in rhyme.101 That year Robinson vacationed for two months at her husband’s summer home in New Hampshire, doing some business by letter, going into Boston occasionally, and leaving Alice Parker in charge of work she could not get to.

  Lelia Robinson and Eli Sawtelle may have seen one another initially at a meeting of the First Nationalist Club of Boston, developing a romance while becoming club leaders. Like Clara Foltz, Robinson had been attracted to the democratic socialist ideas teased out of Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian novel.

  Robinson attended First National meetings but in 1889 joined several other members in splitting off to form the Second Nationalist Club of Boston, a faction that was less theoretical and more pragmatic in its leanings. Robinson was elected its first chairperson.102 In keeping with her books, the group emphasized actively working to bring about change in society through lobbying and running for public office. With Eli’s support she led the club all through 1890 and talked about running for elective office in 1892 as a Nationalist candidate. While head of the club she brought Clara Foltz to Boston to speak to Second Nationalist members.

  In the years 1889 and 1890, Robinson was never plagued with the “waiting around” that had so vexed her in the early 1880s. In addition to her journalism, new marriage, and work for the Nationalists, Robinson kept up her law practice, appearing, for example, with attorney Marilla Ricker in her petition for admission to the New Hampshire bar.103 She also began to outline her third book, a volume on wills and inheritances. But in February 1891 she fell seriously ill with flu. She stopped her work for the Nationalists and in July, with Eli, left earlier than usual for vacation at his family’s home in Amherst, New Hampshire. Troubled with poor sleep, Robinson obtained a prescription for belladonna, took some of the powerful medicine, and on August 10, 1891, died from an accidental overdose. She was forty years old. Her devastated husband ordered a tombstone to read, “The Pioneer Woman Lawyer of Massachusetts, Author, and Journalist. A lover of the true, the good and the beautiful.”

  Mary Greene found out about her friend’s death at her new home in Providence, Rhode Island. She had moved her practice there in 1890 to meet family responsibilities, and with the hope of improving her own health. Alice Parker heard the news in Boston. Robinson’s death was reported in many newspapers and journals but Mary Greene waited nearly thirty y
ears to write a remembrance of her friend for the Women Lawyers’ Journal.104 The facts she reported were by then well known, but she wished also to write about her friend’s deepest strengths. Greene said that Robinson’s “strong sense of justice and her independence in expressing her views caused her to be misapprehended at times by those who did not know the warm heartedness that lay beneath.”105 Her disposition, Greene wrote, “was extremely social, and she loved to bring people together for the advancement of their common aims and interests.” Her friend stressed that the success of women in the legal profession was “a consuming enthusiasm … and [Robinson] was always devising means to bring [women] into closer and more social relations with each other, and she was as generously delighted at their successes as she would have been at her own.”

  In their far longer lives Mary Greene and Alice Parker followed many of the paths laid down by Lelia Robinson. Parker practiced law in Boston for nearly thirty years while also being active in the woman suffrage movement. In 1918, now Alice Parker Hutchins, she moved her practice to New York, where she became editor of the Women Lawyers’ Journal published by the Women Lawyers’ Association (and presumably commissioned Greene’s article about their mutual friend). After the formation of the League of Women Voters, Hutchins became an active member and leader.

  Mary Greene also kept faith with her friend’s ambitions for women. For thirty years she practiced law in Rhode Island. Greene carried forward Robinson’s idea of law “for the people” in her Lasell classes, and in her writing for The Chautauquan and other publications. She also used her legal training on behalf of the Women’s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society, which she served as a vice president and legal counsel for more than a decade. Involvement in the society permitted her to study women’s legal status in other societies, and to mentor young women who were going abroad as missionaries.106