by Jill Norgren
Lasting fame came to Greene after her speech at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. On August 7 she addressed the Congress of Jurisprudence and Law Reform, one of the many associations that met during the exposition. This international meeting was special: it was scholarly, and the original list of speakers had included only the names of male jurists. Mary Greene and Clara Foltz had been invited because Myra Bradwell, her lawyer daughter Bessie, and Catharine McCulloch had argued to the male organizers that women had earned a place high in law, and deserved to be among eminent jurists speaking about important legal topics.107
The paths bringing Foltz and Greene to the congress could not have been more different. Foltz had five children, relied on her parents for help in housekeeping and child care, fought for admission to the bar and to law school, and sought fame and fortune through a court practice. Greene found ready acceptance at law school and at the bar, never married, cared for a widowed mother, achieved recognition as an accomplished legal scholar, and was content with a quiet office practice in her Providence home.108 Foltz, a fine speaker, came to the congress brimming with reformist passion and presented her radical proposal for an office of public defender. In contrast, Mary Greene offered a lawyerly, measured analysis of married women’s property acts in the United States.
Greene was a talented and savvy public speaker. She had written Equity Club members that “[n]ature has blessed me with a rather large amount of self-possession, and I have never in my life known by experience what ‘stage-fright’ is.”109 Greene excelled as a writer and speaker in part because she modified her rhetoric according to her audience.110 In her 1893 presentation she argued that while there had been progress in married women’s property acts, there were contradictions in these laws as well as areas not yet addressed. Cataloguing the positive changes, she said that in all the states and territories of the Union the property of married women is secured so that it cannot be taken for a husband’s debts, and if the wife survives her spouse the property becomes her sole and separate property. A handful of states now had community property laws. But for theoretical, practical, and sociological reasons, reform continued to be needed.
Greene made six recommendations. A wife, she argued, should have control of her own property. and all restrictions should be removed. Women should control and possess the income from real estate. In addition, earnings should be considered part of the personal property of the married woman, and fully owned and controlled by her. Further, contracting statutes should become consistent, all restrictions on a wife’s freedom to contract should be removed, and she should hold full power to testify in a contract suit with her husband. To aid women, and society, a married woman should have full power to carry on any trade or business on her own account, and to bind herself as a guarantor or surety. Finally, Greene asked that a married woman enjoy no greater privileges than a husband and that she be made jointly liable with her husband, if she has property, for the support of the family.
These recommendations were, Greene argued, practical, legally logical, and in keeping with new social conditions, namely, the changed nature of the economy. Knowing her male audience, the argument emphasized the protection of commerce rather than justice, or the protection of women: “[W]ith all of the commerce occurring in 1893, the immunity and protection that the common-law gave women ‘could … be [a] dangerous weapon in the hand of woman …, injuring herself and those with whom she deals.’”111 The talk was a success.
In 1902 Greene cemented her reputation as a scholar, and as a student of Lelia Robinson’s, by publishing A Woman’s Manual of Law. She opened the 300-page treatise by writing that the book’s purpose “is to present in a clear, simple, and, if possible, entertaining way, those principles of law governing the business world and domestic life which most men understand in some degree, or think they do, but which most women do not understand, and wish they did.”112 Greene argued that “the entrance of woman into the business and professional world has caused her to realize that ignorance of her legal rights and liabilities entails pecuniary loss.”113 She noted that “women capitalists and a vast army of women wage-earners” were buying and selling, investing, and speculating: “These women are anxious to know the laws that govern the holding and managing of property.”114 Showing her commitment to Robinson’s idea of “law for the people,” Greene wrote her book guided by a simple principle, that women want to know the law but they do not “wish all the fine-spun details of legal logic; they simply want to know those laws which they are most likely to encounter in dealing with their property.”115 Greene and Robinson, the ladies of Boston University law school, were legal scholars with an admirable philosophy—that the law must be accessible and understood by all if there were to be a level playing field.
Mary Greene lived until August 1936. From the time of her talk in 1893 until her death, she witnessed reform of married women’s property statutes in one state after another. She had also predicted broad social and political change, including women legislators, judges, and jurors. Though they were hardly comprehensive, she did see some significant changes: three women elected in 1894 to the Colorado General Assembly; Jeannette Rankin sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916; Florence Allen elected to several judicial positions in Ohio beginning in 1920 before being nominated for the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1934 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt; and Hattie Caraway, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1932. In her autobiography Greene accepted her part in bringing this new political and economic power to women.116
Lelia Robinson’s career provides the same mystery as Lavinia Goodell’s: how would she have used her extraordinary talents had she not died at such an early age? She joined Lockwood and Foltz in proving women’s ability to shine at trial work. Her books and articles similarly established a model of how lawyers, men and women, might use their training and on-the-job experience. In the spirit of the Progressive era, and Populism, Robinson avoided arcane exposition and endeavored to make an understanding of law something that all literate people could expect. Mary Greene, different from Robinson in certain elements of her philosophy of service, nevertheless used Robinson’s example, producing scholarly discourse and a study of “law for the people.” Greene’s teaching career at Lasell Seminary similarly mirrored the interest that a number of women attorneys had in educating other women. As society’s view of women’s rights and abilities broadened, the opportunity to teach law to women expanded. Lockwood was before her time in trying to establish an educational institution for women, but Foltz, less formally, and Greene at Lasell, brought a new curriculum to women. Ellen Mussey and Emma Gillett cemented these advances with the establishment of what became the Washington College of Law.
9
Law as a Woman’s Enterprise
Equality of rights and privileges is but simple justice.
—Belva Lockwood, 1888
FIRST-GENERATION WOMEN ATTORNEYS trained in the law in order to stretch themselves intellectually and to expand what were, otherwise, limited economic opportunities. Women attorneys also valued law as a tool of reform—not all, to be sure, but many. They supported woman suffrage and understood their personal struggles to be part of the larger fight to achieve an equal place in society.
Woman lawyers, like other pioneering female professionals, engaged in endless debate over what they should or should not do, what was good, bad, normal, or eccentric. In 1881 Belva Lockwood saw that male attorneys in the District who had begun using bicycles (adult tricycles) were completing their work more quickly. Practical, and a health enthusiast, she became the first woman in the capital to buy and use a bicycle, a daring and, some felt, immodest act. With resolute determination, she accepted the verbal harassment that came from showing a bit of ankle. She rode about freely and accomplished her work more efficiently. President Grover Cleveland, understanding cycle technology’s power of sexual equalization, issued what Lockwood called “an edict,” telling the wives of his Cabinet officers that he did not wis
h them to ride bicycles.1
Among themselves, women lawyers puzzled over questions of professional decorum and workplace relations as well as personal issues of health and fitness. The best record of their soul searching survives in the letters of the Equity Club, the group to which Lelia Robinson and Mary Greene were so devoted. The original members from Michigan had recruited “sisters-in-law” who, like California attorney Laura de Force Gordon, felt a “want of Professional companionship … [and] assurances of that close sympathy born of mutuality of interests, which women alone can extend to a woman.”2 Three dozen women trained in law responded to the invitation of their Ann Arbor colleagues to participate in a discussion of the personal and the professional. The club operated through the simple device of shared letters.
This postcard is one in a series, circa 1910, mocking scantily clad women as candidates for public office. (From the suffrage collection of Dr. Kenneth Florey.)
Belva Lockwood sent off her first and only Equity Club letter on April 30, 1887. It typified her spirit in this period, expressing confidence in her professional accomplishments as well as the belief that other women would do well to practice law. Her field was, she said, “far from being a dry study, as many have supposed, but on the contrary, possesses a peculiar and fascinating attractiveness.”3 She also talked about the differences between city and small-town practice. She argued that in large cities an attorney could choose a specialty “and find a practice lucrative enough to fully employ her time.”4 She wrote that “the drafting of Wills, Deeds, Leases and Bills of Sale forms a very pleasant specialty for a woman in a large city where she can draw from a large enough population to secure good custom.”5 In small-town America, however, it was, she felt, necessary to engage in general practice. Many of the male attorneys she had met on the lecture circuit supplemented a general practice with work in real estate.
Lockwood seldom lost an opportunity to speak on behalf of her reform causes, and this letter was no exception. She made two recommendations. She urged the elite Equity Club women to lobby to withdraw from state government the power to legislate domestic law, and to nationalize it instead, so that there would be a unified federal code that applied to all Americans. She also advocated that public schools in the United States establish a new curriculum for girls, one that would educate them in the principles of the state domestic law that she wished to nationalize. “Women,” she wrote, “have always been the chief sufferers of bad legislation.” Referring to guardianship, property, and divorce law, she contended that if schooled early in these “ground principles, a woman would be better able to protect herself and children.”6 Lockwood, the former schoolteacher, trusted schools to be agents of change, as did Mary Greene.
In a variety of ways, women lawyers struggled with the public perception that they were mentally and physically inferior and required special treatment to do their job. Equity Club women categorically rejected the idea that they had less talent for the law. They acknowledged that their careers might suffer because they were excluded from local fraternal organizations, but club members asserted that society gained from the presence of women in the profession of law. Mary Greene argued that the beneficial influence of her sisters was felt broadly, in particular in the less agreeable moral atmosphere of the courtroom.7
Still, the shadow of special treatment, and accusations of inferiority, hung over these women. Happily, then, certain professional questions called forth their sense of humor. Chief among them was women’s dress code. Lockwood was an early target. In 1876 a wit styled “E. Quality” wrote to Myra Bradwell’s Chicago Legal News to ask if women lawyers should not “remove their hats, and address the court with head uncovered, as the gentlemen members of the bar are compelled to do?”8 Several newspapers were quick to report that, in keeping with a sense of equality, “Mrs. Lockwood always removes her hat.”9 Bradwell observed,
If a woman lawyer should follow strictly what is known as etiquette, she would not remove her hat in court; but if she should consider the court room as a place where she has to earn her living upon an equality with her brother members of the bar, she would probably remove her hat, for the same reasons that her brethren do their hats, overcoats, and overshoes, when trying a case, because they only serve as incumbrances [sic]; and it is more respectful to the court to remove them.10
Lockwood’s example, however, did not satisfy all of her Equity Club colleagues. Twelve years after “E. Quality” raised the matter of hats, Lelia Robinson wrote that the issue had not yet been settled “entirely to my satisfaction.”11 She wore a hat in court not wishing “an added sense of unaccustomedness besides that which the place and the business must create.”12 She also believed that women could best “accustom judge, jury, clients and the public to the presence of women attorneys in court” by making few “variations from the usual customs and appearance of women in public places.”13 Robinson, a professional as well traveled and sophisticated as Lockwood, emphasized the need for women to be, well, women, where, in this matter, her Washington colleague followed masculine norms.
In 1889 Chicago attorney Margaret Wilcox put an end to the conversation:
Allow me to make a suggestion in a matter not requiring a profound knowledge of the law, viz: “The Bonnet” or “Not the Bonnet” in the courtroom. … If one should choose to lay aside her bonnet in the courtroom, whether on account of a heated atmosphere, or the shabbiness of the bonnet, or because she knows, intuitively, that the jury to be addressed would be prejudiced against her argument by either the extremely fashionable style of her hat, or its lack of style; whether one should plead with bonnet on, feeling confident that its beauty and becoming style lends persuasion to her tongue, or conscious that her hair needs the friendly concealment of a hat, in either case, I maintain that it is the inalienable right of each lady to follow “her own sweet will.” Her keen intuition will guide her aright.14
This issue of decorum raised the question of whether, to succeed, women needed to follow the example of men and also pushed the women to interrogate themselves as to whether the “female constitution” permitted women to compete as attorneys. The near- universal answer was “yes.” From Iowa City, Emma Haddock wrote, “My health failed in law school. Not, as many thought, from the mental effort, but from the fact that I, like all women who attempt to do anything outside of homework, did really the work of two people, that of a student as well as that of a housekeeper.”15 She rested and went on to post-graduate legal study and a full career in the legal office of her husband. Lettie Burlingame took exception to Ellen Martin speaking of “woman’s delicate organization.”16 Using herself as an example, Burlingame wrote of having been “very subject to the peculiar difficulties of my sex,” but then said that “I am never in better health or spirits than when put to the spur and excitement of trying cases, nor does any hurtful reaction follow the glow.”17 She pronounced herself “now stronger and able to endure more than at any other period of my life. Indeed, I stand court room work better than many of the men.”18
Emma Gillett, less swaggering than others, offered a measured assessment of personality and physiology:
I believe that physically and mentally woman is fitted for the work of the law, and have not myself found my work too hard. I have had to contend all my life with a constitution by no means robust but my health has steadily improved since I began the study and practice of my profession. I have never gone into jury cases and have done very little court work, but I deliberately chose this course at the beginning as I knew by experience that my nervous organism would break under the strain. This lack of nervous endurance I do not count as a feminine failing as I have tested it more especially in caring for the sick or young children, the very place where as a rule, a woman endures beyond a man. Judging from analogy the average woman will endure a prolonged nervous strain better than the average man.19
While most of the Equity Club lawyers did not see themselves as prisoners of the female condition, they understood, as Emma H
addock made clear, that doing the work of two people might cause a woman’s health to fail. Many practiced regimens for healthful living that included calisthenics and outdoor errands (but, with the exception of Lockwood, not bicycle riding). They were sensible women who, while liking to look smart, had accepted many of the teachings of the dress reform movement, which advocated clothes that gave the wearer greater mobility, as well as the end of the tight lacing of corsets. Illinois attorney Catharine Waugh was quite specific in the advice she gave while still single. She admonished her Equity sisters to pay more attention to dress, diet, and exercise if they wished to be strong: “My creed includes no corsets, broad, low heeled shoes, reform under garments, dresses in one piece hanging from the shoulders, no tea, little coffee or pork, few pies and cakes, much sleep, a little hoeing in the flower beds and a day in bed when occasion demands instead of sitting and suffering.”20
* * *
Unlike Mary Greene, who was unsparingly negative in her comments about charity work, a number of first-generation women lawyers combined legal careers with civic contributions or partisan political activity. Even Greene distinguished between the perceived “ingratitude” of her charity clients and the desirability of other forms of community service, such as her lectures on married women’s property law and the teaching of young women. Attorney Ada Kepley, slightly older than Greene, testified that her professional training had been of great help in securing enforcement of temperance laws during the ten years she worked for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).21 From Milwaukee, Margaret Wilcox seconded this testimony, arguing that every branch of the WCTU could benefit from having among its members a woman familiar with technical law. She would have these women lawyers point out “the culpable carelessness of allowing liquor and beer companies to secure the handsomest corner lots for palatial saloons.”22 Wilcox asked her Equity sisters, “Why not try to mould public opinion in this reform by persuasion, as men lawyers have always done in the leading of every great reform…?”23
