by Jill Norgren
Lettie Burlingame, in Joliet, Illinois, adopted an ambivalent stance. She had participated in the successful 1888 campaign of Republican presidential candidate Benjamin Harrison. She did not regret her political efforts but thought the activity itself a mistake because the neglect of her law office had caused a loss of business. “Still,” she wrote, “I gained a wide acquaintance among business men, as I have in the equal suffrage work.”24 Florence Cronise said that she made it a rule of her professional life “to go quietly on, remaining very closely at my business, and the result I believe to be better than had I answered some of the many calls to appear before the people in behalf of woman’s rights.”25 She chastised Kepley and Wilcox: “I cannot agree nor feel any sympathy with our sisters … who think woman’s mission into the profession is to purify. … My mission is to honestly, earnestly, and decently earn my living.”26 Emma Gillett chose not to be lured into “any class of philanthropic … work.”27 Cronise and Gillett were joined by a number of other Equity correspondents who avoided reform advocacy because they feared that it would limit their “making headway” in the profession.
Ada Bittenbender had no such fears. She was one of the very few early women attorneys employed to engage in paid advocacy work. Born in 1848, Bittenbender was an easterner who, at the age of thirty, moved to Nebraska with her lawyer husband. They were both fiercely committed to the temperance movement. A year after the move they purchased a local Republican newspaper, the Osceola Record, which Ada Bittenbender edited for three years, making it “an able, fearless, moral, family and temperance newspaper.”28 During this period she also read law with her husband and became a leader in the state woman suffrage movement. She was admitted to the Nebraska bar in 1882, the first woman in the state to be licensed. She and her husband, Henry, established the firm of H. C. and Ada M. Bittenbender, and moved to the state capital of Lincoln. In Lincoln, Ada Bittenbender built a reputation as a nearly unbeaten trial lawyer (preferring the courtroom to the office) and a successful lobbyist who worked to influence the policy views of legislators in Lincoln, and Washington, D.C. Her advocacy focused upon the protection of women, and temperance. In 1888 she was elected counsel for the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, becoming a paid cause lawyer. She used her position to write The National Prohibitory Amendment Guide (1889), a plan of action to promote a federal prohibition amendment. Months after her selection as WCTU counsel, Bittenbender acknowledged in an Equity letter that she would make more than her fifteen hundred dollar salary by “sticking closer to the profession … [but] [u]sefulness to others I consider the pearl of great price.”29
Ada M. Bittenbender (1848-1925). (Courtesy of the Frances E. Willard Memorial Library and Archives, Evanston, Illinois.)
Activist Mary Lease, based for many years in Kansas, also presented herself as a woman with no fears. Sometime in the 1880s, in her mid-thirties, she studied law and passed the bar in Wichita.30 Lease had a family situation not unlike that of Clara Foltz. Financial panics, drought, and a husband who earned too little led Lease to look for solutions to societal problems in reform movement politics. She first joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Temperance permitted her to talk about wives, children, and economic injustice. She spoke with a different passion, and point of reference, than Ada Bittenbender, who was childless and middle-class. Lease then allied herself with the Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union, and the Knights of Labor. A powerful speaker, she could hold the attention of an audience for hours. She always spoke about toil, privation, danger, and hardship.31
In 1890 the membership of the Kansas Farmers’ Alliance acknowledged that more than self-help measures were needed to combat poverty and unemployment. The Alliance threw itself into electoral politics and from its grass roots produced one arm of the Populist movement. Mary Lease was well-positioned to go on the stump as a Populist Party speaker, arguing the cause of workers against the banking, utility, and railroad money barons. She gave hundreds of speeches and emerged as one of the party’s most effective orators. Her teenage children stayed in Wichita with their father.
Ada Bittenbender benefited from a fixed salary in her position with the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Lease’s financial arrangement was more precarious as her earnings were tied to her ability to give speeches. And while she was an attorney, and later practiced part-time in New York City, Lease approached her work for cause movements strictly as a political partisan. While Bittenbender sat in a Washington library reading decades of congressional legislation and crafting carefully worded proposals for new legislation, Lease seemed never to sit down, instead rousing crowds on the campaign trail with sweeping populist rhetoric. When Kansas Populists won a number of political offices in 1892, Lease hoped to capitalize on the votes and national spotlight she had brought to the party by asking for one of Kansas’s U.S. Senate seats (at that time filled by a vote of the state legislature). She was testing the reach of her fame, and the sincerity of the party’s progressive principles. At a time when American women, at best, could vote for a few local offices and, for the most part, women candidates ran for local or county offices, Lease, having nothing to lose, gambled—and lost. Her request was refused. She was appointed to a position often given to prominent reform women as a consolation prize, superintendent of charities (in this case overseeing Kansas’s institutions for orphans, the mentally retarded, and elderly veterans).
J. Ellen Foster, like Lease, had a frank interest in partisan politics. A member of the Iowa bar, Foster spent decades raising women’s profile within the Republican Party. She argued that a better knowledge of practical politics would help women to lobby more effectively for reform legislation.32 Like Lavinia Goodell, Foster began her law career juggling anti-saloon damage cases.33
In 1874 Foster attended the founding convention of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and fell under the spell of its leader, Frances E. Willard. Six years later Foster became the union’s legal adviser and superintendent of legislation and petitions. Foster resigned her office, however, when Willard sought to bring the WCTU into the Prohibition Party camp. Foster tried fighting within the organization to block a third-party alliance, fearing it would damage the chances of pro-temperance Republicans, including James G. Blaine, the party’s 1884 presidential candidate. Unsuccessful, in 1889 she led Iowa delegates out of the WCTU and founded the Non-Partisan National WCTU. Foster’s non-partisan credentials, however, suffered from her close association with the Republican Party. A year before organizing the Non-Partisan WCTU, she created, and led, the Woman’s National Republican Association—with the blessing of the Republican National Committee. Hundreds of local Republican women’s clubs sprang up through her efforts.34 By the time of the 1892 Republican Convention, Foster was able to stand before the delegates and shout, “We are here to help you. … [A]nd we have come to stay.”35 Contemporary commentators argued that “she had done what few before her had even dreamed of doing. She had made women a recognized factor in party politics and in the party government of a nation.”36
Foster’s party work never ceased but, unlike her husband, she was not rewarded with a permanent patronage job when the Republicans were in office. Like Lease, she had to content herself with consolation work, in her case a number of short-term investigations for the federal government.
Kate Stoneman came to cause lawyering in an entirely different manner. Born in southwestern New York State in 1841, Stoneman moved to Albany as a young woman and matriculated at the New York State Normal School. During her school years Stoneman had her first exposure to a law office when she served as a copyist for Joel Tiffany, the state reporter for the New York Court of Appeals.37 Stoneman graduated in 1866 and taught for many decades. She also took up the cause of woman suffrage and began working with established women’s rights leaders, including Lillie Devereux Blake. Beginning in 1880, they lobbied for the extension of school suffrage to women, along with other property and employment rights issues.
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In the early 1880s Stoneman was designated the executrix of a great-aunt’s estate, which again exposed her to legal questions. In 1882 she applied for a clerkship in the Albany office of attorney Worthington W. Frothingham. She read law with him for three years and in 1885, urged on by her suffrage friends, passed the New York state bar examination. When Stoneman applied for bar admission, however, she found her way blocked. The New York State Supreme Court denied her application, stating that there was no precedent for her admission and that “there was no call for woman lawyers in New York State.”38 The justices also worried that liberality on the subject of woman lawyers would lead to even stronger demands for woman suffrage.
As an experienced woman suffrage lobbyist Stoneman, like Goodell, Robinson, and others, was ready to take her fight to the state legislature. She was known and respected by a number of representatives. Anticipating the defeat at court, she had begun to circulate a proposal to strike the word “male” from the Code of Civil Procedure that regulated bar admission. Assemblyman John I. Platt of Poughkeepsie took her draft proposal, shaped it into a bill, and in January 1886 introduced the legislation in the state assembly. By May the bill had passed the Assembly and the Senate, and was on Governor David Hill’s desk. Stoneman traveled to his office with a coterie of supporters, mostly male, and told Hill that she wished to be admitted to the bar “chiefly to extend the field of women’s activity.”39 The governor signed the bill, Stoneman reapplied for admission, and on May 20 she was the first woman in New York State to be admitted to the bar. Shortly after, she became the first woman student at Albany Law School. Stoneman maintained a law office in her Albany home but spent most of her time teaching and lobbying for woman suffrage. For Kate Stoneman the very act of becoming a lawyer was her cause. She sought to establish a precedent and to open the profession of law to women. She wanted women to have the opportunity to use law to influence the affairs of government and to choose, if they wished, a new sphere of life by which to earn a living.
Katherine (Kate) Stoneman (1841-1924). (Courtesy of the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany Libraries.)
Women lawyers quite naturally identified access to legal education as a necessary reform. While some law programs opened to women early—1869 at both the University of Iowa and Washington University in St. Louis—until the turn of the century there were not many programs that welcomed women. Belva Lockwood had wished to work in the profession of her choice and believed that all women should have a similar opportunity. In the 1870s, when professional schools were in their infancy, she grasped their power to determine who would wear the badge of lawyer, or doctor—who would enjoy economic well-being and status. In the autumn of 1873 she sent to President Grant, and members of Congress, a plan for a sexually integrated national university “worthy of the Capital.”40 She described an institution with departments of law, medicine, science, and the arts that would maintain high standards and where “the race” for admission would be “equal.”41
Lockwood failed to win support for a showcase public university but did not give up on the idea of an institution where women might pursue professional training in an environment less hostile than the one she and Lydia Hall had endured as students. With D.C. colleagues, she tried again in 1876 but failed to attract a sufficient number of shareholders. Her idea was ahead of its time. Clara Foltz explored the idea with her Portia Club, as did a number of well-to-do women in New York City in the late 1880s who started what became the Women’s Law Class, a program taken over by New York University.42
Twenty years after Lockwood’s failure, her friend, D.C. lawyer Ellen Spencer Mussey, revived the notion of a woman’s law school and in little more than a decade, with the help of Lockwood’s protégée, Emma Gillett, built the Washington College of Law into a nationally known program. Mussey and Gillett had originally planned to tutor students and have them transfer to Columbian College (later George Washington University) for a final, senior year of legal study. In 1898 they sent up the names of six qualified women only to be told that conservative members of the Columbian Board of Trustees would not agree to admit the women. Old, tired arguments were trotted out: women, they said, were incapacitated by the “conditions of their sex” and lacked “the mentality for law.”43 Reluctantly, Mussey and Gillett decided to address this prejudice by expanding their program. On April 9, 1898, they incorporated the law school, establishing a three-year course of study (rather than the more common, less rigorous two years). They founded the program to serve women but accepted men, who were attracted to it because of the low tuition. A whites-only policy prevailed, unsurprising given the open racism of the late nineteenth century but nonetheless paradoxical: Emma Gillett, a Caucasian, had taken her law degree at Howard University, which had been founded to serve African American students. Mussey became the dean of Washington College, the first woman to head an American law school.
Until Ellen Mussey asked her to teach, Emma Gillett had resisted Belva Lockwood’s example of the ways law could be used to educate the public and be a force for change. It was Gillett who, in 1888, told the Equity Club women that she would not permit herself to be “lured into any class of philanthropic or other work, knowing the law to be a jealous mistress and believing that I could do no better work than to prove that a woman could by persistent application earn a competency at the law.”44 While Lockwood used lecturing and campaigning as a springboard for reform work and for public notice, Gillett worked the back office of Watson Newton’s law firm where, after fifteen years, she made partner. Late in life she became the second dean of the Washington College of Law.
Mary Lease triumphed as an orator but failed to obtain the U.S. Senate office that she coveted. Even when they were stars, accomplished in court, reform advocacy, or women’s politics, the first generation of female lawyers experienced significant limits with respect to their ambitions. Of course, not every male lawyer did well practicing law. Many male attorneys did not succeed at making a living in law, and most male lawyers never glimpsed the world of cigars, wealth, and power that came with being a successful late-nineteenth-century railroad or corporate attorney.45 Most male lawyers of this period had no access to corporate positions, but they could run for all elective offices, and patronage positions were open to men who were party activists. Women lawyers lacked these opportunities.
The life of Vermont teacher and lawyer John Henry Senter epitomized the profound divide in the prospects of male and female lawyers in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.46 Born in 1848, Senter taught school while studying law in the Montpelier office of Clarence H. Pitkin. He was admitted to the bar in 1879 at the age of thirty. He opened an office in Vermont and, like Lockwood, Foltz, Robinson, and others, was a joiner, active as a Democrat and in civic affairs. Unlike these women, a decade after starting his law practice Senter, a man of modest means, with no family connections, began a second career as an elected official and office holder. He held many municipal positions, including justice of the peace and mayor. He went on to represent Montpelier in the state legislature. He served as chairman and secretary of the Democratic State Committee. During his first term in office, President Grover Cleveland appointed Senter to be national bank examiner. Later, he was appointed United States district attorney for Vermont, and then United States attorney for the District of Vermont.
Women with, and without, law training understood the limits imposed on them. However, particularly in civic matters they refused to be marginalized. They began with suffrage, and temperance. In fighting “demon liquor” they turned to courts and law when moral suasion and protests failed. Ohio’s so-called Adair law allowed any person to sue bar owners, and liquor dealers, to recover damages caused by an intoxicated buyer.47 In one notable early-1870s case brought by the desperate wife of a drunkard against a rum seller, a sympathetic local newspaper cooperated by running articles urging temperance women to come to court and bear witness. At the end of this trial, M
rs. E. D. Stewart, “Mother Stewart,” rose to make a closing argument. Stewart did not hold a law degree, nor had she passed a bar exam. She was, however, a well-known temperance activist who made “a career” of showing up as an advocate in Adair law cases.48 Judges allowed Stewart to argue with defense attorneys, one of whom cursed her, saying that it was “infamous to bring a female in to influence the court and jury.”49 Numerous saloon closings permitted Stewart to acquire judicial experience. Sober-faced male jurors listened to her appeal to men’s God-given obligation to provide for their families. At a time when women like Lockwood and Goodell were still fighting to become attorneys, Stewart, along with the women temperance activists who cheered her from the galleries, successfully manipulated the male-dominated judicial system long enough to introduce anti-liquor messages in court and, in a number of instances, to win damages.
In 1880, there were fewer than one hundred women lawyers in the United States. By this time reformers and union activists had begun to develop an increasingly refined understanding of the problems faced by women. Clearly, however, not all Equity Club lawyers felt an obligation to help sisters-in-need. Individuals like Mother Stewart drew attention to women’s problems, but only locally. Issues of poverty, sexual and physical abuse, and economic injustice demanded systematic attention and redress.
In New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, legal aid organizations for poor women were created in the last quarter of the century to do just this. The aid came from women functioning as lay lawyers, women who created legal aid as a “deeply feminized” sphere.50 Legal aid dates back to the Civil War and the creation, in New York City, of the Working Women’s Protective Union (WWPU), an organization whose mission was to provide legal aid to women in the needle trade whose employers failed to pay their wages. Elite New Yorkers applauded the union as an efficient and praiseworthy organization run by male attorneys. Legal historian Felice Batlan, however, argues that the day-to-day work of the organization, including much of the legal work, was carried out by women. The union’s superintendent was always a woman with a female staff. Potential clients met with the superintendent, who evaluated the complaint and offered advice. She sent out demand letters to employers and worked to keep the number of lawsuits low by negotiating settlements. In these years, before Kate Stoneman opened the New York bar to women, Batlan makes the case that the WWPU’s superintendent, “who was always a woman,” and her staff “were essentially practicing law.”51 Refused admission to the bar, they carved out a self-defined place for themselves in the field of cause lawyering.
