Part 25
The other case is that of Clara S. Foltz. Her married life was unfortunate. She had the family to support. This she did by undertaking dressmaking and millinery, and then conducting classes in voice culture and keeping boarders. An attorney who “admired her keen reasoning powers and her incisive logic,” one day said: “Mrs. Foltz, you are such a good mother that I believe you would make an able lawyer. Here is a copy of Kent’s Commentaries. I wish you would take it home and read it.” She did so as she nursed her babies—five of them now. Shortly afterward she began the study of law in an office. Subsequently she secured a divorce and the custody of her children. In September, 1878, she was admitted to practice and removed to San Francisco for a course in the Hastings Law College. She made application for admission as a student in the college and the dean permitted her to attend the lecture for three days, while the directors were deciding what to do about it. They refused her application on the ground that it was “not wise or expedient, or for the best interest of the college, to admit any female as a student therein.” Mrs. Foltz informed the dean that she meant to attend the lectures—peaceably if she could, but forcibly if she must. She promptly commenced action for a mandate to compel the directors to admit her. She won. The directors appealed the case to the State Supreme Court. Mrs. Foltz appeared and argued her side of the case, making the point that the Law College was a branch of the University, and that woman’s right to enter the latter was unquestioned. The Court agreed with her, and held that “An applicant for admission as a student to the Hastings Law College cannot lawfully be rejected on the sole ground that she is a female.” (Foltz _v._ Hoge, _et al._, Cal. Supreme Court Rep., vol. liv. p. 28.) She entered the college and remained there eighteen months, attending three classes daily to overtake her class. Finally overstudy, lack of means, and the care of her children, prostrated her. It was a severe disappointment not to be able to complete the prescribed three years’ course and win her degree. She will yet gain it. Mrs. Foltz thus tells the story of her first case:
“I firmly believe in the Infinite. The day the Supreme Court admitted me—it was on Thursday—I traveled from San Jose to San Francisco. An old gentleman who knew of my struggles and ambitions was on the train. He explained in an apologetic way that he thought perhaps I would be willing to assist him in finding a land claim that he had pre-empted, and which another settler contested. My would-be client had all the necessary proofs and witnesses ready, and the case was to come up at ten o’clock the following day. I had never been in a land office. I was ignorant of the methods of procedure, but I could soon learn. I accepted the case.
“That day was a crisis in my life. To pay the ten dollar fee of the Supreme Court I pawned this breastpin—dear old pin! Next morning, before I was up, a knock came to my door as the clock struck seven. My client was there. I dressed myself and carried on a conversation through the door. What would I charge for my services, he asked. I did not know, but ventured a guess at the correct figure. I would undertake the case for $25. He hesitated a little, and said that after witnesses fees and other expenses were paid he would have but $15 left, and that if I had a mind to take that sum it would be all right. I accepted eagerly, for I needed the money. Next I invited the witnesses in and questioned them. We parted to meet at the land office, but I went down in advance to see the Surveyor-General. I hold that the truth is always the best, so I told him that I had a case at ten o’clock, but knew nothing about land-office matters, and that I wanted to learn the law. He was very kind and furnished me with a pamphlet of instructions. Then I ventured to request that the case might go over to 1 P. M. He found that it could. I was immensely relieved and hastened off with my precious pamphlet. Client and witnesses were on the stairs. I informed them of the change in time and turned back. Didn’t I get that pamphlet by heart though! And I won my first case, redeemed my cherished pin, and paid my board bill.”
Laura De Force Gordon, who was also denied admission to the Hastings Law College, and aided Mrs. Foltz in her mandamus case, successfully defended a Spaniard charged with murder, within two months after her admission to the bar in 1879. “Among her most noted criminal cases was that of The People _v._ Sproule, which was indeed in some respects the most remarkable trial in the whole range of criminal jurisprudence in California. The defendant had shot and killed a young man named Andrews, by mistake for one Espey, the seducer of Sproule’s wife. It was a fearful tragedy, and the excitement was so great that the jail had to be guarded for a week to prevent the lynching of the prisoner. Mrs. Gordon undertook his defense, against the advice of the most distinguished lawyers in the State, and obtained a verdict of “Not guilty” amid the most deafening cheers of men and hysterical cries of women, half-weeping jurymen joining in the general clamor of rejoicing.” (“Women Lawyers in the United States,” in _The Green Bag_, January, 1890.)
In speaking of her practice, Mrs. Lockwood says: “My first was a divorce case and I won it, but the man refused to pay the alimony. The judge told me there was no law to make him pay it. I told him there was, and I showed him I could issue a _ne exeat_. I issued the writ, and the man was clapped into prison until he agreed to pay the alimony. Years afterward a similar case came up and the men who were the lawyers asked if there was no way to compel a man to stay in the District until he paid the alimony. The clerk said: ‘Belva Lockwood is the only one who has ever issued a _ne exeat_ in the District; you had better consult her.’ Many a time I have been saved by a little wit. Once my client, a woman, got upon the witness stand, in spite of all I could do, and acknowledged she had committed the crime of which she was accused. It was for shooting a constable, and that woman described the whole thing, talking until I was glued to my seat with fright. When she stopped and I had to get up I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I began, ‘Gentlemen of the jury, the laws must be enforced. My client has committed the double offense of resisting an officer of the law and shooting a man. The District is under the common law. That law says a woman must obey her husband. Her husband told her to load a gun and shoot the first officer that tried to force his way into the house. She obeyed him. Gentlemen, I claim that that husband loaded the gun and shot the officer, and as the judge will not postpone this case until I can have the husband brought from the West, where he is, I claim you are not trying the right prisoner. You would not have a woman resist her husband?’ The jury brought in the verdict of ‘Not guilty,’ and the judge, a crusty gentleman, said, when the next case was brought up: ‘I will call a new jury for this case, as the old one has just done a hard day’s work.’”
Col. C. K. Pier, his wife, and three daughters, of Madison, Wisconsin, are widely known as “the Pier family of lawyers.” The Colonel is a lawyer of long standing. Mrs. Pier and their eldest daughter graduated from the Law Department of the University of Wisconsin in 1887. All three practice together. The two younger sisters, Carrie and Harriet, have nearly finished the course in the law school from which their mother and sister graduated. Miss Kate, in her twenty-first year, appeared before the Supreme Court and won her case, the first to be argued by a woman in the supreme tribunal of the State. A newspaper, commenting on the fact, says: “Her opponent was J. J. Sutton, a veteran practitioner. The gray-haired patriarchs of the profession smoothed the wrinkles out of their waistcoats and straightened their neckties, and then wiped the specks off their spectacles. The audience was one before which any young man might readily have been excused for getting rattled. There were present Gen. E. E. Bryant, dean of the law faculty, ex-Secretary of the Interior William F. Vilas, and a host of visiting legal lights. Even the dignified judges were compelled to affect an extra degree of austerity to conceal their interest in the young attorney. But Miss Pier showed no sign of embarrassment. Her argument was direct and to the point, and, moreover, relieved of the superfluities that frequently characterize the verbose utterances of more experienced attorneys of the male sex. She stated her case unhesitatingly, and frequently turned to and cited authorities, showing an acquaintance with the law and a degree of self-possession which indicated that she was truly in love with her profession. She showed she possessed the true mettle for success, and two weeks later, when the judges rendered their decision, she had the pleasure of winning her first case. Since then both she and her mother have frequently argued cases before the Court.”
Almeda E. Hitchcock, of Hilo, Hawaii Islands, graduated from the Law Department of the Michigan University in 1888, and was admitted to the Michigan bar. Her father is one of the circuit judges of that far away island. On her return home she was admitted to the Hawaiian bar on presentation of her license from the Michigan Court, the first instance of a woman’s receiving license to practice law in that kingdom. The same day she was appointed notary public and became her father’s law partner.
Marilla M. Ricker, while a resident of the District of Columbia, was appointed Commissioner and Examiner in Chancery by the Supreme Court of the District, and several cases were heard before her. Other women lawyers, in various parts of the country, have been appointed examiners in chancery and examiners of applicants for admission to the bar. Mary E. Haddock, LL.B., in June, 1878, was appointed by the Supreme Court of Iowa to examine students of the State University for graduation and admission to the bar. She was reappointed for two successive years. Ada Lee, of Port Huron, Michigan, the year following her admission in 1883, was elected to the office of Circuit Court Commissioner, having been nominated, without solicitation on her part, by the Republican, Democratic, and Greenback parties of St. Clair county. “She performed the duties of this office, and held it until the expiration of her term, despite the fact that thirteen suits were begun to oust her, during which time two hundred and seventeen cases were tried before her.” Mrs. J. M. Kellogg acted as Assistant Attorney-General during the time her husband was Attorney-General of Kansas. They are law partners.
Phoebe W. Couzins, LL.B., was chief deputy United States Marshal for the Eastern District of Missouri during the time her father was the Marshal. At the death of her father she was named his successor, which position she held until removed by the incoming Democratic administration. Catherine G. Waugh, A.M., LL.B., was for a year or two Professor of Commercial Law in the Rockford (Ill.) Commercial College. Mrs. Foltz delivered a legal address before the students of Union College of Law in 1886. Mary A. Greene, LL.B. recently delivered a course of lectures before the students of Lasell Seminary on “Business Law for Women.”
Several able articles have been written for law journals by women lawyers of this country. Of books, M. B. R. Shay, is author of “Students’ Guide to Common Law Pleading” (published in 1881.) Of this work, Hon. R. M. Benjamin, dean of Law Faculty, and Hon. A. G. Kerr, professor of Pleading of Law Department of the Illinois Wesleyan University, say, as published in Callaghan & Company’s annual catalogue of law books:
“We have examined with considerable care Shay’s Questions on Common Law Pleading, and can cheerfully recommend them to students as admirably adapted to guide them to a thorough knowledge of the principles of pleading as laid down by those masters of the system, Stephen, Gould, and Chitty.”
Lelia Robinson Sawtelle is author of “Law Made Easy” (published in 1886). Of this work, Hon. Charles T. Russell, professor in Boston University Law School, says: “For the end proposed, the information and instruction of the popular mind in the elements of law, civil and criminal, I know of no work which surpasses it. It is comprehensive and judicious in scope, accurate in statement, terse, vigorous, simple, and clear in style. My gratification in this work is none the less that its author is the first lady Bachelor of Laws graduated from our Boston University Law School, and that she has thus early and fully vindicated her right to the highest honors of the school accorded her at her graduation.” Mrs. Sawtelle has since written a manual entitled “The Law of Husband and Wife,” which likewise has been well received. She is now at work upon another to be called “Wills and Inheritances.”
We have already spoken of Myra Bradwell as the editor of the _Chicago Legal News_. Catharine V. Waite, LL.B., edits the _Chicago Law Times_, which she founded in 1886. Bessie Bradwell Helmer, LL.B., compiled, unassisted, ten volumes of Bradwell’s Appellate Court Reports. Cora A. Benneson, LL.B., was law editor for the West Publishing Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1886.
The first association of women lawyers is called “The Equity Club.” This was organized in October, 1886, by women students and graduates of the Law Department of Michigan University, having for its object “the interchange of encouragement and friendly counsel between women law students and practitioners.” It is international in scope. Each member is required to contribute a yearly letter, “giving an account of individual experiences, thoughts on topics of general interest, and helpful suggestions,” for publication and distribution among members of the association.
Another association of women lawyers, organized in 1888, is the “Woman’s International Bar Association,” having for its object:
1. To open law schools to women.
2. To remove all disabilities to admission of women to the bar, and to secure their eligibility to the bench.
3. To disseminate knowledge concerning women’s legal status.
4. To secure better legal conditions for women.
Women lawyers are welcomed as members of bar associations established by their brothers in the profession. Many have availed themselves of this privilege.
For various reasons quite a number of women admitted have not, so far, identified themselves with law practice. Others have allowed themselves to be drawn into temperance and other reform movements; but the greater portion at once settled down to follow their chosen pursuit with no deviation, and are ripening into able, experienced lawyers, and winning their fair share of clientage. Some confine themselves mainly to an office practice, seldom or never appearing in public; others prefer court practice. Those who enter the forum are cordially countenanced by brother lawyers and acceptably received before court and jury. As a rule they are treated with the utmost courtesy by the bench, the bar, and other court officers.
Woman’s influence in the court room as counsel is promotive of good in more than one respect. Invectives against opposing counsel, so freely made use of in some courts, are seldom indulged in when woman stands as the opponent. And in social impurity cases, language, in her presence, becomes more chaste, and the moral tone thereby elevated perceptibly. But there should be one more innovation brought into general vogue, that of the mixed jury system. When we shall have women both as lawyers and jurors to assist in the trial of cases, then, and not until then, will woman’s influence for good in the administration of justice be fully felt. In Wyoming and Washington the mixed jury system has been tried and found perfectly practicable.
There has not been time enough yet for a woman to develop into an Erskine or Burke, an O’Connor or Curran, a Webster or Choate. But few men have done so, if history correctly records. Woman has made a fair beginning, and is determined to push on and upward, keeping pace with her brother along the way until, with him, she shall have finally reached the highest pinnacle of legal fame.
X. WOMAN IN THE STATE.
BY
MARY A. LIVERMORE.
No one who has studied the history of the world, even superficially, will dispute the statement that over the female half of the human family there has steadily brooded a cloud of hindrance and repression, of disability and servitude. The long past has denied to women the possession of souls, and they have been relegated to the ignorance and injustice to which men have always doomed those regarded as their inferiors. Until within a few years, comparatively speaking, the world has been under the dominion of brute force, and might has made right. Every one has been welcome to whatever he has had the brawn and muscle to win and to hold, and all have yielded to the rule of physical force, as to-day we respect the decisions of the courts. All through these ages the history of woman has been disastrous. Her physical weakness, and not alone her mental inferiority, has made her the subject of man. Toiling patiently for him, asking little for herself and every thing for him, cheerfully sharing with him all perils and hardships, the unappreciated mother of his children, she has been bought and sold, petted or tortured, according to the whim of her brutal owner, the victim everywhere of pillage, lust, and war. And this statement includes all races and peoples of the earth from the date of their historic existence.
Among the Hindoos, woman was the slave of man; bought, sold, lent, gambled away, and taken for debt, with the very power of life or death held over her by some irresponsible husband, father, or other man. She was forbidden to speak the language of man, and was condemned to use the patois of slaves. Under the old Roman law, the husband was the sole tribunal of the wife. He controlled her property, earnings, and religion: she was allowed no rights in her own children; and she could invoke no law against him. The Greek law regarded woman as a child, and held her in everlasting tutelage from the cradle to her gray-haired old age. Aristotle, and they of his school, called her a “monster,” an “accidental production.” The Hebrews pronounced her an afterthought of the Deity, and the mother of all evil. Throughout the entire Orient, her condition has been one of such compulsory servitude, that the phrase “Oriental degradation of woman,” remains to-day the synonym of the deepest debasement woman has ever known.
When the councils of the medieval church came together to decide on the instruction needful to the young, they hastened to count women out, and to declare them “unfit for instruction.” And they, who in defiance of this decision—kind-hearted nuns of the Catholic Church—established schools for girls, were publicly stoned when they were met on the streets. The early Christian fathers denounced women as “noxious animals,” “painted temptresses,” “necessary evils,” “desirable calamities,” and “domestic perils.” From the English Heptarchy to the Reformation, the law proclaimed the wife to be “in all cases, and under all circumstances, her husband’s creature, servant, and slave.” Herbert Spencer, writing of English laws, in his “Descriptive Sociology of England,” says: “Our laws are based on the all-sufficiency of man’s rights, so that society exists to-day for woman only as she is in the keeping of some man.” To Diderot, the French philosopher, even in the eighteenth century, so persistently do the traditions of the past make themselves felt, woman was only a “courtesan.” To Montesquieu, she was “an attractive child,”—to Rousseau “an object of pleasure to man.” To Michelet, nearly a century later, she was “a natural invalid.”
This subjection of woman to man, which has hindered her development in normal ways, has created a contemptuous opinion of her, which runs through the literature and legislation of all nations. It is apparent to-day in unjust laws and customs, which disgrace the statute books, and cause society to progress with halting step. There still exist different codes of morals for men and women, different penalties for crime, and the relations of the sexes to the government are dissimilar. In marriage, the husband has control of the wife’s person, and, in most instances, ownership of her earnings, and of her minor children. She is rarely paid the same wages as man, even when she does the same work, and is his equal only when punishment and the payment of taxes are in question. All these unjust inequalities are survivals of the long ages of servitude through which woman has passed, and which have not yet ceased to exist. During their existence, says Mme. de Staël, “woman was able to exercise fully but one of the faculties with which nature has gifted her—the faculty of suffering.”
Born and bred under such conditions of injustice, and with arbitrary standards of womanly inferiority persistently set before them, it has not been possible for women to rise much above them. Here and there through the centuries, exceptional women, endowed with phenomenal force of character, have towered above the mediocrity of their sex, hinting at the qualities imprisoned in the feminine nature. It is not strange that these instances have been rare. It is strange, indeed, that women have held their own during these ages of degradation. And as by a general law of heredity “the inheritance of traits of character is persistent in proportion to the length of time they have been inherited,” it is easy to account for the conservatism of women to-day, and for the indifference and hostility with which many regard the movements for their advancement.
For a new day has dawned, and humanity is moving forward to an era when oppression and slavery are to be entirely displaced, and reason and justice recognized as the rule of life. Science is extending immeasurably the bounds of knowledge and power. Art is refining life, and giving to it beauty and grace. Literature bears in her hands whole ages of comfort and sympathy. Industry, aided by the hundred-handed elements of nature, is increasing the world’s wealth, and invention is economizing its labor. The age looks steadily to the redressing of wrong, to the righting of every form of error and oppression, and demands that law and justice be made interchangeable terms. So humane a spirit dominates the age in which we live, that even the brute creation share in it, and we have hundreds of societies organized to prevent cruelty to animals. It could not be possible but that women should share in the justice and kindliness with which the times are fraught, and the last quarter of a century has lifted them to higher levels. How has this been accomplished?
While progress is the method of man, his early progress was inconceivably slow. He had lived on the earth long ages before he knew enough, or cared enough, to make a record of what he did, thought, felt, hoped, or suffered for the benefit of posterity. The moment he began to make a record of his daily life, history began. And history takes us back, according to the popular conception, only five or six thousand years—authentic history to a period much less remote. From the early civilizations that flourished in the valleys of the Nile and Euphrates, this age has inherited very little. What we possess that may seem a transmission from that earlier time has been for the most part rediscovered, or reinvented by the civilizations of the present.