1. Report of Speeches and Letters Delivered and Read at the Banquet of the Legal Aid Society, March 23, 1901, New York Public Library (NYPL), 34.

2. See, for example, Tweed, Harrison, The Legal Aid Society, New York City, 1876–1951 (New York: Legal Aid Society, 1954)Google Scholar, vi.; Davies, Martha, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960–1973 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 11–16Google Scholar; Grossberg, Michael, Counsel for the Poor? Legal Aid Societies and the Creation of Modern Urban Legal Structures, 1900–1930 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia University Series, 1994)Google Scholar.

3. WWPU, Working Women's Protective Union Twenty-Five Years' History (1888) (NYPL), 2. The most complete collection of Union reports is located in the NYPL. A number of the Union's annual reports are also located in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College (SSC). A growing number can also be obtained online through Harvard's Open Collection Program at www.ocp.hul.harvard.edu. Although legal scholars have ignored the WWPU, a number of historians of women have very briefly discussed the WWPU, but they have understood it primarily as a middle-class philanthropic women's organization. As such, they have not focused upon the development of legal aid, recognized women's roles as legal aid providers, the relationship of the Union to the bar, or the role that gender played in the creation of legal aid. See Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 91–92Google Scholar. Ginzberg, Lori, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 182Google Scholar; Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hill & Wang), 173; Gamber, Wendy, The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 86n76; Sklar, Kathyrn Kish, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 71Google Scholar; Minow, Martha, “‘Forming Underneath Everything That Grows’: Toward A History of Family Law,” Wisconsin Law Review (1985): 819n227Google Scholar.

4. See First Annual Report of the Protective Agency for Women and Children (Chicago: Women's Temperance Publication Association, 1887) (Northwestern University Law School Library); First Annual Report of The Legal Aid Society of Philadelphia (1904) (discussing its predecessor organization the Committee for the Legal Protection of Working Women (available through the Harvard Law School library at http://fig.lib.harvard.edu/fig/?bib=001764267).

5. For example, wholesale prices for manufactured goods rose in 1863 to 59 percent above those in 1860. More specifically, milk increased from 1.5 cents in 1860 to 10 cents in 1864. Butter was 4 cents in 1861 and 25 cents in 1864. The price of coal and meat also doubled between 1861 and 1864 (Foner, Philip, The History of the Labor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 326Google Scholar.

6. “The Machinists Strike,” New York Herald, November 8, 1863; “General News,” New York Daily Tribune, November 12, 1863.

7. “The Strike of Machinists and others—Philosophy or the Difficulty,” New York Herald (November 13, 1863), 4. On the complex politics of male trade unions in New York, see Bernstein, Iver, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance in American Society and Politics in the Age of Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

8. “Strike Among the Females,” New York Herald (November 13, 1863), 4.

9. “The Working Women,” New York Herald (November 14, 1863), 3.

10. Ellen Carol DuBois writes that “in general men's discontent with the sexual division of labor was limited to their fear that women would undersell male labor and displace men from their jobs … . [T]raditions of craft unionism and labor politics, which encouraged workers to cooperate and improve their employment condition, were almost unknown among women” (DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999 [1979]).

11. “Female Labor,” and “Workingwomen and their Movement,” New York Sun, November 14, 1863, 2; “The Wages Movement,” New York Daily Tribune, November 13, 1863, 11; “The Workingwomen,” New York Sun, November 16, 1863, 1.

12. “Sad Story of a Poor Girl—A Communication,” New York Sun, November 17, 1863, 1; see also “Another Working Girl's Experience,” New York Sun, November 18, 1863, 1.

13. “Another Great Meeting of Working Women,” New York Sun, November 19, 1863, 1.

14. “Meeting of the Sewing Girls Last Evening,” New York Herald, November 19, 1863, 10.

15. For a discussion of working women's activism in New York City during the antebellum period, see Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987)Google Scholar. Stansell wrote that before the war working women had substantial space to maneuver “partly because, other interested parties—working-class men and middle-class reformers—had not yet monopolized the answers. After the Civil War … the air would be too thick with pronouncements on women's proper place for working-class women to speak much for themselves” (Stansell, City of Women, 131). Stansell further noted that after 1860, women's trade union activity ceased (ibid., 152). Although the history of the WWPU provides a particularly vivid illustration of the silencing of working women, it also demonstrates that working women's labor activities continued into the 1860s.

16. “Meeting of the Sewing Girls Last Evening,” New York Herald, November 19, 1863. There is some evidence that this man was labor leader Daniel Walford. See WWPU, Twenty-Five Year's History.

17. “Meeting of Workwomen,” New York Daily Tribune, November 19, 1863, 1.

18. “Meeting of the Sewing Girls Last Evening,” New York Herald, November 19, 1863, 10.

19. “Meeting of Workwomen.”

20. Meeting of Working Women,” New York Daily Tribune, November 25, 1863, 8 (reproducing draft constitution).

21. Ibid.

22. Later reports identified the men as Moses S. Beach (publisher of the Sun), Daniel Walford (union activist and leader), George W. Matsell, William MacKellar, and William Roberts. Matsell, MacKellar, and Roberts were all attorneys (WWPU, Working Women's Protective Union Annual Report (1868) (NYPL), 6).

23. “The Working Women,” New York Sun, December 17, 1863, 1.

24. WWPU, Working Women's Protective Union Annual Report (1868), 6.

25. “The Working Women,” New York Sun, December 17, 1863, 1.

26. Ibid.

27. “Working Womens' [sic] Protective Union, New York Sun, March 24, 1864, n.p.

28. New York City's Draft Riots occurred in July 1863 and were sparked by a conscription act which allowed those drafted to purchase their way out of the draft. Working-class crowds rampaged through the city, directing their rage at African Americans and at the property of wealthy New Yorkers. The riots provoked not only what looked like a race war but a class war as well. See Bernstein, New York City Draft Riots. On elite New Yorkers reactions to the riots, see Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the Bourgeoisie (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 137–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29. “The Working Womens' [sic] Protective Union,” The Sun, March 24, 1864, n.p.

30. Throughout his life, Charles Daly was one of the Union's staunchest supporters. Daly was a ubiquitous presence in nineteenth-century New York City. Daly, whose parents had immigrated to New York from Ireland, was born in 1816. After holding various odd jobs, including apprenticing for a cabinet maker and later clerking for a lawyer, he was admitted to the bar in 1839. In 1844, he became judge in the Court of Common Pleas and went on to become Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court. He held this position until 1885. At various periods of his life, he worked on tenement reform, was president of the American Geological Society, and wrote widely on the New York courts, jurisprudence, Jews, theatre, map-making, and various political issues. Daly also spent a brief time in the New York State legislature. Although Daly was a Democrat, he was widely respected outside the party for his honesty and legal judgment. In 1856, he married Maria Lydig, the daughter of a socially prominent and wealthy merchant. Mrs. Daly is presently most well known for the publication of those parts of her diary that she wrote during the Civil War. The Dalys socialized with New York's wealthiest residents, a wide array of artists, writers, scientists, intellectuals, and local and national politicians. See Daly, Maria, Diary of a Union Lady, ed. Hammond, Harold Earl (New York: Funk and Wagnall, 1962)Google Scholar; Hammond, Harold Earl, A Commoner's Judge: The Life and Times of Charles Patrick Daly (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1954)Google Scholar. For Daly's writings, see Daly, Charles P., Annual Address: The Early History of Cartology; or What We Know of Maps and Map-Making Before the Time of Mercator (New York: Geographical Society, 1879)Google Scholar; Daly, Charles P., The Settlement of the Jews in North America (New York: P. Cowen, 1893)Google Scholar; Daly, Charles P., The Common Law: The Common Law, its Origin, Sources, Nature, and Development and What the State of New York has Done to Improve Upon It (New York: Banks & Brothers, 1894)Google Scholar.

31. Some of the first and most generous financial contributions to the Union were given by attorneys Mynart Van Schalck, who contributed $100, and Robert Bayard, who contributed a similar amount (“The Working Womens' [sic] Protective Union,” The Sun, March 24, 1864, n.p.)

32. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 91–92, provides one of the few historical descriptions of the takeover of the Union.

33. Just a few of the other elite lawyers who visibly supported the Union include Chauncy M. Depew, Noah Davis, Fredrick Coudert, and Henry Day. See, for example, “Protection of Working Women,” New York Times, December 9, 1879, 2; WWPU, Twenty-Five Years' History. By way of background, Chauncey Depew was a ubiquitous figure in New York Republican politics. He was a lawyer, had served in the New York legislature, had been secretary of state of New York, was the president of New York Central Railroad, and in 1888 sought the Republican presidential nomination. He was also known for his wonderful oratorical skills and quick wit. Noah Davis was born in 1818 in New Hampshire and began practicing law in upstate New York in 1841. He was appointed in 1857 to the New York State Supreme Court. In 1870, President Grant appointed him to the position of U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and then he was elected to the Supreme Court of New York. He held this position until 1887.

34. U.S. Education and Labor Committee, Senate Report upon the Relations Between Capital and Labor (1885) (hereinafter Senate Report [1885]), 642.

35. In 1855, in New York City, 25 percent of Irish immigrant women were domestics and 50 percent of African American women worked as domestics (Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 55). The Union clearly understood this. The Union's superintendent testified to a U.S. Senate committee that although the Union did not discriminate on the basis of race, not many African American women came to the Union “because colored women are more exclusively engaged in house-service. There are not so many of them seamstresses” (Senate Report (1885), 641).

36. For discussions of domestic labor in New York City, see Montgomery, Maureen E., Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton's New York (New York: Rutledge, 1998), 82–86Google Scholar; Diner, Hasia, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

37. “Local News,” The Sun, December 14, 1864, n.p.

38. WWPU, Working Women's Protective Union, Fifth Annual Report (1868), 31. The actual office records of the WWPU are probably no longer in existence. In order to construct the story of the WWPU, I have primarily relied upon the WWPU's annual reports that provide a rich description of the work of the WWPU, speeches given by attorneys on behalf of the WWPU, government documents, and a variety of newspaper and magazine reports.

39. WWPU, The Work Done and Doing By the Working Women's Protective Union (1873) (NYPL), 19.

40. The Union did not often specify the race of its clients. It did, however, describe one 1873 case as involving a German employer who hired a “colored woman” to clean a building. He then refused to pay the full amount due. The Union wrote, “The Union managers did not know a good reason why a German should not pay what he promised, even to a colored woman” (WWPU, Work Done and Doing, 17). Although this case indicates that the Union did not strictly limit its service to women who were not African American, the Union's attention to her race indicates that the case was unusual enough to require a remark. Almost a decade later, the Union reported another case that involved an African American woman. The Union stressed that the “colored mission” had already tried to collect her wages but had failed; see Protection for the Working Women of New York (1881) (NYPL), 4. In 1885, the Union's superintendent stated that the Union took cases without regard to “religion, nationality, or color” (Senate Report (1885), 641).

41. WWPU, Protection for the Working Women of New York (1882) (NYPL), 11.

42. WWPU, Protection for the Working Women of New York (1880) (NYPL), 4.

43. WWPU, Seventh Annual Report of the Working Women's Protective Union (1870) (NYPL), 3.

44. Stansell, City of Women, 137–38; Kessler-Harris, Alice, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

45. Kessler-Harris writes, “The ideology that exalted home roles [for women] condemned the lives of those forced to undertake wage work. Sympathetic perceptions of women wage earners sacrificing for the sake of their families gave way to charges of selfishness and family neglect” (Out to Work, 53).

46. Senate Report (1885), 640. The Union superintendent further stated: “It is no uncommon thing to have a woman come in who has four or five children to support by the labor of her own hands” (ibid., 643).

47. WWPU, Twenty-Five Years' History, 5–6.

48. See Stanley, Amy Dru, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 4.

49. For a discussion of the depiction of the sewing woman as weak, fragile, and in need of protection, see Stansell, City of Women, 151.

50. “Working Women's Protective Union,” New York Times, March 22, 1864, 5.

51. WWPU, Fifth Annual Report, 14.

52. Ibid., 11.

53. Twenty-Five Years' History, 16–17. The Union claimed that the phrase was used by a working woman in 1863 (ibid, 1).

54. For a discussion of reformers' claims that sewing women could not survive on what they were paid and had to turn to prostitution, see Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 232–35.

55. “Protection of Working Women,” New York Times, December 9, 1879, 2.

56. WWPU, Twenty-Five Years' History.

57. Ibid, 8.

58. Ibid., 20–21.

59. See, for example, WWPU, Work Done and Doing, 20.

60. On the instability of gender and the paradoxes that it produces, see, for example, Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 2–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scott, Joan Wallach, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

61. See “Working Women's Protective Union,” New York Times, December 14, 1864, 8.

62. See, for example, Boylan, Anne M., The Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

63. Despite an extensive search, all that has surfaced regarding Martha Ferrer is the scant information provided in various censuses. Ferrer was born in Connecticut in 1824, the daughter of English immigrants. By 1848, she was married and living in Central America. There she gave birth to a son, Paul Ferrer. By 1880, she was living with Paul, now a doctor in College Point, Queens. The census leaves her occupation blank.

64. When the New York Legal Aid Society sent a demand notice, it was written and signed by an attorney. One chronicler of the Legal Aid Society writes of such attorney, “The demand notes would lose effect if based upon exaggerated or fraudulent claims. And here again the Legal Aid Attorney's constant experience stood him in good stead. He could swiftly detect either the imposter or the innocently mistaken claimant” (Maguire, Lance of Justice, 28–29).

65. In 1928, a report, coauthored by the Bar Association of the City of New York, on legal aid remarked that the Union, although entirely devoted to legal aid, was run by a social worker. Only when actual litigation was involved, did a volunteer lawyer become involved. Clearly this newly professionalized social worker was performing what had been the superintendant's role; see Report of the Joint Committee for the Study of Legal Aid (New York, 1928), 27–28. This also points to the two-tract gender-specific roles played by lawyers and social workers that developed in the twentieth century. Although their actual work was often similar, women became social workers and men became lawyers. On the professionalization of social work, see Walkowitz, Daniel, Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar. On social workers actually practicing law, see Felice Batlan, “Law and the Fabric of the Everyday: The Settlement Houses, Sociological Jurisprudence, and the Gendering of Urban Legal Culture, Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 15 (2006): 235.

66. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, February 5, 1881; see Balliet, Barbara J., “‘Let Them Study as Men and Work as Women’: Georgina Davis, New Women, and Illustrated Papers,” Common-Place 7 (April 2007): 3Google Scholar, http://www.common-place.org/vol-07/no-03/balliet.

67. Unfortunately, the Union only sporadically provided a list of contributors (WWPU, Protection for the Working Women of New York (1880) (NYPL), n.p.) The woman's suffrage newspaper The Revolution also endorsed the work of the Union (The Revolution, January 21, 1869, 39).

68. WWPU, Twenty-Five Years' History, 28–29.

69. “The Working Women's Protective Union,” The Sun, February 16, 1864, n.p.

70. WWPU, Seventh Annual Report of the Working Women's Protective Union (1870) (NYPL), 4.

71. William Rideing, “Working Women in New York,” 61 Harper's New Monthly Magazine 25 (June/November 1880, 25–37).

72. Grossberg, Michael, “Institutionalizing Masculinity: The Law as a Male Profession,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 133–51Google Scholar.

73. Gordon, Robert, “‘The Ideal and the Actual in Law’: Fantasies and Practices of New York City Lawyers, 1870–1910,” in The New High Priests: Lawyers in Post–Civil War America, ed. Gawalt, Gerard W. (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1984)Google Scholar. This article plays with Gordon's paradigm of the gap between lawyer's ideals of a just and orderly world, their reform activities, how they understood or imagined themselves, and their often anomalous role in working for corporations and promoting corporate interests.

74. Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965, 1993), 104Google Scholar.

75. Ibid., 215. See also Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 174–200. Lowell, Josephine Shaw, Public Relief and Private Charity (New York: Arno, 1971, [1884])Google Scholar; Trattner, Walter I., “Louisa Lee Schuyler and the Founding of the State Charities Aid Association, New York Historical Society Quarterly 51 (July 1967): 233–48Google Scholar; Lubove, Roy, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880–1930 (New York: Atheneum, 1980)Google Scholar.

76. New York Sun, March 22, 1864.

77. WWPU, Protection for the Working Women of New York (1880) (NYPL), 3.

78. WWPU, Twenty-Five Years' History, 9 (italics in original).

79. WWPU, Protection for the Working Women of New York (1880), 6–7.

80. WWPU, Protection of the Working Women of New York (1881) (NYPL), 8.

81. WWPU, Working Women's Protective Union Seventh Annual Report (1870) (NYPL), 5. In a much simplified form the Union's emphasis on the subjective value of a dollar, and its greater utility for a poor person, reflected a larger debate among economists, led in part by Alfred Marshall. See Hovenkamp, Herbert, “The Marginalist Revolution in Legal Thought,” Vanderbilt Law Review 46 (1993): 305–59Google Scholar.

82. WWPU, Twenty-Five Year's History, 31.

83. For instance, in 1879, Judge Brady told the following joke: A lawyer was approached by a man who had a claim for $50. The lawyer tells the man that he is very fortunate to have come to him because the man's father was one of the lawyer's earliest clients, and he remembered the father warmly. The lawyer collects the money and calls the man to his office. While the man is counting the money, the lawyer repeats how lucky he is to have retained the lawyer's services. With some dissatisfaction, the man replies, after he has counted only eighteen dollars, “It is fortunate for me that you did not know my grandfather” (WWPU, Plain Facts about the Working Women of New York (1879) (SSC), 13). Judge Brady, having married Maria Daly's sister, was the brother-in-law of Judge Charles Daly.

84. WWPU, Working Women's Protective Union Seventh Annual Report (1870), 5.

85. Ibid.

86. WWPU, Twenty-Five Years' History, 2–3.

87. In 1848, the New York legislature passed a statute that allowed married women to keep separate property gained from inheritance or gift. However, it did not provide married women with the right to contract in their own name or to their wages (Basch, Norma, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 136–61Google Scholar).

88. See, for example, Dubler, Ariela, “In the Shadow of Marriage: Single Women and the Legal Construction of the Family and the State,” Yale Law Journal 112 (May 2003): 1634–1715CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. As Norma Basch demonstrates, the New York judiciary often eviscerated the intent of the Earnings Act and continued to apply the common-law rules of coverture (Basch, Eyes of the Law, 200–213). See also Hartog, Hendrik, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Basch, Norma, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 206–17.

90. See Siegel, Reva B., “The Modernization of Marital Status Law: Adjudicating Wives' Rights to Earnings, 1860–1930,” Georgetown Law Journal 82 (1994): 2127, 2158Google Scholar; Birkbeck v. Ackroyd, 74 N.Y. 356 (1878); Reynolds v. Robinson, 64 N.Y. 589 (1876); Porter v. Dunn, 30 N.E. 122 (N.Y. 1892).

91. Siegel, “The Modernization of Marital Status Law,” 2156.

92. As Amy Dru Stanley writes, “The image of the contracting subject was an ‘isolated man’ implying that the sentimental realm where contract did not prevail, was woman's sphere” (Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 2).

93. Lawrence Friedman writes that the nineteenth-century doctrine of contract law revolved around abstract relationships: “‘Pure’ contract doctrine is blind to details of subject matter and person. It does not ask who buys who sells, and what is bought and sold… . [I]t is a deliberate renunciation of the particular, a deliberate relinquishment of the temptation to restrict untrammeled individual autonomy” (Friedman, Lawrence M., Contract Law in America: A Social and Economic Case Study (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 20–22Google Scholar). See also Gilmore, Grant, The Death of Contract (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974)Google Scholar. Gilmore approvingly cites Friedman and argues that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century contract law drew a sharp distinction between contract and tort (Gilmore, 6–7, 87–88).

94. The Union superintendent described the women it aided as not engaging in cigarette smoking, the consumption of liquor, or popular amusements (Senate Report (1885), 645). On the activities and images of young working women in New York, see Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusement: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Ewen, Elizabeth, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

95. WWPU, Fifth Annual Report, 31.

96. WWPU, Protection for the Working Women of New York (1880), 3.

97. In doing so, it performed a similar function as the Freedmen's Bureau did for newly freed slaves. For discussions on the role of the Freedmen's Bureau and other northern organizations in creating contractual and work discipline, see Rose, Willie Lee, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Vintage, 1964)Google Scholar; Jones, Jacqueline, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Athens: University of Georgia, 1992)Google Scholar; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract.

98. See For the Better Protection of their Rights (New York University, 1940) Women's Legal Education Society, NYU Archive, 20; “The Sohlichtungsverin,” New York Times, March 3, 1889, 15. Emily Kempin is also credited with having inspired the creation of women's legal aid bureaus in Germany (The Legal Aid Review (July 1909), 18 (New York Historical Society) [NYHS]).

99. New York University Law School began admitting women in 1892. Some of the women graduates of NYU created the Woman's Law League of New York. Its mission included providing legal services to poor women and using their legal skills to further philanthropy (“The Woman's Law League of New York,” The Business Woman's Journal, April 1893, 1).

100. Batlan, “Law and the Fabric of the Every Day,” 2.

101. See MacGuire, Lance of Justice, 16–17, 58.

102. Ibid., 70.

103. Nineteenth Annual Report of the German Legal Aid Society for the Year 1894, 17 (Arthur v. Briesen Collection, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Collection, Princeton University (BCPU).

104. See, for example, “Legal Aid for the City's Poor,” Globe, February 14, 1905; “Report of the Committee for the East Side Branch of the Legal Aid Society Upon the Taking of Commissions on Accounts Collected (1905),” BCPU, folder 16, box 5; Tweed, The Legal Aid Society, 20.

105. Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1897, 6–7, BCPU.

106. Eighteenth Annual Report of the German Legal Aid Society for the Year 1893, 2, BCPU.

107. Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1900, 14.

108. See, for example, Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1902, 25–27 BCPU.

109. Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1901, 10, BCPU.

110. “The Judicial Aspect of the Work of the Legal Aid Society,” The Legal Aid Review (July 1907) (NYPL).

111. WWPU, Seventh Annual Report of the Working Women's Protective Union (1870), 4.

112. Domestic Employment: A Handbook (Legal Aid Society: New York, 1908) (available at http//:google.books.com/books).

113. See The Legal Aid Review (No. 4, 1904) (NYPL), 1.

114. On antidesertion law as embodying the idea that men's marriage obligations should be enforced and that dependency should be private and contained in the family, see Ingra, Anna, Wives without Husbands: Marriage, Desertion, and Welfare in New York, 1900–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 82–83Google Scholar. See also Dubler, “In the Shadow of Marriage.”

115. See “Good Work Done By the Legal Aid Society,” New York Times (1905), BCPU, folder 13, Box 7; Catchings, Waddill, “The Work of the New York Legal Aid Society,” Greenbag 15 (1903): 316Google Scholar.

116. See, for example, Twenty-Second Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1897, 10–11 (BCPU); John Elfreth Watkins, “Where the Poor Get Legal Advice Free,” The Ladies Home Journal, November 1906, 45. On the practice of rabbis giving ghets to men, and Jewish legal groups responses, see Ingra, Wives without Husbands, 36.

117. See Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1900, 12–13 (BCPU).

118. Twenty-Fourth Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1899, 35–36 (BCPU). At the turn of the century and for decades thereafter, it was common for reformers to blame wives' lack of domestic skills, failure to be submissive, and physical appearances for husbands' desertions (Ingra, Wives without Husbands, 59–61).

119. Watkins, “Where the Poor Get Legal Advice Free,” 45.

120. Catchings, Waddill, “The Work of the New York Legal Aid Society,” Greenbag 15 (1903): 313–14Google Scholar.

121. Ibid., 317.

122. Maguire, Lance of Justice, 72; Davies, Brutal Need, 15; Anna Ingra, although only briefly mentioning the issue, suggests that women attorneys at the turn of the century worked for the National Desertion Bureau, a Jewish organization that provided legal support to women whose husbands had deserted them (Ingra, Wives without Husbands, 23).

123. Maguire, Lance of Justice, 175.

124. Letter from James Reynolds to Mrs. William Gulliver, January 11, 1899, and Letter from James Reynolds to Carl Schurz, January 10, 1899), Records of the University Settlement Society of New York City, Jacob S. Eisenger Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, box 7.

125. Loew, who was Jewish, was the daughter of a successful lawyer and granddaughter of a prominent Hungarian rabbi. She graduated from New York University Law School in 1895 and went to work in her father's law office. Loew later went on to become active in the suffrage movement and in politics. She was eventually appointed judge in domestic relations court, making her the first woman in New York to hold such a position; see Rada Blumkin, “Rosalie Loew Whitney: The Early Years as Advocate for the Poor,” http://www.stanford.edu/group/WHLP; Danielle Haas Laursen, “Rosalie Loew Whitney: Lawyer, Crime Fighter, Judge, Political Activist, and Suffragist,” http://www.stanford.edu/group/WHLP.

126. Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the Legal Aid Society for the Year 1901 (BCPU).

127. See Letter from Cornelius Kitchell to Arthur v. Briesen, February 10, 1905, BCPU, box 4, folder 8; Letter from Louis Stoiber to Arthur v. Briesen, April 19, 1905, BCPU, box 4, folder 8. In 1905, after working at the Legal Aid Society, Mary Quakenbos formed her own law firm called the People's Law Firm. Quakenbos's clients were primarily poor. Similar to her work at the Society, many of her cases involved representing women in abandonment, support, and other domestic relations cases. Quakenbos, a woman of independent wealth, hoped that her offices would simply generate enough income to pay expenses. She also offered to train any woman lawyer who would be interested in working for her (“New Field of Legal Work among the Poor,” New York Times, June 11, 1905, 7).

128. Letter from Mary Quackenbos to Arthur v. Briesen, April 7, 1905, BCPU, box 5, folder 11.

129. “The Judicial Aspect of the Work of the Legal Aid Society, The Legal Aid Review (July 1907) (NYPL).

130. Ibid.

131. Ibid.

132. On early women lawyers and trial work, see Drachman, Virginia, Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Drachman, Virginia, Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887 to 1890 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

133. “New Field of Legal Work Among the Poor,” New York Times (June 11, 1905).

134. Maguire, Lance of Justice, 68.

135. Invitation card from the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Banquet Committee (1901), Legal Aid Society material, NYHS, (italics added).

136. Letter from the Banquet Committee (1901), Legal Aid Society material, NYHS.

137. Letter from Edward Fleming to Arthur v. Briesen, January 11–12, 1905(?), BCPU, box 5, folder 18.

138. Michael Grossberg makes this important point but does not connect it to issues of gender or women; see Grossberg, Michael, “The Politics of Professionalism: The Creation of Legal Aid and the Strains of Political Liberalism in America, 1900–1930,” in Lawyers and the Rise of Western Political Liberalism, ed. Halliday, Terrence and Karpik, Lucian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

139. On the development of social work, which was itself in the process of professionalizing, see, for example, Ehrenreich, John H., The Ultruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 53–66Google Scholar.

140. Report of the Joint Committee for the Study of Legal Aid (New York, 1928), 27–28.

141. For example, Kate Holladay Claghorn criticized legal aid societies for their emphasis on technicalities, overlooking the larger needs of clients, favoring male attorneys, and tending to believe employers over their (often female) employee-clients (The Immigrant's Day in Court (New York: Harper's Brothers, 1923), 470–85).

142. Smith, Reginald Heber, Justice and the Poor: A Study of the Present denial of Justice to the Poor and the Agencies Making more Equal their Position before the Law, with Particular Reference to Legal Aid Work in the United States (New York: Carnegie Foundation, 1919)Google Scholar.

143. See Babcock, Barbara Allen, “Inventing the Public Defender,” American Criminal Law Review 43 (2006):1267Google Scholar.