Jill Norgren, the author of Rebels at the Bar, is a political scientist. But she has produced more than political science. Those members of the profession who are devoted to quantitative methodology might question whether this book counts as political science at all. Studies of “first” women rarely lend themselves to quantitative methods. The experimental group is dwarfed by any possible control group. Norgren presents biographical sketches of eight lawyers, and mentions about 20 more. Comparing them to their male counterparts, to women their age with similar backgrounds, or to twenty-first-century women lawyers would have been an exercise in futility. The story Norgren wanted to tell required depth more than breadth, thinking more than counting. Her history and biography have produced a valuable study that transcends disciplinary boundaries and should have wide appeal outside academia.
Norgren's subjects were born between 1830 and 1862. Predictably, most had middle-class, if not affluent, backgrounds. Myra Bradwell, rejected by the Illinois bar, was a judge's wife. Mary Greene of Boston belonged to a first family of Rhode Island. Belva Lockwood, the subject of a Norgren biography, was the exception. The daughter of “farmers who eked out a modest living,” she quit school at 14 to help support her family (p. 74). All were Christian and Caucasian. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the only African-American woman mentioned, “likely” entered Howard Law School in 1869 as “one of the country's very first women law school students” (p. 35).
A study of “firsts” invites several sets of questions. What factors distinguished these women from the majority of their contemporaries and linked them with one another? What attracted them to their particular endeavor? Finally, how did they gain entry where they were not wanted? Norgren's analysis suggests a variety of intriguing answers to these questions. This book confirms much of what historians and biographers know about nineteenth-century women professionals, but it also provides some fresh insights.
These women were not rebels in either the 1960s radical or 1970s feminist sense of the word. Their rebellion against male supremacy did not extend to the family, the legal system, the social order, or even sex roles in general. Several had parents who were committed to causes like temperance and antislavery. Although these parents did not all encourage their daughters' ambitions, none of Norgren's subjects became permanently estranged from their families of origin. Parents, and some husbands, encouraged them to study. Several attended academically oriented girls' “seminaries” until their late teens. These lawyers exercised an extraordinary amount of initiative even for their class and background. Lockwood ran for president in 1884. Clara Foltz and Lelia Robinson divorced their husbands, a rare and stigmatized act in the 1870s.
“Some of these women wanted and needed to make a living” (p. 34). Law seemed “more interesting, with more promise” than teaching, the usual alternative. The “intellectual challenge of the law” attracted these women whether or not they had to earn money. So did “the possibility of using law to further reform movement objectives” (p. 25). The women strove to achieve reforms both in their support for legislation and in the cases they took.
Their entry into the law coincided with radical changes in legal education. Bradwell and Lavinia Goodell, like most male attorneys of their generation, “read law” as apprentices. Lockwood, their contemporary, was denied this opportunity and attended law school in her 30s. Greene and Robinson graduated from Boston University Law School in the 1880s, temporarily becoming Boston's only women practitioners.
Opposition to women becoming lawyers was the norm. The Illinois Supreme Court justified excluding Bradwell by “invoking the common-law doctrine of coverture (by which upon marriage a woman's legal rights were folded into those of her husband)” (p. 38). At the same time, Goodell “discovered that being single and free from the law of coverture by no means granted her easy admission to the profession of law” (p. 41). But “lawyers in the courtroom laughed out loud as Justice [Joseph] Bradley read his theory of separate spheres” (p. 42) in his concurring opinion in Bradwell v. Illinois. Goodell found in Janesville, Wisconsin, “a community that, believing law to be men's work, nevertheless met her halfway in terms of her professional plan” (p. 50). The barriers had weak spots, and the women became experts at finding and exploiting them. Persistent efforts to find receptive sponsors and law schools paid off. The explanations offered for their exclusion may have reduced the sting of repeated rejection. For example, both Lockwood and Foltz were told that their presence would distract male students.
My only quarrel—quibble, really—with Norgren is her choice of “not everyone is bold” as a chapter title for accounts of two lawyers who avoided courtroom practice. The chapter shows that the belief that “public opinion would be against a woman trying cases in court” did not negate Mary Hall's or Catherine Waugh McCulloch's boldness in surmounting the obstacles they faced (p. 134). The best measure of the success of these rebels is the fact that behavior that was unusual in their time are commonplace now. Jill Norgren's account is fascinating and informative.
