Rebels at the Bar Read online

  Bradwell’s growing success as a publisher kept her out of the orbit of these grumblings. She spent her time expanding the reach of her commercial empire while drafting and advocating reforms concerning the legal system, including jury packing and corruption, guardianship, treatment of the insane—prompted by her friendship with Mary Todd Lincoln, who had been hospitalized involuntarily in an asylum—suffrage, and married women’s property rights.57 She encouraged her daughter to study law, and stood by proudly in 1882 when Bessie graduated from Chicago’s Union College of Law, having been chosen orator in a class of fifty-five. Bessie married lawyer Frank A. Helmer and joined him in his practice. She also helped in her mother’s company, compiling at least ten volumes of Bradwell’s Appellate Court Reports.58

  Bradwell’s harshest critics portrayed her as “a fanatic destroyer of domesticity.”59 This was, of course, the curse directed at virtually any middle-class married woman of the time who wanted a career. In Wisconsin, however, Lavinia Goodell, another ambitious woman, discovered that being single and free from the law of coverture by no means granted her easy admission to the profession of law.

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  Lavinia Goodell

  “A Sweeping Revolution of Social Order”

  If nature has built up barriers to keep Woman out of the legal profession, be assured she will stay out; but if nature has built no such barriers, in vain shall man build them, for they will certainly be overthrown.

  —Lavinia Goodell, 1876

  LAVINIA GOODELL, BORN IN 1839, learned about the power of law at an early age. Slavery and temperance were everyday topics of conversation at her parents’ dinner table. By the age of nineteen Lavinia imagined law as a profession through which she could do good and not lose her moral bearings. From the same age, she also imagined herself happily, forever, unmarried.

  Moral bearings were everything in the world of Rhoda Lavinia Goodell. The second surviving daughter of William and Clarissa Goodell, Lavinia, or Vinnie as she was called, began life in Utica, New York. The area was a stronghold of religious revival, and earnest social and moral reform. Earlier, while earning a living as a merchant trader, William found himself “tugged at” by the slavery question and “the Drink Demon.”1 He put commercial life behind him and began working for the cause of abolition, and for temperance.

  By the year of Lavinia’s birth, William had been writing and publishing reform newspapers for more than a decade. He was on his way to building a national reputation as an abolition and temperance activist.

  Rhoda Lavinia Goodell (1839-1880). (Reprinted by permission from the William Goodell Papers, Historical Collections, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky.)

  Along with her father, her more conservative and conventional mother, and a much-loved sister, Maria, twelve years her senior, Lavinia shared in a daily routine of prayer, dinnertime debate, and adherence to the vegetarian diet prescribed by wellness reformer Sylvester Graham. Maria said that the household lived by “regularity,” yet on any given day guests might include well-known anti-slavery agitators as well as the “poor and defenseless … without distinction of color or sex.”2

  William and his colleagues set a high moral bar for the members of their community. Clarissa Goodell struggled, once telling a neighbor, “[M]y selfishness is every day rebuked by his [William’s] higher life.”3 Lavinia, a quick study from an early age, knew her own mind. She developed predictably strong feelings in support of the abolition of slavery, but by the time she was eight or nine, according to her sister, had adopted “entirely independent views from her family” with respect to organized religion and making public professions.4 Later, she would not join a church just to help her business.

  Maria married and moved away when Lavinia was eleven and the family had established a residence in Brooklyn, New York. The separation, one that lasted virtually all of Lavinia’s life, encouraged the two to exchange letters containing everyday news as well as deeply felt meditations about how to live a decent and principled life. In March 1858, Lavinia sent Maria a letter full of pain and pleading, one seeking an ally for an audacious plan. Lavinia was nearly nineteen and ready to graduate from Brooklyn Heights Seminary.

  Dear Sister,

  You know I expect to graduate … and I must have some life plan. I don’t believe in living to get married, if that comes along in the natural course of events—very well, but to make it virtually my end and aim, to square all my plans to it, and study and learn for no other purpose, does not suit my ideas. … This would be different if women would learn to depend more on themselves, instead of thinking it devolves on the other sex to support them. We want self-reliance. … I would not counsel neglect of such accomplishments as are necessary in a wife and mother, but they are not reliable capital to un-engaged, unlikely to be engaged girls, who want to be true to themselves.

  I think the study of law would be pleasant, but the practice attended with many embarrassments. Indeed I fear it would be utterly unpracticable [sic]. Our folks would not hear to my going to college. I should not mention it. Momma is being much afraid I shall become identified with the women’s rights movement. … In all probability I must teach, that is about all a woman can do, and now the profession is over crowded with women.

  I do hope that you can give me some suggestions. I have only you to advise me, as our folks think of me only as a child and don’t think I need ever do any thing.

  Your loving Sis,

  Lavinia5

  Maria, thirty-one, the wife of a minister and a mother, had listened to Lavinia’s ruminations during a visit the previous summer. At that time she had dismissed her younger sister’s ideas as ones “founded on a false and vain ambition.”6 Lavinia’s letter did nothing to change Maria’s mind or to win her as an ally. Despite Maria’s stance, Lavinia maintained good spirits and shortly wrote again. She said that her first duty was to make a cheerful and pleasant home for their parents, and not to do anything to which they would object. The senior Goodells were unwilling to have Lavinia leave home to teach. Lavinia told Maria, “I have not the slightest desire to do anything out of the common cause.”7 Her sensibilities as a dutiful daughter intersected with her interest in the law, and she concluded, “I shall wait eight or ten years before deciding and see how matters stand.”8

  The wait, in fact, proved to be a dozen years, time in which Lavinia matured as a woman who was concerned about duty, but also personal growth. At twenty-two she told her trusted cousin, “You know we reached the conclusion last summer that the object of life is discipline, not happiness; viewing matters in that light we can not wonder that all our wishes are not gratified.”9 Her independent views about religion had not been resolved. In her late teens she had written Maria, “I hope I may be coming nearer that ‘higher life,’ but theory is so much easier than practice. I don’t want to make any professions. I think God has given me a great deal more light on some things.”10 In her early twenties, despite working alongside her father at his newspaper, she was no closer to that higher life.

  Lavinia stayed in New York during the Civil War. She liked the “stir and excitement of city life” and the mental challenges of journalism. When her father was ill, she sat in for him at his reform newspaper as editor-in-chief.11 At the end of the war, her parents retired from the city. At the age of twenty-six, for the first time, Lavinia was alone and “beginning life for herself.”12

  She had written that teaching was the only calling for an educated woman, and when her father closed the newspaper, she hired herself out as an instructor. For two years, Lavinia tutored a dozen students in the home of a Brooklyn family. To Maria, the mother of four boys, she expressed very mixed feelings about this calling. When the children were good, Lavinia enjoyed her days, but when they fell into tantrums, she was reduced to despair.

  The weight of teaching ill-behaved children and dealing with their parents sparked many conversations between the sisters. In the summer of 1866 Lavinia wrote, agreeing with Maria, who had commented that “the m
anner in which we have been raised has unfitted us for contact with the world”; Lavinia added, “[A]t the same time it has molded our characters, so that we are less liable to yield to temptation.”13 The moral rectitude expected of a Goodell daughter did not, however, seem entirely disagreeable. “The memory of what our parents have been through, of what they are,” Lavinia asserted, means “I can not be sufficiently thankful for that rare house training which I have received even if it does make my subsequent life harder. It is a selfish world and sometimes I think there is no way to go through it but to be selfish too, but we will try, to be actuated by high motives.”14

  While teaching, Lavinia had written stories, and in 1868 she was taken on as an assistant in the editorial rooms of the new Harper’s Bazaar fashion magazine. Children’s tantrums were now a thing of her past. The work of recommending which stories to reprint from other publications required discrimination and judgment. She found the position congenial and so well-paying that she was able to visit her sister in Janesville, Wisconsin, while also making investments and sending money to her parents and Maria. At night Lavinia, the intellectual daughter who had not been permitted to attend college, began to study German. To sharpen her spoken Deutsch, she moved into a boarding house run by a German family. In letters from this period Lavinia admitted to Maria that she shocked people “by not keeping Good Friday”; she also asked if her sister had been reading Tennyson and encouraged her to make time for Charlotte Brontë.15

  Lavinia loved journalism and hoped that her position at Harper’s would be permanent. Mr. Harper had “spoiled” her for any other boss, and she told Maria that if she should have to leave, “it would be to go into business for myself” but did not let slip what this work might be.16

  The senior Goodells had been thinking about moving to Janesville—childhood home of temperance leader Frances Willard—to be near Maria. This unsettled Lavinia. She told her sister that if William and Clarissa left the East, she would think about resettling in Chicago or even Janesville. In 1870 the Goodells made the move to Janesville. A year later Lavinia, thirty-two, joined them, once more making her home with her parents. Maria thought that this was an entirely good arrangement. William was nearly eighty and Clarissa had health problems. She divulged that their parents now had “a competence, and were able to give [Lavinia] such a home without labor, as she had not enjoyed for many years; [a household that permitted] leisure to follow her literary tastes.”17

  Lavinia, however, had never lost interest in the idea of becoming a lawyer. Before she resettled in Janesville, small items had appeared in the press about the first women to make their way into legal sanctuaries. It is probable that Lavinia knew that Lemma Barkaloo had been denied admission to New York’s Columbia Law School but had succeeded, along with Phoebe Couzins, Ada Kepley, and Sarah Killgore, in winning admission to midwestern university law programs. She might also have learned about the welcome given Belle Mansfield when she began to read law as an apprentice in Iowa. With Columbia, her home-town school, as off-bounds to Lavinia as it had been to Barkaloo, a move to Illinois or Wisconsin was not an unreasonable strategy despite her happiness as a Manhattan career woman.

  When Lavinia finally settled in Janesville she spoke of the move as her good fortune, an act of “Special providence.”18 Maria still saw folly and vain ambition in her sister’s desire to become an attorney, speaking about it as an “indulgence.”19 For practical reasons as well as the sake of propriety, Lavinia spent her first Wisconsin year making acquaintances, looking after her sometimes problematic health, and doing the necessary housekeeping. At the age of nineteen Lavinia had professed that she would be content never to marry. In early January 1872, now thirty-three years of age, Lavinia appears to have opened her mind to the possibility of marriage only to find herself in a community where there were few single men. She wrote to Maria, “[Y]ou need not worry about my getting married. I haven’t gone far enough west yet.”20

  Maria, who later in life wrote her sister’s biography, controls the story, and she casts Lavinia’s choice to read law as a decision that could not, or would not, be made without the permission of relatives. Lavinia had, Maria writes, put off her studies while settling in but then “father and sister encouraged her, the former because of his conviction that she was ‘cut out for a lawyer.’ … The latter because Lavinia could not live without some high aim, and the study of the profession would occupy her mind, and make her happy.”21 Maria appears dyspeptic and condescending. Surely, Lavinia wanted the approval of her family, but many things about her move to Wisconsin suggest she had set an independent course of action in leaving New York, one that would permit her to read law. And that is what she began to do in January of 1872.

  Lavinia went to Janesville, the county seat, hoping to find a culture of liberality. She encountered a community that, believing law to be men’s work, nevertheless met her halfway in terms of her professional plan—that is to say, nobody shunned her, and a few members of the local legal fraternity even lent her their law books. She built upon her family’s good name as reformers and temperance activists. The community knew her to be a decent and proper Christian woman.

  Goodell’s own temperance activism burnished her image, as did her willingness to make and receive conventional social calls, and to teach Sabbath school. The community’s positive view of her was no small accomplishment at a time when another Wisconsin woman commented in the Woman’s Journal, “I never before found myself settled in the midst of such a conservative society. To affirm one’s faith in woman suffrage is about as much as one’s social position is worth, and for a woman actually to declare that she desires to go to the polls and vote, produces an effect not unlike that which might be produced should she express a desire to commit burglary or arson.”22

  * * *

  By 1872 several dozen law school programs existed in the United States, but none was near Janesville. Young Janesville men wishing to learn the law apprenticed with local attorneys, but none of the town’s more than two dozen lawyers was willing to give Goodell a desk and make her an apprentice in the traditional manner. However, A. A. Jackson agreed to direct her reading, which she did at home five or six hours a day.23 Jackson, she said, was “one of the pillars of the Cong. Church, and a good woman’s rights man.”24

  In March 1872 Lavinia wrote to Maria that she had been studying law for six weeks and liked it “ever so much.”25 She had already read through Warren’s Law Studies and two volumes of Blackstone. Opening her heart to Maria, she confided that if something would happen in the family, her studies would have to be stopped temporarily, so

  I don’t like to tell what great things I’m going to do, but wait and see whether I can do them. I think the information I shall acquire will always be of great use to me, even if I never should practice. If I succeed in getting creditably thro’ my studies, tho’, I think I shall try to get admitted to the Bar, if only for the precedent. (How would it look—Lavinia Goodell, Counselor at Law.)26

  By the spring of 1873 Goodell reported reading “no books now but law books.”27 Three volumes of Greenleaf’s Treatise on the Law of Evidence took her several months, after which she moved on to real estate subjects. Blackstone and Kent were always on her table. Even when the Wisconsin weather turned harsh, Lavinia continued what had become regular visits to the local circuit court, where she scrutinized the presentations of the attorneys and the rulings of Judge Herman Conger, a former New York State attorney and two-term congressman.28 Goodell was not put off by this world of men and spittoons and found, in the courtroom, that the sheriff was “delightfully polite” to her.29 She wrote to Maria—now living in Michigan—that her recent observation of cases involving counterfeit money and burglary had been “interesting.” Intrigued, but sensitive that Maria’s concerns were those of family and housekeeping, she finished off, “[T]here has been a very amusing case about seventeen dead hogs, also some horse cases, but I presume a detailed account of them would not interest you.”30
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br />   Goodell understood that tolerance was the best she might expect from the locals. She told her sister that it was “quite an innovation” for her to go into court as Janesville was a “small, conservative, gossipy town.”31 To make these visits, she drew on reserves of “moral courage,” all the while thinking of the “primitive Christians, who had to fight with wild beasts in the amphitheatres, or live in the catacombs, or be beheaded, or burned alive.”32 Thus fortified, she managed her courthouse visits and appreciated that while the local people did not comprehend her ambitions, if she dressed well, attended an orthodox church, made cake and preserves, and developed “no other alarming eccentricity than a taste for legal studies” she would be fine and would not antagonize the gossips.33 Indeed, she wrote to her cousin, Sarah Thomas, “nobody seems shocked” by her studies.34