March 3: Women and the Supreme Court

On this date in History .... March 3, 1879:

Belva Lockwood became the first woman sworn in as a member of the U.S. Supreme Court Bar, and was the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court. 

In 1884, Lockwood became the second woman (after Victoria Woodhull) to run for President of the United States. She was the first to appear on the election ballot and to engage in a full-fledged campaign as the candidate for the National Equal Rights Party. 

In 1914, when she was 84 yrs old and asked whether a woman would one day be president she replied, “If a woman demonstrates that she is fitted to be president she will someday occupy the White House. It will be entirely on her own merits, however. No movement can place her there simply because she is a woman. It will come if she proves herself mentally fit for the position.”

MARCH:  WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH

August 2: Myra Bradwell, Woman Lawyer

On this date in History .... August 2, 1869:

photo courtesy of
Columbia law library.edu

Myra Bradwell passed the Illinois Bar Exam at the age of 38, becoming one of the first women lawyers in the country and the first woman lawyer in Illinois. (Arabella Mansfield is credited with being the first woman to pass the bar (in Iowa) in June 1869.) However, the Illinois Supreme Court denied Bradwell admission to the bar, not because she was a woman …. but because she was a married woman.  They were afraid that since a lawyer may be held responsible for their actions, she might be arrested and “therefore she would not be available to her husband.”

 "The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many occupations of civil life....The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign office of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator." [83 U.S. 130 at 141].   

(quote source: http://library.law.columbia.edu/rise_of_women/practice/myra_bradwell.html

Her appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court was denied but this time it WAS because she was a woman, with one of the four reasons being that allowing her to practice law would “open the floodgates” and the court feared civil offices would be filled with women.

Bradwell appealed the decision to the Supreme Court who also denied her access to practice law. Illinois eventually passed laws to permit women to practice law and in 1890, she was granted a license to practice law. Her license was granted munc pro tunc (“now for then”) and dated 1869, making her officially the first licensed woman lawyer in Illinois.

Bradwell was the lawyer for Mary Todd Lincoln’s insanity trial in 1875 when Lincoln was declared sane and released from the sanitarium.  (SEE ALSO MY BLOG OF JUNE 19 – MARY TODD LINCOLN) 

In 1868, Bradwell founded The Chicago Legal News, a regional legal-news newspaper that was the highest circulated legal newspaper for over two decades. She became very involved in married women’s property rights, drafting a law in 1869 to protect the earnings of married women and to protect the interest of widows in their husbands’ estates.

Her daughter graduated law school in 1882 and continued to run the newspaper until 1925.

July 30: First New World Legislature

On this date in History ......July 30, 1619: 

The first legislative body was formed in the New World. The House of Burgesses (the English word for “citizens”) convened on July 30 and the first law passed required tobacco to be sold for a minimum of three shillings per pound. 

Other laws passed during this first session included prohibitions against gambling, drunkenness and idleness, and one that made observation of the Sabbath mandatory.