In 1869, Myra Bradwell applied for a license to practice law in the state of Illinois. She was 38 years old, married, with two teenage children. She had trained in her husband’s law office and passed the bar exam with high honors. In those days, you didn’t have to go to law school to practice, you just had to pass the bar, and so Bradwell had done all that was required.
The Illinois Supreme Court rejected her application. It did so without regard to her competence (the justices acknowledged her abilities in the ruling) or her good standing in the community. Rather, she was rejected on the ground that she was a woman. In the justices’ view, Bradwell’s sex created a legal “disability” the court was “powerless” to cure. Although the licensing law was silent on the matter of sex, given that only men had ever been admitted to the bar, if a female was to be eligible, the court said, the state legislature would have to say so explicitly.
The state court justices, though, went on to make it clear that they thought female lawyers were a bad idea. They thought that the “hot strifes of the bar,” the “momentous verdicts,” and the “prizes of the struggle” would “tend to destroy the deference and delicacy with which it is the pride of our ruder sex to treat” women. The “administration of justice,” these men said, would suffer if women were present “as barristers in our courts.” In other words, the law is like war. In the heat of battle, male lawyers can’t help but be rough and rude, and should women be injected into the arena, men—who are otherwise perfectly competent—would be distracted by “rustling garments” and “swayed”—not by the law or the evidence—but by sex, “the most powerful influence known to humanity.”
Myra Bradwell was having none of this. She had been raised by abolitionist parents and chose as her own cause “the freeing of women from many of the conditions of their own enslavement.” In 1868, she had founded the Chicago Legal News, which was a quick success thanks to the valuable information and services it provided to the men of the bar. She now used its editorial columns to contest the decision: “Brains and mentality are measured by the formation of the wearing apparel. This will not do!” And she drafted a bill for consideration by the state legislature. It read, simply, “No person shall be precluded or disbarred from any occupation, profession, or employment (except military) on account of sex.” On a further front, she appealed her loss in the Illinois Supreme Court to the Supreme Court of the United States.
