Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury by Michael S Lief

Author:Michael S Lief
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC035000
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1998-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

A Man’s World No More

Clara Shortridge Foltz Sends Shockwaves Through the Turn-of-the-Century Legal Establishment When She Becomes the First Woman to Do Battle in California’s Courts

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the idea of women becoming attorneys was beyond foolish to American men, and more than a few women. Lawyers were thought of as bold, brilliant, aggressive, incisive, and ruthless in pursuit of justice and the interests of the client. In the United States of the 1870s, nothing could have been further from the popular conception of what a woman should be. The chief judge of Wisconsin spoke for many when he said that “[r]everence for all womanhood would suffer in the public spectacle” of women practicing law.

The numbers speak for themselves. In the 1880 national Census there were only seventy-five women lawyers in the entire country. It took an 1879 act of Congress—sponsored by the senator from California (an attorney)—to allow the first woman to argue before the United States Supreme Court.

It was in this hostile atmosphere that Clara Shortridge Foltz stepped into the breech and forever changed the practice of law. Foltz, married at fifteen, followed her husband on a trek that led from Iowa to Oregon and then to San Jose, California, where they and their four children arrived in time for an economic depression featuring spectacular bank and crop failures. Within a few short years they had a fifth child, and Jeremiah Foltz was gone, abandoning his family and leaving his wife to support the youngsters. In 1878, Foltz, twenty-nine, turned to public lecturing to support herself, filling auditoriums with her rhetoric in support of the women’s suffrage movement.

Foltz soon set her sights on becoming an attorney. She wrote to a renowned California trial attorney, seeking a position with his firm, so that she might study the law with an expert. His reply was succinct:

My dear young friend:

Excuse my delay in answering your letter asking for permission to enter my law office as a student. My high regard for your parents, and for you, who seem to have no right understanding of what you say you want to undertake, forbids encouraging you in so foolish a pursuit—when you would invite nothing but ridicule if not contempt.

A woman’s place is at home, unless it [is] as a teacher. If you would like a position in our public schools I will be glad to recommend you, for I think you are well qualified.

Not one to be easily discouraged, Foltz went to work in the office of an early male feminist with whom her father had practiced law before becoming a minister. Foltz knew from the beginning that once her studies were completed she would have an even more formidable hurdle to overcome.

The state of California did not allow women to practice law. A law school education or passing a statewide examination was not required to be a member of the bar; the only qualifications were that the applicant be a twenty-one-year-old white male citizen of good moral character, and possess the necessary “learning and ability.

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