America's First Woman Lawyer

During her lifetime, Myra Bradwell (1831-94) - America's "first" woman lawyer as well as publisher and editor-in-chief of a prestigious legal newspaper - did more to establish and aid the rights of women and other legally handicapped people than any other woman of her day. Her female contemporaries - Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone - are known to all; now it is time for Myra Bradwell to assume her rightful place among women's rights leaders of the nineteenth century. With author Jane Friedman's discovery of previously unpublished letters and other valuable documents, Bradwell's fascinating and compelling story can at last be told. America's First Woman Lawyer chronicles the tortuous steps Bradwell took to establish her right to practice law. In 1869, at the age of thirty-eight, she passed the Illinois bar examination with high honors, but because she was a woman, Bradwell was deemed "unfit", and barred from practicing her chosen profession - twice by the Illinois Supreme Court, and finally by the nation's highest court. Undaunted, Bradwell refused to heed the U.S. Supreme Court justices who declared that "the Law of the Creator" and the "divine ordinances" mandated that the "domestic sphere" was the proper domain of women. She immediately established the Chicago Legal News, which became the most highly respected and widely circulated legal newspaper in the nation. While at its helm, Bradwell advocated, drafted, and secured the enactment of extraordinary legal reforms in women's rights, child custody, improvement of the legal system, and treatment of the mentally ill. Many of the proposals she spearheaded were enacted by the Illinois legislature and served asprototypes for similar legislation in jurisdictions throughout the land. Bradwell's writings, and accounts of her activities published during her lifetime, make it clear that she was a leading nineteenth-century suffragist. Yet her extraordinary contributions are seldom mentioned