1. To open law schools to women.
2. To remove all disabilities to admission of women to the bar, and to secure their eligibility to the bench.
3. To disseminate knowledge concerning women’s legal status.
4. To secure better legal conditions for women.
Women lawyers are welcomed as members of bar associations established by their brothers in the profession. Many have availed themselves of this privilege.
For various reasons quite a number of women admitted have not, so far, identified themselves with law practice. Others have allowed themselves to be drawn into temperance and other reform movements; but the greater portion at once settled down to follow their chosen pursuit with no deviation, and are ripening into able, experienced lawyers, and winning their fair share of clientage. Some confine themselves mainly to an office practice, seldom or never appearing in public; others prefer court practice. Those who enter the forum are cordially countenanced by brother lawyers and acceptably received before court and jury. As a rule they are treated with the utmost courtesy by the bench, the bar, and other court officers.
Woman’s influence in the court room as counsel is promotive of good in more than one respect. Invectives against opposing counsel, so freely made use of in some courts, are seldom indulged in when woman stands as the opponent. And in social impurity cases, language, in her presence, becomes more chaste, and the moral tone thereby elevated perceptibly. But there should be one more innovation brought into general vogue, that of the mixed jury system. When we shall have women both as lawyers and jurors to assist in the trial of cases, then, and not until then, will woman’s influence for good in the administration of justice be fully felt. In Wyoming and Washington the mixed jury system has been tried and found perfectly practicable.
There has not been time enough yet for a woman to develop into an Erskine or Burke, an O’Connor or Curran, a Webster or Choate. But few men have done so, if history correctly records. Woman has made a fair beginning, and is determined to push on and upward, keeping pace with her brother along the way until, with him, she shall have finally reached the highest pinnacle of legal fame.
X.
WOMAN IN THE STATE.
BY