treated as a feme sole, and be sued as such; and, with such consent, could be an administrator, executor, or guardian, in England or America.
The Legislature has, in repeated instances, acknowledged the capability and capacity of your petitioner to transact business, by providing that the Chicago Legal News, edited by her, and containing the decisions rendered by your honors, should be received in evidence in all the courts of this State, and in the following extract from the charter of the Chicago Legal News Company:
And all the real and personal estate of said Myra Bradwell shall be liable for the debts of said company, contracted while she is a stockholder therein, and all stock of said company owned by her, and the earnings thereof, shall be her sole and separate property, the same as if she were an unmarried woman; and she shall have the same right to hold any office or offices in said company, or transact any of its business that a feme sole would have.—Legal News, Edition Laws of 1869, p. 93. Sec. 4, p. 93.
Your petitioner claims that a married woman is not to be classed with an infant since the passage of the Act of 1869. A married woman may sue in her own name for her earnings, an infant can not. A married woman, if an attorney, could be committed for contempt of court the same as any other attorney. If she should collect money and refuse to pay it over, she could be sued for it the same as if she were single. A married woman is liable at law for all torts committed by her, unless done under the real or implied coercion of her husband. Having received a license to practice law as an attorney, and having acted as such, she would be estopped from saying she was not liable as an attorney upon any contract made by her in that capacity.
The fees that a married woman receives for her services as an attorney are just as much her earnings as the dollar that a sewing-woman receives for her day's work, and are just as much protected by the Act of 1869. Is it for the court to say, in advance, that it will not admit a married woman? Should she be admitted, and fail to perform her duty, or to comply with all her contracts as an attorney, could not the court, upon application, strike her name from the roll, or inflict more summary punishment?
Your petitioner has complied with all the provisions of the statutes of the State regulating the admission of attorneys, and asks, as a matter of right and justice, standing as she does upon the law of the land, that she be admitted.
Not a line of written law, or a single decision in our State, can be found disqualifying a married woman from acting as an attorney. This honorable court can send me from its bar, and prevent me from practicing as an attorney, and it is of small consequence; but if, in so doing, your honors say to me: "You can not receive a license to practice as an attorney-at-law in the courts of this State upon the ground that you would not be bound by the obligations necessary to be assumed, where the relation of attorney and client shall exist, by reason of the disability imposed by your married condition"; you, in my judgment, in striking me down, strike a blow at the rights of every married woman in the great State of Illinois who is dependent on her labor for support, and say to her, you can not enter into the smallest contract in relation to your earnings or separate property, that can be enforced against you in a court of law.