The Summer School of Philosophy at Concord was founded in 1879.[1] A majority of the students are women, as was not the case in the elder schools of philosophy, and they come from far and near to spend a few weeks of their summer vacation in the enjoyment of this halcyon season of rest. Day after day they sit patiently on the æsthetic benches of the Hillside chapel and bask in the calm light of mild philosophy. Its seed was sown forty years ago, in what was called the Transcendental movement in New England. The Concord school finds in Mr. Sanborn its executive spirit, without which it could no more have come into existence at this time than its first seed could have been planted forty years ago, without the conceptive thought of Mr. Emerson, Mr. Alcott and Margaret Fuller.
Boston University long ago offered the advantages of its law-school to women, but they do not much avail themselves of this privilege. Lelia J. Robinson, in March, 1881, made her application for admission to the bar. In presenting her claim before the court, April 23, Mr. Charles R. Train admitted that it was a novel one; but in a very effective manner he went on to state the cogent reasons why a woman who had carefully prepared herself for the profession of the law should be permitted to practice in the courts. At the close, Chief-Justice Gray gave the opinion, informally, that the laws, as they now exist, preclude woman from being attorney-at-law; but he reserved the matter for the consideration of the full bench. The Supreme Judicial Court rendered an adverse decision. Petitions were then sent to the legislature of 1882, and that body passed an act[2] declaring that, "The provisions of law relating to the qualification and admission to practice of attorneys-at-law shall apply to women." The petition of Lelia Josephine Robinson to the Supreme Court was as follows:
1. The best administration of justice may be most safely secured by allowing the representation of all classes of the people in courts of justice.
2. To allow women to practice at the bar as attorneys is only to secure to the people the right to select their own counsel. It is to give the women of Massachusetts the opportunity of consulting members of their own sex for that advice and assistance which none but authorized attorneys and counsellors are legally qualified to give.
3. To exclude women from the bar would be to do an injustice to the community, in preventing free and wholesome competition of existing talent, and to do still greater injustice to those women who are qualified for the profession, by shutting them out from an honorable and remunerative means of gaining a livelihood.
- ↑ Its projectors were A. Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Professor W. T. Harris, Frank B. Sanborn, Professor Benjamin Pierce, Dr. H. K. Jones, Elizabeth P. Peabody and Ednah D. Cheney.
- ↑ This act is almost as brief as a certain clause in one of the election laws of the State of Texas, which says: "The masculine gender shall include the feminine and neuter."
