WOMEN LAWYERS IN THE UNITED STATES. By Lelia J. Robinson, LL.B. THIS is an era of experimental philoso phy. New departures of every kind have been taken in all directions, physical, mental, and moral, many of which must lead their followers entirely away from the broad paths, smooth-trodden by the myriad feet of custom through the ages, into fields un known, perhaps to gracious heights beyond, and possibly into pitfalls and quagmires; and of all nineteenth-century novelties, there is probably no one that would have amazed our good ancestors of a century ago more than the woman lawyer as she exists to-day. Not that she is, strictly speaking, a new invention. The oft-quoted proverb, " There is nothing new under the sun," has been well verified in this respect by the valua ble brochure entitled "La Femme Avocat," which was recently published in Brussels by Dr. Louis Frank, an advocate at the bar of that city, in view of the application of Mile. Marie Popelin, in September, 1888, for admis sion to the Order of Advocates. An able translation of this pamphlet by Miss Mary A. Greene of the Suffolk Bar, Massachusetts, has been running for the past year in serial form in the " Chicago Law Times," and has made us all familiar with the litigious Calphurnia, upon whose ancient shoulders seems to have been thrown all the burden of woman's legal inferiority since the old Roman days, when she made herself obnoxious. " The for wardness of Calphurnia appeared to all the ancient jurists a peremptory reason for ex cluding women from the forum," says Dr. Frank; and his citations from legal authori ties in many countries prove him quite cor rect. Eve plucked the apple and shared it with Adam; Calphurnia argued loud and long, and occasionally won cases which pre sumably some man lost. The race of women ever since has borne the yoke of these wick ednesses. Sisters in the law, one and all,
let us take heed that we walk not in Calphurnia's footsteps, thereby becoming a hin drance and a stumbling-block to those that shall follow us! In various countries and at different times since the ill-fated Calphurnian epoch, a very few women have been noted students of law, and one or two Italian ladies lectured and taught in some legal branches; but it re mained for the United States to inaugurate the era of the woman lawyer of to-day. And this was so short a time ago, — for the woman lawyer in the abstract has not yet attained her majority, — that the novelty of her very existence has scarcely begun to wear off, and the newspapers publish and republish little floating items about women lawyers along with those of the latest sea-serpent, the pop ular idea seeming to be that the one is about as real as the other. I have often been asked how many women there are in the law, and until the returns came in from a somewhat extended system of cor respondence which I started a few weeks ago for the purpose of gathering material for this article, I had to give very vague replies; for though I have preserved every scrap of infor mation which I could gather on the subject for a dozen years past, this gave me only a mass of unreliable data. Another difficulty in the way of a direct reply to this question is the fact that many women who have studied law, who have taken degrees in law, or who have been admitted to the bar, are not at the present time in active practice, owing to a variety of reasons; yet as we do not cease to regard as a lawyer the politician who spends his days at Washington in his country's service, so neither should the woman who has temporarily or even permanently abandoned the office and the court-room for the platform or the nursery, thereby lose recognition as a lawyer. One of the things
