Where is the line to be drawn between “you may do this” and “you must not do that”?

Henry Ward Beecher, March 1876

One hundred fifty years ago, Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most famous men in the United States. The Brooklyn, New York Congregationalist preacher was a lifelong proponent of equal rights for women. He was also a personal friend of Lavinia Goodell, Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer. (Read more about Lavinia’s relationship with Beecher here.) So it was not surprising that when the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to allow Lavinia to practice before it due to her gender, Beecher wrote a strong rebuke in his weekly paper, The Christian Union.

He wrote:

Has woman the right to earn her own living in her own way? Reduced to its practical shape this is the question which the Wisconsin Supreme Court has decided in the negative in refusing to admit Miss Lavinia Goodell to practice at its bar. The old common law, it seems is to blame for this; at least their “honors” fall back upon it in the absence of an express statute authorizing the gentler sex to enter the legal profession.

Beecher pointed out the fallacy of the court’s reasoning:

But it might be asked whether Wisconsin has any law parceling out work for woman. Does she cook, scrub, wash, and teach by statute? Has any legislature limited her capacities or defined her sphere? Where is the line to be drawn between “you may do this” and “you must not do that”? … Miss G will argue that with Portias on the bench and her sex at the bar, court rooms must become respectable … and men of low degree would have to vacate.

Beecher predicted that in spite of the antiquated thinking displayed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the tide was turning in favor of women gaining equality with men.

This Wisconsin decision, however, is not at all likely to righten that persevering class of women who are pushing out for a “sphere,” and it certainly will not disturb the out-and-out advocates of female suffrage. The latter, indeed, are now urging the Massachusetts Legislature to give woman the vote, and they have found a strong friend in Dr. Loring, the president of the Senate, who last week made an elaborate speech in that body in favor of their new departure. That the sex is not held back from seeking a higher lane of intellectual activity may be inferred from such facts as for instance the new Boston University affords, where the school of oratory has more ladies than gentlemen in attendance. Whether this means the coming of a new order of stump speakers or platform lecturers remains to be seen. That woman has a field in the lyceum, at least, no one will question, and the preparatory step to it is evidently the school of oratory.

Lavinia Goodell persisted in her efforts to open Wisconsin legal practice to women. She persuaded an all-male legislature to pass legislation accomplishing this, and the governor signed it into law in 1877. Shortly before she died in 1880, Lavinia was admitted to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and won the only case she was able to present there under her own name without the need of a male lawyer signing on to her filings. Although she optimistically hoped that women would gain the right to vote before the turn of the twentieth century, it wasn’t until 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment was finally passed.

Sources consulted: The Christian Union, March 8, 1876.