Lavinia, a temperance advocate, hailed from New York where the tradition was to hold an open house for family and friends on New Year’s Day. In 1870, she welcomed the New Year with the German family who had just tried to get her tipsy on Christmas. Four years later, she celebrated in Janesville, Wisconsin surrounded by kindred spirits. On both holidays she preached temperance to the revelers. Her letters describe the results of her efforts.
Lavinia Goodell, February 21, 1861
Abraham Lincoln was elected the nation’s sixteenth president on November 6, 1860. In mid February, 1861, Lincoln left Springfield, Illinois on a rail journey that would take him on a whistle-stop tour through numerous towns in advance of his March 4 inauguration. On the afternoon of February 19, twenty-one year old Lavinia Goodell joined throngs of other New Yorkers to watch the president-elect’s carriage procession in mid-town Manhattan. According to the February 20, 1861 New York Times, the special train carrying Lincoln and his entourage arrived at the new depot of the Hudson River Railroad on 30th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues punctually at 3:00 p.m. Lincoln was greeted by a jubilant crowd:
Continue reading →Thank you so much to Barry Adams and the Wisconsin State Journal for publishing a wonderful article about Lavinia Goodell and the efforts that went into creating her digital biography. The article notes:
Lavinia Goodell was feisty and would have fit right in 100 years ago, when women were fighting for the right to vote.
The Janesville woman also would have been at home in the 1970s, during the rise of feminism and more recently as the Me Too movement helped push for social change.
But Goodell found her own way to enact change and did so in the 1870s by taking on the all-male establishment to solidify her place in Wisconsin history. In 1874, she became the first female lawyer in the state of Wisconsin when she was admitted to the Rock County Bar. She made further waves when, because she was a woman, she was denied the right to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1876. But Goodell persevered and in 1879 was granted the right to practice before the state’s highest court.
Read the full article here.
Continue reading →— Lavinia Goodell, Christmas 1869
Throughout her life, Lavinia Goodell enjoyed learning new things. In early 1868 she reported to her parents that she was studying German. Her instructor was a native German speaker, and she paid $20 for 25 one-hour weekly lessons.
In the fall of 1869, Lavinia decided that the best way to improve her German language skills would be to live with a German family, so she put an advertisement in the Staats-Zeitung German newspaper saying, “An American lady would like to find board in an educated and refined German family, for the purpose of learning the language. Minister’s family preferred.” Lavinia received two responses and chose to rent a room at 228 East 23rd Street in New York. The move greatly shortened Lavinia’s commuting time to her job at Harper’s Bazar in lower Manhattan.
Continue reading →What was it like for a woman to work at America’s first fashion magazine in the late 1860s? Follow this this blog, and you will find out. In family letters, Lavinia Goodell, Wisconsin’s future first female lawyer, provided detailed accounts of her day-to-day responsibilities as assistant editor at Harper’s Bazar and of her relationships with the famous Harper brothers.
It’s true! Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer helped launch America’s first fashion magazine. In 1867, Harper & Brothers, a highly respected publisher, sought to expand its audience with the revolutionary Harper’s Bazar,* a weekly journal that reported on style, explained how to pin a bun, commented on work, family, and social mores, and published poetry and fiction from prestigious writers like Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Lavinia Goodell was present at the creation.
–Lavinia Goodell, August 6, 1874
A huge thank you to Anna Marie Lux for writing and the Janesville Gazette for publishing an in-depth account of Lavinia’s digital biography and the research behind it. Lavinia would no doubt be very pleased to know that nearly 140 years after her death her hometown newspaper still finds her newsworthy. Read the article here.
In 1862, a young man at the Brooklyn Times wrote: “The study of astronomy is of about as much use to a young lady as a knowledge of cookery is to a hen.” Lavinia, then a 22-year old Brooklynite, skewered him in The Principia:
