“The position of lawyer was an office exercisable only by males.”

Court of Appeals of Turin, Italy in ordering the disbarment of Lidia Poët, Italy’s first woman lawyer, in 1883

When Lavinia Goodell was denied the right to appear before the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1876, the Chief Justice wrote that by appearing in court a woman would “unsex” herself and commit “treason against nature.” Lidia Poët, Italy’s first woman lawyer, was subjected to very similar sentiments by an Italian court in the early 1880s.

Lidia Poët was born in 1855. After high school, she enrolled in law school at the University of Turin. She graduated with honors and wrote a thesis titled “Condition of women with respect to constitutional law and administrative law in elections.”  For two years she was an apprentice in the office of a progressive senator and lawyer. In 1883 she passed a bar exam and asked the Order of Turin to admit her to the register of attorneys. Her request was granted, by a vote of 8 to 4, but two of the naysayers were so outraged that they resigned from the Order in protest.

The Attorney General of the King challenged Lidia’s registration. An appellate court ruled against Lidia and cancelled her registration. It said that even though the law regulating the legal profession did not expressly exclude women, since it did not expressly say they were included, women could not practice law.  

“Lydia Maria Child has a good letter to the editor.”

Clarissa Goodell to Lavinia Goodell, March 3, 1866

Best known for her Thanksgiving poem “Over the river and through the woods,” Lydia Maria (pronounced Mar – eye – ah, the same pronunciation as Lavinia Goodell’s sister Maria Goodell Frost’s name) Child was an  influential nineteenth century woman author. She was also an ardent abolitionist who was well known to Lavinia Goodell and her family. (In an 1861 letter, Child mentioned Lavinia’s father William, complimenting the  “close, hard logic of Goodell.”)

Child was born Lydia Maria Francis in Massachusetts in 1802.  She wrote her first book at age 22, Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times, a scandalous novel for its time telling the story of a Native American warrior who fell in love with a white woman. Child’s rapidly rising literary star gained her friends in the highest pantheons of literature, including Edgar Allen Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier. Children’s books and a children’s magazine, The Juvenile Miscellany, followed.

In 1828, she married David Lee Child, an idealistic lawyer, writer, abolitionist, and believer in women’s rights. His reckless business ventures condemned the couple to a life of debt, and the money Maria earned from her writing barely kept them afloat.  

In the early 1830s, the Childs met William Lloyd Garrison and became active in the antislavery movement, a commitment shared by the Goodell family.

“Miss Lily Peckham is now preparing herself for the ministry.”

Juniata Sentinel (Mifflintown, Pennsylvania), January 4, 1871

A previous post discussed Lily Peckham (1843-1871), who was active in the woman’s rights movement and who may or may not have briefly practiced law in Milwaukee.

Lily maintained a busy schedule in the last two years of her life. According to newspaper accounts, she attended and spoke at women’s rights conventions in Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Providence, R.I. Reporters complimented her speeches but also commented on her appearance, with the Chicago Evening Post referring to her as “the beautiful and bewitching Milwaukee lawyeress,” and an Iowa newspaper touting her “lady-like appearance and manner and intellectual cast of features.”

Lily contributed to and was a Milwaukee agent for the Revolution, the official publication of the National Woman Suffrage Association formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to secure a suffrage through a federal constitutional amendment.