Life in Wisconsin: 1871-1880 Archives - Page 2 of 15

Mar

2023

“Dined with Dr. Wolcott”

Lavinia Goodell, October 17, 1879

Lavinia Goodell was acquainted with many pioneering women of her day, including Dr. Laura Ross Wolcott, Wisconsin’s first woman physician.

Laura Ross was born in Maine in 1826. She graduated from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1856 and was the third woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree. (Janesville, Wisconsin gained a woman physician in 1878 when Dr. Clara Normington set up practice there.) Dr. Ross moved to Milwaukee in 1857, but was denied admittance to the Medical Society of Milwaukee County because she was a woman. She went to Paris in 1867, and sat in on lectures at the Sorbonne and worked in a hospital. She returned to Milwaukee and was admitted to the Milwaukee County Medical Society in 1869, in part due to the support of an older physician, Erastus Wolcott, whom she married that same year.

1869 was a busy year for Dr. Wolcott since in addition to being admitted to the Medical Society and getting married, she helped organize a woman’s rights convention in Milwaukee (Lily Peckham, who was an aspiring lawyer and later became a minister also participated in the convention) and was a founder of the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association, serving as its president until 1882.

The Milwaukee newspaper the Semi-Weekly Wisconsin, described the 1869 convention as follows:

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Mar

2023

“The devil has come down in great wrath knowing that his time is short.”

Lavinia Goodell, February 29, 1872

In early 1872, media accounts – especially on the east coast – were abuzz with the scandalous story that a woman had been allowed to preach in a Brooklyn Presbyterian church. The brazen woman in question was Sarah Smiley, a Quaker.

Ms. Smiley was born in Maine in 1830. She initially wanted to become a teacher but after the Civil War went South to “relieve human suffering.” She later began speaking to audiences and eventually was invited to speak in liberal-minded churches. In January 1872 she became the first woman to ever speak in a Presbyterian church when Rev. Theodore Cuyler invited her to address his congregation in Brooklyn. Rev. Cuyler had lived with Quakers and had been invited to address a Friends revival meeting in Brooklyn, so in return he invited Ms. Smiley to speak from his pulpit on a Sunday evening.

By all accounts Ms. Smiley’s address was well received (she spoke about the vision of Jacob wrestling with an angel), and it is unlikely that either she or Rev. Cuyler could have anticipated the firestorm that soon followed. Two days after the event a scathing letter signed by Jon Edwards appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Mr. Edwards accused Rev. Cuyler of “degrading the teachings of St. Paul.” He wrote:

This is no time to encourage even in the remotest way the pretensions of those graceless women who are engaged in the unholy work of turning society upside down, and whom I hear in our families and social gatherings, ridiculing St. Paul as an old Jewish bachelor, unworthy of respect.

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Feb

2023

“Heard Dr. Whiting on the women’s temperance movement.”

Lavinia Goodell, April 26, 1874

Lavinia Goodell and her parents were members of the Congregational Church in Janesville, Wisconsin, and she had a cordial relationship with the church’s pastors. While she became close friends with Rev. T.P. Sawin, who was the same age as Lavinia and arrived in 1876, she was also very fond of Sawin’s predecessor, Dr. Lyman Whiting.

In addition to his church obligations, Dr. Whiting and his wife actively supported Janesville’s temperance crusade. In late April 1874, Lavinia’s diary entry notes that she had gone to hear Dr. Whiting speak about temperance.

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Feb

2023

“Went to inquire about Lily Peckham.”

Lavinia Goodell, June 3, 1874

In the weeks leading up to Lavinia Goodell’s admission to practice law in Rock County, Wisconsin circuit court, she had begun to despair whether she would ever get the opportunity to take the bar examination. The lawyer who was supposed to move her admission seemed to be dragging his feet, and no one knew whether the judge would allow a woman to take the exam. (Read more about all that here.) In her efforts to get the chance to be examined, Lavinia mustered all the ammunition she could. Her June 3, 1874 diary entry noted that she first went to see a Mrs. Newman (according to the 1876 Janesville city directory, Mrs. Newman was possibly a Janesville dentist’s wife) and then wrote to the Milwaukee County circuit court clerk to “inquire about Lily Peckham,” a young woman who, according to some accounts, had briefly practiced law in Milwaukee prior to dying in 1871 at age 28.

Elizabeth (Lily) Peckham’s grave, Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

We do not have the Milwaukee clerk’s response, but there is no record that Lily Peckham ever asked the Milwaukee court to admit her to practice law. In fact, finding any information about Peckham is a challenge. The problem starts with her name. While her birth name was Elizabeth, contemporary sources alternately referred to her as Lily, Lilly, Lillie, Lila, Lilia, and Lillian. Through a great deal of persistence and a little luck (a helpful hint to all historical researchers: always try multiple spellings of names), we have been able to piece together parts of Peckham’s biography. She was clearly an intelligent and able young woman who accomplished a great deal in her short life – although it is unclear whether she ever practiced law.

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Jan

2023

“The Old Maids’ Convention, under the title of Woman’s Rights, met at Syracuse yesterday.”

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 16, 1855

Lavinia Goodell worked tirelessly for women’s rights in the 1870s, and she encountered a fair amount of resistance to her views from both men and women. But even though Lavinia struggled to win people over to her cause, societal attitudes toward women’s roles had already evolved considerably from the 1850s when Lucy Stone, one of Lavinia’s mentors, began advocating for equal rights for women.

Lucy Stone was born in Massachusetts in 1818. In 1850, she helped organize multiple women’s rights conventions. A convention held in Salem, Ohio in April declared: “The laws should not make a woman a mere prisoner on the bounty of her husband, thus enslaving her will, and degrading her to a condition of absolute dependence.”

The Liberator, a publication edited by William Lloyd Garrison, announced a convention to be held in Worcester, Massachusetts in October 1850 and said, “The signs are encouraging; the time is opportune.” The announcement continued:

Woman has been condemned, from her greater delicacy of physical organization, to inferiority of intellectual and moral culture, and to the forfeiture of great social, civil and religious privileges…. But, by the inspiration of the Almighty, the beneficent spirit of reform is roused to the redress of those wrongs.

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Jan

2023

“To stifle the longings of an immortal soul to follow any useful calling in this life is a departure from the order of nature.”

Attorney Ada M. Bittenbender, writing about Lavinia Goodell

In 1891, eleven years after Lavinia Goodell’s death, Henry Holt published a book titled Woman’s Work in America.

Edited by Annie Nathan Meyer, founder of Barnard College, New York’s first liberal arts college for women, the book contained chapters on women in various professions. In the introduction, Julia Ward Howe (a writer, abolitionist, and suffragist best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic) wrote, “The theory that women should not be workers is a corruption of the old aristocratic system.” Ms. Howe went to note that a speaker at a Massachusetts legislative hearing had recently asked why women did not enter the professions. Ms. Howe said, “One might ask how he could escape knowing that in all of these fields … women are doing laborious work and with excellent results?”

Lavinia Goodell was featured prominently in Chapter nine of the book, “Women in Law.” The chapter was written by Ada M. Bittenbender, the first woman admitted to practice before the Nebraska Supreme Court and the third woman admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court.

Ms. Bittenbender recounted Lavinia’s battle to be admitted to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court and quoted at length Chief Justice Ryan’s opinion denying her petition. Ms. Bittenbender predicted that Ryan’s opinion “will be read with interest and remain of historic value as showing the fossilized misconceptions woman combated with in attaining the generally acceptable position in the legal profession in this country which she now holds.”

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Jan

2023

“Lavinia Goodell is a shrewd, quick-witted girl, fond of humor, studious and argumentative.”

Lippincott’s Magazine, March 1879

Lavinia Goodell received a fair amount of national media attention during the years she practiced law in Wisconsin. While precise numbers are virtually impossible to come by, it is fair to say that when Lavinia was admitted to practice law in the summer of 1874 there were fewer than a dozen women lawyers in the entire country. The novelty of her admission made her newsworthy, and her epic battle with Chief Justice Ryan in which she sought to be admitted to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court generated many columns of ink.

The March 1879 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine contained a profile of Lavinia written by someone identified only by the initials M.W.P.

The identity of the author is unknown, but he or she evidently knew Lavinia during the time she worked at Harper’s Bazar (1867 to 1871). The piece gave one of the most detailed descriptions of Lavinia’s appearance and personality:

When I first knew Miss Goodell, she was employed in a literary way in the office of Harper’s Bazar – a shrewd, quick-witted girl, fond of humor, studious and argumentative. In person she was of medium height, but looking tall from her slender, erect figure, blue-eyed, and with light brown curling hair.

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Dec

2022

“Clear and cold. Got up late.”

Lavinia Goodell, January 1, 1879

With the exception of 1878, Lavinia Goodell made daily entries in a diary from 1873 until shortly before she died in 1880. The small leather bound volumes are part of the William Goodell family papers housed in the special collections and archives at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. (Lavinia’s beloved eldest nephew, William Goodell Frost, was the long time president of Berea College.)

The diaries and vast cache of family correspondence provide a firsthand view of Lavinia’s life. The amount of primary source material written by Lavinia herself is truly astounding and allows us to know what she was doing and thinking on an almost daily basis.

1878 had been a difficult year for Lavinia. Both of her parents died, and she spent months in the east undergoing and then recovering from major surgery to remove an ovarian tumor. No diary survives from this annus horribilis, but Lavinia took up her pen again in 1879.