Welcome! We are delighted to illuminate the important work of Lavinia Goodell. This blog shares significant moments in Lavinia’s life and excerpts from her personal papers. You may browse the posts or use the Table of Contents to find posts that interest you. Please subscribe and help spread the word about Wisconsin's first woman lawyer.
“The part assigned to women by nature is inconsistent with the practice of law.”
In re Dorsett, Minnesota Court of Common Pleas, October 1876
Martha Angle Dorsett was the first woman admitted to practice law in Minnesota. Ms. Dorsett was born in New York in 1851. After earning a bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of Michigan, she enrolled in the Iowa College of law. She graduated there in 1876 and married her classmate, Charles Dorsett, the same year.
Martha Angle Dorsett
Dorsett and her husband were admitted to the Iowa bar. They then relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where they applied for admission to practice in Minnesota’s courts. Charles Dorsett’s application was granted. Martha Dorsett’s was not.
In 1869, in an effort to improve her German language skills, Lavinia Goodell moved from her aunt and uncle’s home in Brooklyn into an upper room of a home on East 23rd Street in Manhattan owned by a German doctor. For a time she had a roommate who was a medical student at the Woman’s Medical College and Infirmary, an institution recently opened by sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. Lavinia found Nancie Monelle very companionable, although they had divergent interests.
Nancie Monelle
Lavinia wrote to her sister:
My new chum is quite a character. She is short, plump, black eyed, rosy, jolly and good-natured. Supports herself and studies medicine. She is very gay, too, and quite a flirt, and fond of the gentlemen. We get along admirably, because I don’t care a fig for them & am quite willing she should have them all to herself…. Miss Monelle has already laid up money enough to take her thro’ the medical college. She has been a teacher several years.
Nancie Monelle was born in New York in 1841. Her ancestors were French. Her great grandfather had come to America with the young Marquis de Lafayette and liked the country so much that he never went home again. Nancie graduated from a college in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1861 and taught at various schools and colleges, including Vassar. While at Vassar she decided to study medicine. Mary Ann Wattles, a fellow student at the Woman’s Medical College and a longtime friend of Lavinia, recommended that the two women room together.
Lavinia enjoyed Nancie’s high spirits. She reported to her parents that they “have lots of fun laughing over the eccentricities of our German friends.” But at Christmas 1869, when the Germans stealthily tried to get the women drunk, teetotaling Lavinia was disappointed in Nancie, telling her sister:
My roommate had no conscience about the matter, but drank glass after glass till she dared not drink any longer & then pretended to & threw the wine away furtively, when they were not looking, all to be “social.” I was indignant at her, for she knows better.
By the spring of 1870, Nancie Monelle had taken a room at the medical college.
Although Lavinia did not mention her again, Nancie Monelle went on to have a distinguished career. She graduated from medical school in 1872 after writing her thesis on cholera and earning highest honors in surgery. In 1873, she became a physician missionary in India for the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. She was the first woman physician to go alone into a native Indian state. According to the Missionary Society’s 1896 report, “The ruler of the province furnished elephants, a regiment of sepoys and a band of music to escort her to the palaces of the various noblemen.” After three years in India, after establishing a dispensary and hospital and treating 40,000 patients, she married Rev. Henry Mansell, a Methodist minister. The couple remained in India. In the 1880s, during a cholera epidemic, Dr. Mansell took charge of the dispensary with native assistants and was so successful that the Indian municipality sent her a handsome sum for the purchase of medicine.
In the 1890s, Dr. Mansell became appalled at the Indian custom of marriages being arranged for very young children, which sometimes resulted in grievous injuries, and even death, to the young girls. Dr. Mansell drew up a petition, signed by 55 other women physicians, raising the marriageable age for girls to fourteen. The government raised the marriageable age to twelve, which was seen as an important step in the domestic and social life of the Indian people.
Dr. Mansell died in India in 1903 and was buried there. Her husband died in 1911 and is buried in Poughkeepsie.
Sources consulted: Lavinia Goodell’s letters to Maria Frost (November 21, 1869 December 30, 1869;) Lavinia Goodell’s letters to William and Clarissa Goodell (November 28, 1869; March 21, 1870; April 17, 1870); Frances J. Baker, The Story of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, Hunt & Eaton, New York (1896); Mary Sparkes Wheeler, First Decade of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Phillips & Hunt, New York (1893); Janice P. Nimura, The Doctors Blackwell, W. W. Norton & Co. (2021).
History is a story with many voices that we tell together.
Lavinia Goodell
The Wisconsin Historical Society was founded in 1846, two years before Wisconsin became a state. Lavinia Goodell, who in 1874 would go on to become Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer, was then a seven year old girl living in New York state.
In 2021, the Wisconsin Historical Society is celebrating its 175th anniversary of collecting, preserving, and sharing the state’s rich history. The Society is recognizing Wisconsin visionaries, changemakers, and storytellers. We are deeply honored that Lavinia Goodell is among the outstanding Wisconsinites singled out for recognition. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/175.
In the words of the Wisconsin Historical Society, we look to the past to inspire the future, and we study the stories of those who came before us to define who we are today. Congratulations to the WHS on its 175th anniversary. Long may it continue to share stories of our state’s past and inspire new generations to build a better tomorrow.
When Lavinia Goodell became the first Wisconsin woman admitted to practice law in June of 1874, she could credit her accomplishment on her studiousness and tenacity, but if Circuit Judge Harmon S. Conger had refused to allow her to take the examination given to aspiring attorneys, Lavinia’s battle to become a member of the bar may have been far more protracted. Despite some initial uncertainty as to whether women were eligible to become lawyers, Judge Conger found no statute or rule explicitly prohibiting women’s admission to the bar, and he offered Lavinia the same chance to prove herself afforded to male candidates. Although the judge held conservative ideas on many topics, he treated Lavinia with equanimity and became her mentor and friend.
That easily could have been the headline of the June 2, 1877, Janesville Gazette. Max St. Bar was an inmate at the Rock County Jail and one of many students in Lavinia’s jail school. She immediately noticed his intelligence and elocution. In her relentless effort to prove that prisoners often have good qualities and are worthy of mentoring, Lavinia persuaded the sheriff to release St. Bar for a bit so that he could recite poetry to her Mutual Improvement Club.
“Went to Milwaukee to try Dr. Hanson’s Turkish baths.”
Lavinia Goodell, January 21, 1880
In mid-January of 1880, ten weeks before her death from ovarian cancer, Lavinia Goodell travelled to Milwaukee to seek treatment at a Turkish bath establishment.
The Milwaukee Thermo Therapea was located at 415 Sycamore Street, a few blocks west of the Milwaukee River. (Sycamore Street is now known as Michigan Street.)
“Mrs. Beale is very neighborly. Comes in nearly every day.”
Lavinia Goodell, June 27, 1873
Lavinia Goodell’s best friend and closest confidant during her years in Janesville, Wisconsin was Mrs. D.A. (Dorcas Amanda) Beale. Lavinia’s diaries for the years 1873 through 1879 mention Mrs. Beale 392 times.
Mrs. Beale was born in Maine in either 1825 or 1827. (There is a two year variation in her age between the 1860 and 1870 census.) She came west at a young age, taught school in Chicago, and married John Beale in Beloit in 1857. John was a hatter who had a store on Milwaukee Street in Janesville, next door to the building where Lavinia set up her law office in 1874. John Beale died unexpectedly while on a trip to Hartford, Connecticut in 1863. He was 39 years old.
In May of 1873 Lavinia and her parents leased one half of a “double house” on South Academy Street in Janesville. Mrs. Beale lived a block away.
Mrs. D.A. Beale’s home, 302 South Academy Street, Janesville, Wis.
Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most famous men of the nineteenth century. Born in Connecticut in 1813, he was a Congregationalist preacher, a staunch abolitionist, and a supporter of women’s suffrage and temperance. In the early days of the Civil War, Beecher preached anti-slavery sermons from his Brooklyn pulpit. On one occasion a rumor spread that a mob would attack his church, and 200 Metropolitan police officers were dispatched to quell any disturbance that might arise. Fortunately their services were not needed.
Henry Ward Beecher
Lavinia Goodell’s family held similar political and social views, so it is not surprising that they became acquainted with Beecher when the Goodells were living in New York. Lavinia’s diaries and letters contain many references to Beecher, and reading Beecher’s sermons was a weekly tradition for the Goodells.
