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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.

Dec

2019

“Law offices, suffering for want of students to help, … and yet they would not let me in, because I was a woman.”

Lavinia Goodell, 1873

It is a common misconception that Belle Case LaFollette, wife of Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Fighting Bob LaFollette, was Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer. While Belle was the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law school in 1885, five years after Lavinia’s death, Lavinia became the state’s first woman attorney in 1874 after studying the law on her own for over two years and then passing an examination in the Rock County Circuit Court. Entering the profession without going to law school was quite common at the time. Many of Lavinia’s sisters in law followed the same path.

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Jan

2020

Spinsterhood: the fate of an unattractive woman or a radical act?

Have you seen the Little Women movie? The new ending would have incited Lavinia Goodell to dash off an op-ed for the Woman’s Journal.

Jo March negotiating with her editor in Greta Gerwig's 2019 adaptation of Little Women — Jo March negotiating with her editor, Little Women (2019)

Greta Gerwig has Jo March telling an editor that her heroine was adamantly opposed marriage, so the novel would not end with her wedding either Laurie or Professor Bhaer. The editor shot back: “Who cares! Girls want to see women married, not consistent. If you end your delightful book with your heroine a spinster, no one will buy it. It won’t be worth printing.” For Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer, “them’s fightin’ words!”

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Nov

2019

“I am dying to see a sensible woman. And they don’t abound here.”

In June 1919, Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19^th Amendment giving women the right to vote. In celebration of this great achievement many have repeated an enchanting origin story of Wisconsin’s women’s suffrage movement published in The Milwaukee Journal on December 21, 1924:

Way down in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin, the little town of Richland Center has been glorified above all towns in the state in that it is the cradle of women’s suffrage in Wisconsin.

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Jan

2020

“Do not be surprised if you are sued for defamation.”

William Goodell, September 28, 1867

By all accounts, Lavinia Goodell had planned to continue teaching indefinitely at the Brooklyn home of Mr. Lyon, a wealthy merchant, but at the end of the school year in 1867 a bitter dispute arose between her and Lyon over her promised wages. As Lavinia tells it:

I did not ask him for anything for the time that I did not teach…. All I asked was that he should pay me what he agreed to for the time I did teach. He promised – and I had his written word for it – to pay me $300 a year, if we had 12 scholars, promising verbally that if we had over 12 I should have all the extra money, over and above what came in for 12.
We had 12 all the time, and much of the time 15. We had no settlement till I came to leave. Then I brought in my bill for $224 for 3/4 of a year; and $46 for the extra scholars; whereupon he positively refused to pay me excepting at the rate of $200 a year, or $150 for 3/4 of a year, saying that was all he promised. I showed him the letter in which he promised $300, and he was the angriest man you ever saw. He was rude, and insulting, and he said he should pay me no more than he pleased, and that I could prove nothing against him as the bargain was not a legal document with a seal. I never was as surprised in my life. At the final settlement, this fall – by holding out about it, and making him think I might do something – I brought him to a compromise, and he paid me at the rate of $275 a year, no allowance for extra scholars. A lawyer, who appears to be well posted, and is secretary to the mayor said I could have received the whole by going to law; and that I was foolish not to do it. Mary Booth thought it was outrageous, and it was with her advice that I wrote him that letter. I am not sorry I did it. I think such villainy ought to be exposed for the protection of innocent and unsuspecting people – not, of course, from motives of revenge. Everybody who knows it is even more indignant than I have been over it.

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Jan

2020

“I find I am getting quite a reputation as a good teacher.”

Lavinia Goodell, October 14, 1866

When the anti-slavery newspaper, The Principia, ceased publication after the end of the Civil War, Lavinia Goodell was out of a job. In September 1865 she began a new career as a teacher in a home located at 26 South 10^th Street, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Lavinia’s new employer was a wealthy merchant. Lavinia described her new position to her sister:

I have just formed an engagement to teach in a family… at a salary of $300 including boards & washing…. I answered an advertisement, and the advertiser turned out … to be an old acquaintance…. Mr. Lyon…. There are two little girls, 10 and 10, and a boy 8. The plan is to have a small house school having nine children outside of the family, making the whole number twelve. This I think I shall like. Mr. and Mrs. Lyon seem like very pleasant people and I think I shall enjoy living there. They tell me I shall be just like one of the family,… Mr. L. … received 150 answers to his advertisement, but gave me the preference.

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Dec

2019

Preaching temperance on New Years?!

Preaching temperance on New Year’s Day?!

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.

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Dec

2019

“O, ‘Ria, I have seen Honest Abe!”

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 30^th Street between 9^th and 10^th Avenues punctually at 3:00 p.m. Lincoln was greeted by a jubilant crowd:

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Dec

2019

Wisconsin State Journal: Legal Eagle Rose Above Bias

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.

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