Lavinia Goodell

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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.

Jun

2023

“Hark! Is that the step of my first client that I hear approaching my door?”

Lavinia Goodell, July 14, 1874

Immediately after being admitted to practice law on June 17, 1874, Lavinia Goodell took steps to open a legal practice. She had hoped to join Pliny Norcross and A. A. Jackson in their practice, but while Norcross was willing to allow her to share their offices, Jackson was not, so Lavinia told her sister, “I shall have to give up that little scheme.” However, as luck would have it, there were empty rooms for rent on the same floor of the Tallman Building as Jackson & Norcross, and Lavinia engaged one of those offices for $33.33 per annum, to be paid by the month.

Tallman Block, site of Lavinia’s first law office

Lavinia described her office:

A rather small room, but about right, with two east windows, and a small closet out of it. I have bought Mr. Hoppin’s desk, which Rebecca was glad to sell for $10.

My office is prettily furnished, and everybody says it looks pleasant. I have a pink straw matting on the floor, the one that was on my bedroom last summer, turned the other side up. Mr. Hoppin’s desk varnished over, a carpet lounge, two rocking and three arm chairs, a table on which reposes my small library. (Gerrit Smith sent her $20 to put toward her library.) And in the closet, mirror, washstand, toilet articles…. All I want now is a few good clients, which I hope the good Providence, which has always provided so well for me, will send.
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Jun

2023

“The middle aged, grey headed individual who now addresses you is an honorable member of the Wisconsin bar.”

Lavinia Goodell, June 18, 1874

On the evening of Wednesday, June 17, 1874, after successfully passing a rigorous examination administered by three elder statesmen, Lavinia Goodell made history by being sworn in as Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer. The following day she wrote a long letter to her cousin Sarah Thomas. Lavinia’s own words recount the excitement of the event far better than any summary could do:

My Dear Girl,

The middle aged, grey headed individual who now addresses you is an honorable member of the Wisconsin bar. I was admitted last night, and am still in the first enthusiastic glow of happiness produced thereby.

I was in agony of impatient suspense all day Tuesday and Wednesday. Spent the time at the office, so as to get the latest intelligence from court, and devoted myself to reviewing.

Wednesday about 5 p.m. Mr. ___ came down from court saying that the prospect looked dubious. One case was finished, but they were rushing another one and he did not know when they would get time to attend to us. But he said that the young man from Beloit had come, and perhaps I had better go up and see him, and see if we could get the judge to approve a time.
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Jun

2023

“I am bound to get in if I climb up the roof and go down the chimney.”

Lavinia Goodell, June 8, 1874

During the first two weeks of June 1874, Lavinia Goodell’s mind was consumed with plans to take the bar examination so that she could be admitted to practice law in Wisconsin. It was not clear until an hour prior to the examination on June 17 whether she would actually be allowed to sit for it. In a June 8 letter to her cousin Sarah Thomas, Lavinia wrote:

Have passed through some mental excitement since I wrote you last. I write you in my last letter Tuesday that I had made an attempt to have an application made for my admittance, but the man from whom I expected aid failed me. Wednesday morning when I went downtown, I was informed that the reason was because some of the lawyers, who were on intimate terms with the judge, had told him that the judge had intended to refuse me, on account of my sex, so he thought he would wait and consult me, as perhaps I would prefer to back out, and so avoid the “mitten.” (To “get the mitten” was to be rejected.)

I was very much stirred up by this piece of news and informed him that I would be admitted to the bar of Wisconsin, if I lived a few years longer, and that if Judge Conger refused me I would make him sorry for it before I had done with him, together with some other plucky and strong minded remarks, indicative of an intensely martial state of mind.
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May

2023

“Ignorance is always dangerous.”

Lavinia Goodell, May 1871

In the second installment of her series of Woman’s Journal articles rebutting commonly touted reasons why women should not vote (read the about the first installment here), Lavinia Goodell focused on the claim that voting would disrupt the tranquility of the home and take women away from their traditional duties. Rubbish! declared Lavinia.

Lavinia queried how much of a woman’s time would be spent in voting and what important duties would she be neglecting while doing so? She pointed out that no one seemed bothered that men, too, had to step away from their jobs to vote. “The mechanic, in voting, does not neglect his workshop, the merchant his counting room, nor the farmer his fields. Neither would woman forsake the kitchen and the nursery. The duties of a husband and father in providing for his family are as numerous as those of the wife and mother in her position as housekeeper. Yet experience teaches that the exercise of his duties as a citizen do not interfere with them. Neither would woman’s interfere with her home duties.”

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May

2023

“A woman does not become unwomanly by entering fields in which man has heretofore been the principal worker.”

Lavinia Goodell, April 1871

Lavinia Goodell was a lifelong proponent of woman’s suffrage. Although American women did not win the right to the ballot until forty years after her death, during her lifetime Lavinia wrote many articles promoting suffrage. In April 1871, a few months before she left her job at Harper’s Bazar and moved to Wisconsin, Lavinia wrote the first of a series of articles on the topic for the recently launched Woman’s Journal, which was published by Lavinia’s mentor Lucy Stone. The series appeared under the title “Womanhood Suffrage – a Review of Objections.”

The article began by noting that one popular objection to women gaining the franchise was that it would result in women “unsexing themselves.” Lavinia responded:

Why a consideration of measures to promote the well-being of thousands of her fellow creatures would convert a lovely and conscientious woman into a monster of selfishness and hardness, while ignorance or carelessness of any interest outside her own and those of her family and immediate circle of friends would keep her gentle and unselfish, we are not told. The assertion … rests upon the assumption that a woman under the same conditions with a man would develop manlike qualities. This is a mistake. A sunflower and a rose may grow in the same soil, and be nourished by the same showers and sunshine yet the sunflower does not become a rose, nor the rose a sunflower.
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May

2023

“The love of the aged is glorious.”

Lavinia Goodell, 1860

Lavinia Goodell was an astute observer, and she enjoyed writing about peoples’ relationships. In the summer of 1860, twenty-one year old Lavinia wrote a short story titled “Old Lovers” for her father’s newspaper, the Principia. The narrator of the story, a young woman, meets an elderly couple in the ladies’ sitting room of the train station in the “little village of C” in western New York. (“C” perhaps stood for Canastota, where the Goodells had relatives.)

Lavinia began, “Youthful love has been all worked up in verses and stories and essays,” “but O, why do we not hear more of old lovers? Are they so few? Does love die out with youth? Does the hard, and actual of life so over-sweep the ideal? Is love so weak, so easily overcome? Not always.”

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May

2023

“Baby’s rights was the watchword.”

Maria Goodell Frost, speaking of her sister Lavinia as an infant

On May 2, 1839, Rhoda Lavinia Goodell was born in Utica, New York.

A previous post recounted her father’s letter informing his father-in-law about the birth. Lavinia’s sister, Maria, who was twelve years old at the time, reminisced about the event in her unpublished biography of Lavinia:

Thursday, the 2^nd day of May 1839 was ushered into the household a being who seemed to have pre-existed, to have experience, to have formed views on various subjects of physiology, law, government, ethics, policy, language, evolution, in short all of the varied elements that simply or combined go to make up the different phases of theory and practice in human life. She was destined at the outset to overthrow existing institutions.
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Apr

2023

“If we are true to our own higher nature, we cannot fail.”

Lavinia Goodell, 1858

Graduation season is just around the corner. In 1858, Lavinia Goodell graduated from the Brooklyn Heights Seminary, a school for girls.

Lavinia wrote a graduation essay, which was read by a male professor at the commencement ceremony. Maria Goodell Frost included a rough draft of the essay in her unpublished biography of her sister. At age nineteen, Lavinia was still developing as a writer, but her piece clearly shows her love of learning and her optimism about the future. She began:

It is a queer place this world we find ourselves in when we first open the eyes of our minds and look about us. It is a vast unexplored field, everything a phenomenon to be studied, investigated solved.

She said, “In childhood there is a vague general idea that everything commenced with us. We are the center around which all revolves.” But as children age and have contact with others, who are also seeking after truth, “we open our hearts to them, admit them into the brotherhood.”

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