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.

Apr

2023

“Folks don’t write Sundays.”

Lavinia Goodell to her father, early 1840s

According to the unpublished biography of Lavinia Goodell written by her older sister, Maria Goodell Frost, Lavinia’s first experience attending church was in Whitesboro, New York. The minister was Rev. Beriah Green.

Green was born in Connecticut in 1795. He became the pastor of a Congregational church in the early 1820s. By the 1830s he became acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison and became a staunch abolitionist, a calling shared by Lavinia’s father, William Goodell. In 1833, Green became the president of the Oneida Institute, a Presbyterian institution in Whitesboro, New York. Green, along with William Goodell and Alvan Stewart, were founding members of the New York Anti-Slavery society.

In 1836, in a sermon at the Whitesboro Presbyterian church, Green called American slavery “a system of fraud, adultery and murder,” and argued that the slave had been “robbed of inalienable rights.” By the late 1830s, 59 members of that church seceded over the issue of abolition and formed the Congregational Church of Whitesboro. Green served as the church’s pastor from 1843 to 1867. This was the first church that little Lavinia attended. According to Maria Frost Lavinia was excited to see Rev. Green:

A little trill of joy escaped her as her sole known friend appeared in the pulpit, for that goodly man, so like his master, who “suffered the little children to come unto him,” knew all the lambs of his flock and none better than Lavinia.

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Mar

2023

“She shall be worth ten thousand dollars to you, Brother Goodell.”

Attorney Alvan Stewart to William Goodell, 1842

One of the first lawyers Lavinia Goodell ever met was Alvan Stewart.

Born in 1790 in New York State, Stewart had the reputation of a brilliant lawyer. Alvan Stewart moved to Utica in 1832, and the Goodell family was living in Utica at the time of Lavinia’s birth in 1839. In addition to his law practice, Stewart was active in the anti-slavery and temperance movements, as was William Goodell.

In 1842, when Lavinia was three years old, Stewart was a candidate for New York governor on the Liberty party ticket. According to Lavinia’s sister, Maria Goodell Frost, who was a teenager at the time, one evening Mrs. Goodell announced that Stewart would be paying them a visit. William Goodell said he was “very glad he was coming” as he “wished to speak with him on some points of law.”

Little Lavinia, who by all accounts was a rather difficult child, allowed herself to be washed and dressed in a dignified way so as to be ready to meet the distinguished guest.

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Mar

2023

“The future for women law graduates is bright”

Emily Kempin-Spyri, first woman law graduate in Switzerland, 1888

Arabella Mansfield is often cited as the first woman lawyer in the United States, gaining admission to the bar in 1869 (although she never practiced). By the time Lavinia Goodell was admitted to practice law in Wisconsin in 1874, she joined a small coterie of a dozen or so other American women. A previous post featured Lidia Poët, Italy’s first woman lawyer. The first Swiss woman to earn a law degree was Emily Kempin-Spyri.

Emily Spyri was born in 1853. She was the niece of Johanna Spyri, the author of Heidi. She was born into a wealthy family but married against her father’s wishes. Her husband, pastor and social reformer Walter Kempin, supported her aspirations to become a lawyer. She graduated from the University of Zurich’s law school in 1883 and earned a doctoral degree, summa cum laude, in 1887. However, she was denied the right to practice because she was not an “active citizen” of Switzerland. The Swiss constitution required a citizen to pay taxes and serve in the military, which excluded women. After her appeal to the Supreme Court but was denied, she came to New York where there were greater opportunities for women lawyers. In order to familiarize herself with American law, she applied for admission to Columbia College Law School. It was four months before her request was denied, but in the meantime she had been quietly attending the school’s lectures. New York University allowed her to attend law classes, as a courtesy to the University of Zurich, with the understanding that her attendance would create no precedent for other women. Unfortunately, she was denied admission to the New York City bar association because she was a foreigner. She then co-founded a free legal clinic for the poor and soon afterward decided to establish a law school for women.

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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 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.

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Mar

2023

“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.

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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.