Women's History Month: A Few Trailblazing Women Attorneys

Elizabeth Thompkins pictured with her law school class at the University of Virginia

March is women's history month. I am using the opportunity to learn more about the women lawyers, judges, mediators, and restorative justice explorers who have paved the way for my work today. (Although in some situations, I am not finding the road to be as smoothly paved as it could be!) I am posting daily on social media and will do four blog posts during the month. This post examines some of the trailblazer women attorneys in the United States.

Arabella Mansfield was the first woman to be admitted to the bar in the United States. Rather than attend law school, Ms. Mansfield "read the law," an option that remains open for potential Virginia attorneys. She passed the Iowa bar in 1869 but was refused admission to the bar.

Ms. Mansfield challenged the rule and was admitted. Ms. Mansfield used her training in her work as a social activist and as a college educator.

I primarily practice law in Virginia and West Virginia. West Virginia was one of the first states to admit women into law school. Agnes Westbrook Morrison attended law school with her husband (just like me!). But she graduated about ninety years earlier, in 1895. Ms. Morrison opened a practice with her husband in Wheeling.

About thirty years later, Virginia's first woman attorney, Elizabeth Thompkins, along with two other women, Catherine Lipop Graves and Rose May Davis, attended law school at the University of Virginia. The three women passed the bar in 1922, becoming the first women admitted to practice in Virginia. Ms. Tompkins first clerked after graduation and then entered private practice and enjoyed a career practicing law with several firms in Richmond. Dr. Davis apparently decided the law wasn't for her and, in 1929, was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. from Duke University in chemistry. Ms. Graves was a law librarian at the University of Virginia.

Belva Lockwood was the first female attorney admitted to the bar of the
United States Supreme Court.

Another woman attorney who paved the way for women to argue in appellate court was Belva Lockwood, the first woman to be admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court. After completing the requirements for graduation from National Law School in 1872, she was denied a diploma until President Grant intervened. In October 1876, a fellow attorney moved her into the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court. Again, she was denied, and it took the passage of a statute by Congress to provide for her admission in 1879. In 1880, she became the first woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her most famous case was in 1906, when Lockwood represented the Cherokee Nation. She sought payment from the federal government when they failed to comply with the payment required by an 1835 treaty.