State Bar of Wisconsin

Rhoda Lavinia Goodell
1876
(1839-1880)

Rhoda Lavinia Goodell was the daughter of a noted abolitionist, William Goodell, the editor of several abolitionist publications. He was the most important influence in her life.

Lavinia, as she was known professionally, was born in May 1839 in Utica, the "burned-over district" of New York, which was the home not only of evangelical religion but also of women's rights. She grew up in a world focused on reform, primarily abolition and temperance, and on Christian values. The family moved to Brooklyn when she was 13, and she learned editing by working with her father, and later she worked at Harper's. She came to Janesville in 1871, following her parents who had come the year before to be near their younger married daughter.

When Lavinia was about to graduate from a ladies' seminary at the age of 19, she wrote her sister, "I think the study of law would be pleasant, but the practice attended with many embarrassments." It was extraordinary that she even thought of law in 1858, 11 years before the first woman was admitted to the bar in this country. Her sister challenged the idea as "trying to be a man," and "out of the common course," but Lavinia replied saying that she was motivated by a sense of duty and a desire to do good. She went on, "What is more womanly than the desire to defend and protect the widow and the fatherless and in a field where they have been wronged hitherto?"

In Janesville Lavinia began to study law at the age of 32. Not accepted initially in any law office to read law, she gradually made a place for herself in the firm of Jackson and Norcross. She was admitted to the bar in Rock County in June 1874, after Harmon Conger, the local circuit judge, decided that a woman could be admitted. Her first court case was representing the temperance women of Fort Atkinson. She had a general practice involving a good deal of litigation, and she took a particular interest in the rights - or really the lack of rights - of married women. Her great interest, however, became jail reform and penal legislation. Shortly after she was admitted to the bar in Rock County, the circuit judge appointed her to represent two indigent defendants. She visited them in the jail, and what she saw there led to her lifelong devotion to the welfare of prisoners and the reform of prison conditions. She was a reformer in the tradition of her father, and jail reform and penal legislation became an absorbing interest in her life.

Under state law, admission to one circuit court bar entitled a person to practice in any court in the state except the Wisconsin Supreme Court. However, the supreme court customarily granted the right to practice before it upon admission to the circuit court bar.

In 1875, one of Lavinia's cases was appealed to the state supreme court. She petitioned for admission to practice before the court. Her petition was presented by a male friend, Assistant Attorney General I.C. Sloan. He presented an argument prepared by Lavinia.

The petition was denied in February 1876. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Edward G. Ryan expressed outrage at the petition, describing Lavinia's efforts as "a departure from the order of nature" and "treason against it." He wrote: "Nature has tempered woman as little for the juridical conflicts of the court room, as for the physical conflicts of the battle field."

Lavinia later persuaded the Wisconsin Legislature to remove the barrier the court had erected and on March 22, 1877, it passed a bill prohibiting denial of admission to the bar on the basis of gender. She applied again for admission to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Her petition was granted on June 18, 1879. Ryan dissented.

On March 11, 1880, Lavinia learned that she had won a criminal case before the supreme court. She wrote in her diary: "I have beaten the Attorney General of the State and reversed Judge Conger's decision. I had no assistance, so it was a pure woman's victory!" She died three weeks later, just a month before her 41st birthday. Four years earlier Lavinia learned she had an ovarian tumor, ultimately resulting in her early death.

Rhoda Lavinia Goodell's life typifies what most historians see as the path that led women into law - an involvement in reform - anti-slavery, temperance, women's rights.

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