State Bar of Wisconsin

In the Quest of Historical Record: Researching Wisconsin's First 150 Women Lawyers

Rebecca Paul had about had it. She'd already spent too long researching Attorney Margaret Anderson, but with no luck. The woman seemed to have vanished from the earth. Now, once more trudging through the Portage County courthouse, Rebecca stopped to look again at her notes. For some reason, she looked up. There on the wall, in a place Rebecca had passed innumerable times before, hung a picture of Anderson. And below, a copy of the magazine article detailing her life. Since it would take a carpenter to pull the display case off the wall to make a copy of the article, the Clerk of Court, Bernie Flatoff, asked one of her court reporters to transcribe the story.

While a bit unusual, Rebecca Paul's story illustrates the challenges facing any biographer of the less than hugely famous. The resources are fragmented and fickle. More than 100 years of inconsistent record-keeping increases the already difficult assignment. While some women, such a Belle Case La Follette, have statewide importance and numerous biographers, and others merit local importance or interest and at least one biographical article, most woman attorneys, like most people, lead lives that do not land them in the biography section of the local library.

Finding the less than famous requires digging into published local history, public records, law school alumni records, obituaries, newspaper articles, genealogies, talking with family members, and, in the case of a few of the first 150, interviewing the women themselves. These records are incomplete, generally not indexed, and scattered around the state. In short, this is not easy work and the results in this book demonstrate that. While some biographies are quite complete, other women seem to have disappeared right after signing the Wisconsin Supreme Court roll.

The supreme court roll is the origin of all names, being a listing of all lawyers admitted before the Wisconsin bar since statehood in 1848. For some of the 150 pioneers, all we have is their name, year of admission, the name of their law school if any, and their residence at the time of admission. For some of these, we are not even sure they are women. The supreme court roll is handwritten, and not every signator took Palmer method penmanship. Lynn Schell is a good example. A Milwaukee resident, she was admitted to practice in 1925 without having graduated from law school. There are no other records. Of course, Lynn is also a man's name. But if you look again at the signature, the first name could be Lyman, not Lynn, and Schell could be Schall, or Scheil, or... Researching each of these and other variations at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin library also yielded no results. And we won't even talk about the "challenges" of tracing women who marry after law school and change their names.

The Library of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin is rivaled only by the Library of Congress and the Morman Mountain in Utah as a source for genealogical information. For researching Wisconsinites, there is no rival. Often assisted or instructed by Jim Hansen, the chief reference librarian and a nationally recognized genealogist, the many volunteer researchers and writers for this project used such wide and varied sources as the U.S. Census on microfilm for every year up to 1920; the Wisconsin dicennial census through 1905; the necrology of obituaries through about 1940; the Milwaukee Sentinel index through the turn of the 20th century; the Wisconsin marriage and death records indexes through 1907; the hundreds of state and local newspapers, all on microfilm, published in the last 150-plus years; the dozens upon dozens of local histories, including The Bench and Bar of Wisconsin and other hagiographies; and the thousands of Wisconsin city directories and telephone books published since before statehood.

The law school alumni officers, Ed Reisner at the U.W. Law School and Christine Wilczynski-Vogel at Marquette University Law School spent hours digging through university records searching for information and photographs of the numerous graduates. Again, the record is fickle. For some there are voluminous materials; for others, only the fact that they attended the school. All these materials were provided to the researchers/writers and often became clues for further research.

Local and county historical societies proved to be valuable resources for biographers. They house information about local leaders, such as attorneys, that never made it to the State Historical Society library collections. On the other end of modernity, the Internet provided valuable resources through its searchable database of all deceased Social Security recipients and a searchable Martindale-Hubbell directory.

Oral history often filled in the gaps of information, particularly for pioneers who are still living or who have family members, colleagues, or friends who could be located. Living attorneys were asked to fill out questionnaires, while relatives and others were interviewed by researchers. The advantages of oral history, particularly provided by a relative, friend ,or colleague, is the sense of intimacy the reader feels with the person being described, such as Attorney Anthony Varda's description of his father, a Madison attorney, receiving a speeding ticket on his wedding day only to be later defended successfully by his new bride, Attorney Margaret Pinkley Varda. This detail often is lost when public records or an obituary are the only available resources.

The biographies of the first 150 women lawyers in Wisconsin are as complete as the information readily available on each woman. Most certainly, the publication of this booklet will result in individuals coming forth with additional stories or information about the pioneers, whether their biographies are fairly complete or substantially incomplete. This booklet then is merely a snapshot of these women. And like a photograph, it is a reminder of the people we wish to remember, an historical record in and of itself, and an historical document that will tell future historians that we cared to remember.

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