Mary Hall: the Decision and the Lawyer
| Publication year | 2021 |
| Pages | 29 |
79 CBJ 29. MARY HALL: THE DECISION AND THE LAWYER
VOLUME 79, NO. 1
In 1882, Justice John Park,(fn1) one of the longest serving Justices in the history of the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors, and a man never known for being a legal innovator, nonetheless issued the first decision in the United States holding that a woman, Mary Hall, like the men of Connecticut, was a qualified person and therefore eligible to practice law in the State. In Re Hall(fn2) was the first judicial decision in the United States permitting a woman to practice law. Despite its importance as a landmark in the law of equal protection and as one of the greatest decisions in Connecticut jurisprudence (fn3) only a handful of scholars have discussed the decision(fn4) and it is seldom cited. Mary Hall herself, like the decision, is only barely remembered despite her ground-breaking entrance into the legal profession, and her importance in Connecticut history as an attorney, suffragist and social reformer.
While Mary Hall was the first Connecticut woman, and one of the first in the nation, to practice law in the nineteenth century, in colonial times it was not unknown for women to appear before the bar, either advocating their own cases or those of family members as their attorneys-in-fact.(fn5) Margaret
* Of the New London Bar.
1 Leonard M. Daggett, The Supreme Court of Connecticut, Vol II No.09 GREEN BAG, 425, 436 (September 1890); Wayne G. Tillinghast, The Curious Obituary Sketch of Chief Justice Park, 9 CTLA FORUM 9-13 (Nov.-Dec. 1991).
2 In re Hall, 50 Conn. 131 (1882).
3 WESLEY W. HORTON, THE CONNECTICUT STATE CONSTITUTION: A REFERENCE
GUIDE, 22 (1993).
4 See VIRGINIA C. DRACHMAN, WOMEN LAWYERS AND THE ORIGINS OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY, 136 (1993); VIRGINIA C. DRACHMAN, SISTERS IN LAW - WOMEN LAWYERS IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY, 30-33,88(1998); HORTON, supra note 2;
Wesley W. Horton & Jeffrey J. White, The Butler-Park Court, 37 CONN. L. REV. 383-386 (2005); Tillinghast supra note 1 at 9, 10-11; D. Kelly Weisberg, Barred From the Bar: Women and Legal Education in the United States 1870-1 890, 28 J. LEGAL ED., 85, 486-488 (1977); Robert M. Spector, Woman against Law: Myra Bradwell's Struggle for Admission to the Illinois Bar, 68 J. ILL. HIST. SOC. 228,240 n. 38 (June 1975); Shirley Raissi Bysiewicz, Women in Connecticut Law, 49 CONN. B.J. 360-361 (1975). Hall is honored in the Connecticut Woman's Hall of Fame, see www.cwhf.org/browse/inductees/hall.htm.
5 See, generally, CORNELIA HUGHES DAYTON, WOMEN BEFORE THE BAR: GENDER LAW & SOCIETY IN CONNECTICUT 1638-1679 (1995); Sophie Drinker, Women
Attorneys of Colonial Times, 56 MD. HIST. MAG. 335 (Dec. 1961).
Brent of Maryland functioned as an attorney from 1639 to 1643, acting on behalf of the colony's governor and managing considerable real estate. She is usually considered the first woman lawyer in America.(fn6) In colonial Connecticut women also went to court to enforce their own rights and those of their families. Isabella Whiting Bryan Grey made fifteen court appearances in thirteen years as the administratrix of both her husband and her father-in-law's estates.(fn7) Hannah Alsop appeared before a court three times in four years.(fn8) Mrs. Mary Miles may have been the first woman to preside over a court proceeding in British North America. She managed her late husband's tavern in 1704 and 1705 while the New Haven County Court was held there.(fn9)
These examples, however, had little influence on the profession of law as it emerged in the nineteenth century. With the notable exception of Margaret Brent, the women who entered the court system did so more as "deputy husbands"(fn10) than as independent professionals. Their court appearances were usually expansions of their role within the family household, and not as attempts to enter the male professional world.
The legal world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not contain the same institutions and the same def-
6 KAREN BERGER MORELLO, THE INVISIBLE BAR THE WOMAN LAWYER IN
AMERICA 1638 TO THE PRESENT, 2-7 (1986); Drinker, supra note 5 at 349-350.
7 DAYTON, supra note 5 at 86-87.
8 Id. at 83, 85.
9 Id. at 82-83. In England Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset and Montgomery, may have sat with judges on the bench in her hereditary office of Sheriff of Westmoreland. Leila Robinson's Case, 131 Mass. 376, 378 (1881). Three women were elected probate judges in Connecticut, the first women to serve in the Connecticut judicial system. Connecticut Task Force on Gender, Justice and the Courts, September 1991, at 13. Margaret Connors Driscoll was the first woman member of the Connecticut judiciary, appointed to the Juvenile Court in 1960. JoAnne Kiely Kulawiz was the first woman judge to preside in any court other than the Juvenile Court when she was appointed to the Circuit Court in 1972. Ellen Bree Burns was the first woman appointed to the Superior Court, in 1976. Ellen Peters was the first woman appointed to Connecticut's Supreme Court, in 1978. Connecticut Task Force on Gender, Justice and the Courts, September 1991, Appendix VI (listing the 25 and the dates of appointment); see also State v. Kelly, 229 Conn 557, 576, n.6 (1994) (Berdon, J., dissenting) and citations therein. In 1978 Judge Burns was the first woman appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut.
10 Drinker, supra note 5 at 228; LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH, GOOD WIVES: IMAGES AND REALITY IN THE LIVES OF WOMEN IN NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND, 1658-
1750, 35-50 (1977).
inition of the lawyer as a full-time professional attorney that developed in the nineteenth century. It was only after the dissemination of a body of American law by American judges,(fn11) the 1784 founding of the Litchfield Law School in Connecticut(fn12) and the (re)opening of the Harvard Law School in 1829(fn13) that the legal profession begin to take on the contours that are recognizable today. The late nineteenth century entry of women into the legal profession and the Hall decision are rooted more in the nineteenth century struggle for women's equality than in the previous colonial examples.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, middle and upper-class women were expected to live their lives in the women's "sphere." Their proper place in society was defined primarily by domestic and maternal roles.(fn14) Within these roles, women were often able to exert some influence on society at large, but their participation in the emerging capitalist economy was severely limited, as were their activities outside the home. The roles that tied women to the domestic sphere and limited their opportunities outside the home also united them in a female world and helped to create a social and political identity in which women began meeting and further defining their position relative to society and the ways in which the woman's role could change society.(fn15) Women's church groups began discussing issues of the day and engaging in missionary and charitable work. By the 1820s women were becoming increasingly active with respect to political questions of the day, particularly the abolition of slavery.(fn16)
11 GRANT GILMORE, THE AGES OF AMERICAN LAW, 8 (1977).
12 Andrew M. Siegel, To Learn And Make Respectable Hereafter: The Litchfield Law School in Cultural Context, 73 N.Y.U.L. REV. 1978, 2003 n. 110 (1998).
13 Id. at 978-979, n.2, n. 4.
14 NANCY F. COTT, THE BONDS OF WOMANHOOD "WOMAN'S SPHERE" IN NEW
ENGLAND, 1780-1835 (1977).
15 Id. at. 189; see also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth Century America, reprinted in
SMITH ROSENBERG, DISORDERLY CONDUCT VISIONS OF GENDER IN VICTORIAN
AMERICA, 53-76 (1985).
16 ELEANOR FLEXNER & ELLEN FITZPATRICK, CENTURY OF STRUGGLE THE WOMAN'S RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES, 38 (Enlarged Edition 1996);
Michael Goldberg, Breaking New Ground 1800-1 848, in NANCY COTT, ED., NO
SMALL COURAGE A HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES, 214-232 (2000);
Marylynn Salmon, The Limits of Independence 1860-1800, in COTT, supra. at 178.
Mary Hall was born into this world on August 16, 1843, one of seven children of Gustavus E. Hall and Louisa (Skinner) Hall of Marlborough, Connecticut.(fn17) Gustavus Hall was a prosperous miller with mills on the Black Ledge River.(fn18) At this time women were gaining greater access to education as reformers founded the first all-female schools and "seminaries."(fn19) Hall was born while the ideology of separate spheres was in full force, but also at a time when the first voices advocating for women's rights began to emerge. Only five years after her birth, on July 19, 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention for Woman Suffrage gave voice to women's demands for equal rights.(fn20) One of the Convention's demands in the "Declaration of Sentiments" was that "avenues to wealth and distinction" including "medicine, or law" be opened to women.(fn21)
The Declaration of Sentiments also demanded women's right to control their property after a marriage. At the time of Mary Hall's birth the Connecticut courts took an extremely conservative view towards any woman's claim for property she may have owned prior to her marriage.(fn22) Reforms moved slowly, but by 1849, six years after Hall's birth, Connecticut had its first Married Woman's Property Act, granting some limited rights, including protection of a woman's property from the debts of her husband.(fn23)
While women advocated for equal rights to their own
17 DWIGHT LOOMIS & J. GILBERT CALHOUN, JUDICIAL AND CIVIL HISTORY OF CONNECTICUT, 509 (1895).
18 HARTFORD DAILY TIMES, November 15, 1927 at 1 (Obituary of Mary Hall).
19 FLEXNER & FITZPATRICK, supra note 16, at 22-38...
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