A brief history of gender law journals: the heritage of Myra Bradwell's Chicago Legal News.

• Author: Chused, Richard H.
• Position: Why a Feminist Law Journal?

In the front of the first issue of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law published twelve years ago, the members of the staff inserted a brief statement of purpose. (1) Claiming that their "working job titles confer[red] no greater or lesser power, but serve[d] only to define primary responsibilities," they hoped "to publish legal and interdisciplinary writings on feminism and gender issues and to expand feminist jurisprudence." (2) For its moment in history, this was a fairly radical statement of purpose. Eschewing most aspects of hierarchy and viewing their primary audience as students and academics, (3) the members aimed "to promote an expansive view of feminism embracing women and men of different colors, classes, sexual orientations, and cultures." (4)

A brief comment by Ruth Bader Ginsburg followed immediately after the journal members' statement of purpose. (5) She focused not on theoretical and philosophical questions, but on events preceding her rise to a position of power and authority. Harking back to the lament of a 1922 Barnard graduate who was denied admission to Columbia Law School, recalling the faculty decision to reverse that result and accept women as students in 1928, recollecting (with a certain perverse glee I am sure) that Harvard declined to accept women until 1950, and recognizing the enormous legal and cultural changes of the 1970s, Justice Ginsburg dwelled on the sorts of practical steps taken by courageous women and men to alter the landscape of the legal academy and the legal profession.

This was not the first time Justice Ginsburg wrote an opening essay for a new gender law journal. While a member of the faculty at Rutgers Law School in Newark, she wrote a brief essay to mark the arrival of the Women's Rights Law Reporter at that institution. (6) This journal, which first appeared in 1972, was the first gender and law journal published at an American law school. (7) As its name suggests, its original focus was on essays, notes, case reports, and notices designed to provide practical information about legal issues and events for the bench and bar, as well as the academy. (8) Indeed, Justice Ginsburg's contribution was a case note on Reed v. Reed (9) intended to provide some basic background on the case for use by the then emerging anti-discrimination bar. (10)

The differing approaches of those who founded the journals at Columbia and Rutgers mirror debates that go back through much of the history of the nation. Arguments about legal and political strategy have long been visible in the various legally-related publications overseen by women. From the time of Myra Bradwell--known for both the infamous case (11) in which the United States Supreme Court refused to require states to admit women to their bars and the founding of the Chicago Legal News, (12)--until today, those laboring in journal offices have struggled to find purpose and meaning in their work. The career of Bradwell, who tried to fulfill the ambitions of both the Columbia and Rutgers journals by meeting the needs of practitioners and feminists alike, teaches us much about the difficulties and pleasures, frustrations and joys of using the written word to stimulate legal change.

The first issue of the Chicago Legal News appeared on October 3, 1868. Good businesswoman that she was, Bradwell widely distributed a Prospectus seeking subscribers during the month before the first issue was printed. Neither gender, feminist theory, nor the "woman question" were mentioned. Noting "the want of a legal publication in the West," Bradwell stated simply that the paper "will give abstracts of the points decided in our local courts, comment freely, but fairly, upon the conduct of our judges, the members of the bar, officers of courts, members of congress and our state legislature in their administration of public affairs." (13)

But in the third issue of the paper, Bradwell--perhaps feeling confident because of the obvious success of her fledgling enterprise (14)--began w hat became a regular feature, a column entitled Law Relating to Women. As far as I know, these columns were the first instances in which a legal publication run by a woman contained arguments about the "woman question." (15) In the first such column, clearly written by Bradwell, she described some of the rules limiting the civil legal status of married women, (16) outlined a case decided over three years earlier (17) holding that a married woman could not sue in her own name to recover her earnings, and opined that the Illinois Married Woman's Act of 1861 (18) should be amended to include earnings among the types of property eligible for control by married women. "In the case of a drunken or spendthrift husband, such an amendment would often save the wife and children from want," Bradwell argued, "as well as place the wife's earnings beyond the reach of her husband's creditors." (19) The Law Relating to Women column published the following week claimed that the process of separately examining married women before allowing their deeds waiving dower to take effect was loosely enforced. "We think," Bradwell wrote, "that the law should be so changed, that if a married woman signs a deed, and there is no fraud o r force used in obtaining her signature, that she should not be allowed to recover her dower." (20)

The seemingly tame quality of the two initial columns quickly gave way to bolder salvos about suffrage. Anticipating a state constitutional convention the following year, Bradwell urged in the third column that the new charter should not limit the vote to men, writing that, "In many of the states of the union negroes can vote, women can not. Is not a woman as good as a negro? Shall it be said that we accord the negro a voice in this government, that we deny to women?" (21)

The following week, a long editorial urged women to see to it that...