Rebels at the Bar

by Jill Norgren

  Waugh left Rockford in 1882 after graduating first in her class. Whether she had a conversion experience is unclear, but she was certain about her commitment to temperance, and after leaving school spent more than a year as a temperance speaker in northwestern Illinois. In 1884, the Rockford law firm of Marshall and Taggart hired Waugh, possibly as a copyist.

  Many elite law schools maintained their misogynistic admission policies well into the twentieth century; other legal education institutions, however, opened their classes to women in the 1870s and 1880s. Waugh encountered no problem entering Union College of Law in Chicago (later Northwestern Law School) in 1885. She was admitted with one other woman, Catharine Van Valkenburg Waite. Waite had already read law with her husband while he served as a judge in the Utah Territory, and was an established writer. She was in her mid-fifties and became both a friend and a steadying influence on Waugh during their year of law school, particularly in the early weeks of the program when the male students tested the women’s resolve. The curriculum included lectures in medical jurisprudence, what Waugh described as “abortion, infanticide and kindred topics.”45 Waite was not in this class and her friend was reluctant to “hear these delicate subjects discussed before young men.” Colleagues in the temperance movement, however, encouraged her to attend, with Dr. Mary Weeks Burnett, a physician friend, saying, “If I was Dean of your Faculty I would not let you graduate if you skipped some lectures just because of your squeamishness.” To back up her opinion Dr. Burnett joined Waugh in class each week for the duration of these lectures, a kindness Waugh publicly acknowledged in a Woman’s Tribune article.

  Waugh graduated from law school in May 1886 at the age of twenty-four and was admitted to the Illinois bar on November 9. Getting an education posed few difficulties; finding a job with a law firm was an entirely different matter. After passing the bar, Waugh set out to find a legal position in Chicago. Myra Bradwell, who never stinted with CLN articles that might help women attorneys, drew notice to Waugh with a short biography that concluded, “[S]he would like a place in some good law office of this city.”46

  Despite Bradwell’s help, Waugh’s experience was not a happy one, and she did not find a job. Full of grit, Waugh was not reluctant to publish a tell-all account of what she encountered, an account she and Clara Foltz might easily have shared during an evening of talk about the unwillingness of their legal brethren to hire women:

  Many friends advised me to settle in Chicago and capture my share of the large fees floating about. So I decided to get a clerkship in some first class law firm. … Other classmates were doing the same already and why not I? [X] gave me a list of good men and firms and wrote me personal letters to several. Armed with these and letters and recommendations from two Judges friends of mine and the College Professors I sallied forth to seek my fortune. I sailed out inflated with enthusiasm and confidence in my own abilities. I dragged myself back collapsed with chagrin and failure.

  Mr F. whose sister was a friend … had more clerks than he knew what to do with.

  Mr W. was glad to make my acquaintance but … [it] was the wrong season of the year to look for such a place.

  Mr J. preferred the help of his two sons and must also confess he disapproved of women stepping out of their true sphere, the home. This of course led to some discussion the nature of which you can no doubt imagine.

  Pompous Judge J. never knew of anyone who needed a clerk … [and spoke] with his eyes still clinging to his newspaper.

  Bristly, bullet headed little Mr. B. exclaimed vehemently “I don’t approve of women at the bar, they cant [sic] stand the racket. I would prefer to find a place for my daughter in someone’s kitchen and I advise you to … go home and take in sewing.” … I assured him it was not in default of having opportunities to enter kitchens that I wished to do law work. … inwardly reflecting that only when I had defeated that pettifogger in some illustrious lawsuit would he be fully answered. Take in sewing at 60 cents a dozen for fine shirts? No thank you. He can make shirts himself.47

  Waugh’s experience, like that of Foltz, suggests that large cities were neither more progressive nor more receptive in the matter of women attorneys. Waugh retreated to Rockford, Illinois, which had become her hometown. She rented a modest office, boarded with her parents until her marriage in 1890, and had some paying clients whose fees, she wrote, “kept her from debt.”48 When Lelia Robinson conducted a survey of women attorneys in 1890, Waugh reported that she did “all varieties of work, foreclosing mortgages, obtaining divorces, drafting wills, collecting claims, settling estates, and occasionally appearing in probate and juvenile courts, but seldom doing anything in criminal law.”49

  The local male attorneys and court officials in Rockford were friendly and helpful to her. Still, Waugh had spare time and used it to take classes at Rockford Seminary, earning, in 1888, a B.A. and an M.A. degree with a thesis titled “Woman’s Wages.”50 The thesis examined the “manifold excuses for inequality of [women’s] wages” and then gave the reasons for this inequality along with the remedies that Waugh argued would end it: “[O]pen the doors to all schools supported by public money as well as technical training, making women eligible for all occupations, and giving them equal political rights.”51 She made the fifty-plus-page study into a book, sent review copies out to newspapers and journals, and printed up an ad offering it for sale at twenty-five cents each.52

  In 1888 Waugh also accepted nomination as the Prohibition candidate for state’s attorney and, although unsuccessful, ran two hundred votes ahead of the party ticket. With the humor that was increasingly evident in her writing, Waugh sent a letter about the experience to the Equity Club. She had fun as a candidate, and thought having men around the county see a woman speak helped on the “woman question,” but found campaigning “hard work, [with] no pay, little glory, and a second time, people would call one a chronic office seeker.”53 In these early years of law practice Waugh also began a lifelong custom of assisting poor women who needed legal services. In the same 1889 Equity Club letter she said, “When the client is a poor woman who cannot afford to pay anything I call that a free dispensary case and rejoice that I had an opportunity to learn some new point there.”54

  Suffrage politics also claimed a significant amount of Waugh’s time. In the summer of 1889 she published a long essay in The Farmer’s Voice on the growing debate about Christian theology in relation to women’s rights. The target of Waugh’s pen was not, as Mary Hall’s had been, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Waugh wrote in response to a male contributor who was “straining hard to prove that the Scripture is opposed to woman’s voting and places her subject to man.”55 Waugh opened by reminding her readers that “the subject of balloting for one’s legal representatives is not directly under discussion in the Bible and so we can find no direct commandment to men even to vote any more than to women … [W]e must study the general trend of its teachings.” She fell back into the now familiar discussion of pronouns: Genesis says “let them have dominion.” She noted that Adam and Eve were both punished, and then “Christ’s coming lifted the curse for all.” With sarcasm, she continued that “the opposers of woman enfranchisement make little of Christ, the master, and much of Paul, the servant.” The whole of her essay shaped an interpretation of scripture that argued, “Bible teaching is for liberty and equality. It is not Christianity which opposes woman’s progress but the lack of it and the bigotry and selfishness which would debar women from a conference or legislature because her admission might keep out some male.”

  Writing was only one aspect of her suffrage advocacy. In 1890, she joined her legal and political interests and became legislative superintendent of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA). As the association’s legislative watchdog and lobbyist, she tried to appeal to all factions interested in women’s rights, including clergymen and labor unions. She was hard driving and sometimes dogmatic. She drew up a bill that provided for woman suffrage in presidential and certain local elections not lim
ited by the Illinois constitution to male voters. The bill was introduced in 1893, regularly re-introduced, but enacted only in 1913.56 As superintendent she was successful in winning passage of other legislation important to women, including an Illinois joint guardianship bill. She later became legal advisor to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, serving the organization from 1904 through 1911.57

  Catharine Waugh had already done a great deal when, at the age of twenty-eight, she married local attorney Frank Hathorn McCulloch, a former Union College of Law classmate. The May 30, 1890, ceremony was performed by the Reverend Anna Howard Shaw, a well-known suffrage and temperance leader. Waugh sent a written announcement to her Equity Club colleagues, saying that she was following the marital example set by Jessie Wright and Lelia Robinson, each of whom had recently wed. Waugh wrote that she had “doubled my joys and halved my sorrows.”58 The bride had previously promised to speak at a suffrage campaign in South Dakota, and so the couple journeyed north on their honeymoon rather than to some fashionable watering spot.

  Frank McCulloch was, according to his new wife, a brilliant man who was doing well in his Chicago practice. She told the Equity ladies, “[S]o you see I won’t leave the profession but will really step into a wider field of work.”59 She made this step by giving up her solo practice in Rockford and joining with Frank in McCulloch & McCulloch, a firm that they created. Five months after the wedding she described their life in Chicago: “We reach the office at 9 A.M. and leave at 6 P.M. We are keeping house with my brother and his wife only married recently, and divide between us the responsibility. … [B]etween the successful administration of there [home] and our prosperity here at the office, I am more contented and yet more ambitious than ever before.”60

  McCulloch revealed that, as a professional woman, she had been wary of marrying but Frank, bright, affectionate, and respectful, had been a good choice of husband. She confessed to her Equity Club sisters,

  I believe now that instead of crippling my ability to be a lawyer that my prospects are much improved. I believed differently a year ago, but it makes all the difference in the world who one married, and I should never again oppose a woman lawyer marrying, if she devotedly loved her husband and he was clean and brilliant and honorable and progressive enough to be proud that his wife was a lawyer.61

  Equally forthright, she said that

  as yet I have had very little Chicago business of my own, being generally at work on matters belonging to Mr. McCulloch, but within the last month I had a genuine client and she had sent her friends to me with abstracts to examine and altogether we did $55 worth of work for them. It pleased me that something was coming to me.

  In fact, while she built up a clientele, Frank’s client list was larger, and he was busier.

  Two years out of law school Catharine Waugh had scolded Mary Hall and urged her to summon up some professional gumption, advising her to come to Illinois, “where it is just as honorable for a woman to talk to men publicly as in private.” Before, and after marriage, Catharine McCulloch certainly did not hold back. She was outspoken, caring more about shaping public opinion than, as was the case for Hall, responding to it.

  Waugh was well known for her unequivocal views about women’s rights when she became Catharine Waugh McCulloch. She spoke publicly, and before men. A year after their marriage, the first of the McCullochs’ children arrived. The three boys and one girl were well spaced, with birth dates in 1891, 1899, 1901, and 1905. This created less pressure than Clara Foltz experienced with her tightly spaced brood. At a time when middle-class women retired to their homes upon marrying, maintaining a professional identity with even one child presented an indisputable statement of an independent identity. McCulloch sought work-family balance but wrote with real honesty in a memoir, “Necessary attention to children and home duties never wholly diverted Mrs. McCulloch from the family law office.”62

  Participating in a family law practice undoubtedly gave McCulloch a cushion. She may not have sought one, but as her children were born, the flexibility must have been helpful. She wrote very little about the joint practice. It was a given, a backdrop to everyday life. Scraps of her legal work seep out, here and there, of her various autobiographical accounts. In 1897 she collaborated in the representation of a retail dealer in meats, but increasingly McCulloch, not unlike a number of early women lawyers, combined legal case work with other forms of advocacy. Still, in February 1898, she successfully sought admission to the U.S. Supreme Court bar.63

  Holding down the IESA legislative superintendent’s position was one expression of McCulloch’s commitment to the suffrage movement. Representing (with Frank) clients advocating for women’s municipal suffrage was another. They wrote briefs in support of woman suffrage for consideration by the Chicago Charter Convention as well as the Elections Commission of Chicago.64 Catharine McCulloch, a talented author, expanded the scope of her pro-suffrage political writing by publishing Mr. Lex (1899) and Bridget’s Daughters (1911), fiction that dissected the case for women’s rights. The degree to which she may have diversified her work as a response to a small client list is not something McCulloch talked about.

  Three years after her marriage, Chicago hosted the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. While the nation celebrated its achievements, women’s organizations highlighted their history and accomplishments and spelled out an agenda for the coming years. A break-away faction of women formed the Queen Isabella Association, believing that the fair’s glorification of Columbus slighted the queen who funded his expedition. The Isabellas, as they were known, vied with the Board of Lady Managers, and others, to be the exposition’s voice of women. This feisty group sponsored exhibits and talks, and the first congress of women lawyers. At least fourteen women gave papers, Lockwood, Foltz, and Kepley among them, but not McCulloch. The Chicago Legal News reporter did not mention whether she attended. It is curious that McCulloch, an able and frequent speaker, the woman who urged Mary Hall forward, did not speak at this first formal meeting of women lawyers.

  In 1894, their fortunes much improved from the early days of boarding with in-laws, the McCullochs moved to the Chicago suburb of Evanston. Catharine spent part of that year leading a political campaign to elect Lucy Coues Flower, a seasoned activist, as the first woman member of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Flower’s success made her the first woman elected to a state office in Illinois. Through this campaign, McCulloch increased her own reputation as a woman who knew how to expand opportunities for women.

  American women began contesting for elective office in the late 1860s.65 They ran when the law permitted them to be candidates, and sometimes when it did not. In the last decades of the nineteenth century partial, or limited, suffrage opened the door to women campaigning for the position of school board member, county school superintendent, mayor, and later, state representative. In 1894 three women won election to the Colorado state legislature. Two years later, Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon ran successfully as the Democratic candidate for Utah state senator.

  In 1907 Catharine McCulloch took the plunge and ran for justice of the peace in Evanston when a mid-term vacancy occurred. Unlike her 1888 campaign for state’s attorney, which she undertook when she was single, McCulloch was now married with four children, ranging in age from two to sixteen. This bid for elective office expressed her pro-suffrage belief that women should have the right to participate in all aspects of politics and governance. It was not, however, a symbolic campaign. Smart and competitive, she wanted to win.

  The contest was between McCulloch and a plumber named Billie Moore. Municipal suffrage for Illinois women was six years in the future. If McCulloch was to be successful, she had to win election from an all-male voting pool. Aside from her sex, Catharine held all the cards. Newspapers spoke highly of her character and professional training. Rather than let anti-suffrage hecklers confront her, or accuse her of not being at home with her family, McCulloch made the savvy decision to conduct a mail campaign rathe
r than to give public speeches. She laid out her qualifications, her belief that women were eligible to hold office, and her desire to work near her children.66 She defeated Moore by more than thirteen hundred votes. Moore and his supporters struck back by attempting to block the appointment on the grounds that women were not eligible for office. McCulloch’s old law school classmate and friend, Governor Charles Densen, settled the matter by signing her commission.67

  With the governor’s approval of the voters’ choice, McCulloch became the first woman in Illinois to hold the office of justice of the peace. The work was less challenging than client demands at McCulloch & McCulloch. She heard cases in a large hall with the jury nearby and often deposed of cases quickly, suggesting that much of her time was occupied with default judgments.68 And, of course, she had the pleasure of marrying people.

  The Chicago Legal News, which had survived Myra Bradwell’s death, ran an article about McCulloch’s victory as well as an article by the new justice of the peace arguing women that could, and should, hold elective office.69 McCulloch was re-elected in 1909, serving until 1913. Later in life, she wrote her daughter that Florence E. Allen, confirmed in 1934 as the first woman to serve as a federal appeals judge, said that McCulloch’s election as justice of the peace encouraged her successful campaign in 1920 for judge of the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Court of Common Pleas.70

  McCulloch brought intelligence, savvy, energy, and humor to everything she did. Some people found her feisty and prickly—she had a long organizational feud with Chicago suffrage leader Grace Wilbur Trout—but her accomplishments considerably outweighed any limits of personality. She continued to lobby relentlessly for suffrage, writing informational tracts as well as humorous pieces. While justice of the peace, she invented a women’s rights educational game. Questions included “Does a married woman own her clothing?” and “Has any State Superintendent of Public Instruction been a woman?”71 In this period she also wrote a delightfully satiric essay, “Shall Men Vote?” In it, the fictional Hon. Mrs. Libertas et Justitia, Chairman of the Elections Committee in the Oligarchy-of-Women State, carries on an interlocution with men arguing for male suffrage. The Hon. Mrs. reviews the impediments, saying, “[A] really great obstacle to men voting is that they are too emotional. I have observed it at football games and political conventions. Men of otherwise good character … howled like demons.”72 The Hon. Mrs. considers the arguments against male enfranchisement and decides that they are “bosh.” Men “should not be governed without [their] consent … should have a jury of [their] peers. … [W]hen men can vote as well as we women, we will have a government ‘of the people, for the people and by the people.’”73