Volume 35, number 6!
Rapids Historical Society
March 2014
Grand River Times The Newsletter of the Grand Rapids Historical Society
Inside this issue: Cover Story: March program: The First Century of Women Attorneys in Grand Rapids, 1870s 1970s Letter from our President, page 2 Rediscovering Merze Tate, page 4 A Suffragist Spring, page 5 Mel Goolsby, page 5 Happening in History, page 6 Photo Sleuth, page 7
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Next Program: The Most Christian Nation in the World: Religion in America on the Civil War Homefront Save the date: Thursday, April 10, 2014, 7:00 p.m., at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church (134 Division Ave North).
Grand River Times!
Women at the Bar: The First Century of Women Attorneys in Grand Rapids, 1870s - 1970s Thursday, March 13, 2014, 7:00 p.m. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum Presented by Ruth Stevens, Attorney and Grand Valley State University professor Cosponsored by the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s Historical Commission In the 1960s and 1970s, a new wave of women attorneys began joining the bar in Grand Rapids, paving the way for many who followed. Yet they were not the first female attorneys to practice law in Grand Rapids. In the late 1870s, Elizabeth Eaglesfield, one of the early female graduates of the University of Michigan Law School, hung out her shingle and began advertising for clients. Shortly after 1900, Ella Mae Backus became the longlasting backbone of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Michigan. She was followed by the occasional individual, like Gale Saunders, largely unknown today. Before women became fully enfranchised citizens in 1920, they had more difficulty entering the law than they did many other professions. As women, they were disenfranchised. As lawyers and licensed members of the legal profession, they had position within the conventional institutions of power. But even graduates of good law Continued on page 4 Elizabeth Eaglesfield (right) began a private practice when she returned to Grand Rapids in 1886 and had office space in the relatively new Twamley Building (see page 4). City directories, however, indicate that her office moved frequently until, toward the end of her career in Grand Rapids, we find her address in the office of another attorney. As early as 1889 Eaglesfield commented on the difficulties faced by women attorneys in a Grand Rapids newspaper feature: “I can’t say that my business is increasing with that rapidity that I could desire. . . . The advance of our sex in the professions has been so rapid and so recent that many prejudices exist against us. Men are afraid to associate us with them in the trial of a cause . . . and clients are afraid to trust us with cases that have to be submitted to [an all-male] jury.”
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