Female attorneys and judges, once an impossibility in the U.S., have become indispensable.

In March, we celebrate Women’s History Month, an appropriate time for us to remember and reflect upon the struggles women face in joining our profession and their contributions to it. It is appropriate, I believe, for us to take a brief trip down memory lane to remember that the journey began 153 years ago by Illinois lawyer Myra Bradwell isn’t finished.

Most of us were introduced to Bradwell in law school and we all remember her fight to become admitted to the Illinois Bar. Her personal history, however, is a remarkable story of how one woman made a difference in our profession across our nation. I was unaware, for instance, that prior to passing the bar exam in 1869, Bradwell was the founder and editor in chief of Chicago Legal News, a legal publication with a circulation across the U.S. Typical of the discrimination against women in that era, she was required to obtain a special charter from the Illinois legislature to enable her as a woman to own and operate the periodical. The charter also authorized her to enter into contracts in her own right, without her husband’s (also a lawyer) permission, and to retain income derived from the paper as her own.

By all contemporary accounts, Chicago Legal News was a commercially successful publication, widely read in the legal community throughout the country, and especially respected for Bradwell’s comment and analysis on legal opinions of the day and the Illinois legal forms she herself produced and published. It also served as a platform for her to espouse, advocate for, and advance social issues of the day—specifically women’s suffrage and women’s rights. In short, when the Illinois Supreme Court’s denial of a law license to her reached the U.S. Supreme Court, she had already well established herself as the antithesis of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller’s belief that a woman’s “paramount destiny and mission [were] to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”

Of course, Justice Miller authored and affirmed the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision to deny this incredibly talented and dynamic woman the opportunity to practice law. Only Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, dissenting, had the foresight and courage to acknowledge what we take for granted today:

… [The majority’s] noble vision of avoiding the exposure of women to obligations outside the home is misplaced. This country was settled and built with the work of women who not only tended children and domestic affairs, but who have joined with husbands or acted in their widowhood with the difficult task of earning a living. On our frontiers, women are even pressed into arms to defend themselves. To imagine a world in which women do not toil, and toil mightily, outside of the home is to imagine what never was, and what will never be.

If our society, notwithstanding women’s station in life, can bear the blush of having women working in more physically demanding jobs, it can surely bear the honor of having Mrs. Bradwell called to the bar.

Bravo, Chief Justice Chase. Bradwell never practiced law, albeit having been admitted sua sponte by the Illinois and U.S. Supreme courts shortly prior to her death in 1894. (The ISBA named Bradwell as an honorary member in 1879, even though she had been denied a law license.) Her struggles inspired another young woman, Belva Lockwood, to enter what is now George Washington School of Law and become the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1879 (although it did literally take an “act of Congress” to get that accomplished). Bradwell acknowledged the historic accomplishment in the Chicago Legal News: “The Court, which has said to woman ‘you cannot enter here,’ must now open its doors at her approach, when she comes armed with the proper documents ….”

153 years later …

Thanks to these two women and many others, we find ourselves, 153 years later, with a dramatically different profession—one much the better for encouraging all those with the skills and desire to practice law to do so regardless of their gender. In fact, in 2021, 55.3 percent of all law school admittees were women. Women are ubiquitous in our profession, from bar to bench, and have assumed roles in all disciplines and areas of our practice (In all likelihood, this would have made Justice Miller’s head spin.). The U.S. Supreme Court obviously looks very different today than he could ever have imagined in 1872, with four women, two of whom are minorities, on its bench.

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, noted, “It’s fine to be the first, but you don’t want to be the last.” And indeed, she was not last on that Court or the thousands of others throughout the country. In Illinois, we now have five women justices out of the seven justices on our Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Mary Jane Theis. Chief Justice Theis is joined by four colleagues, two of whom are Black, and all of whom having enjoyed long, distinguished, and remarkable legal careers in addition to having faced the daunting challenges, as Chief Justice Chase noted, of “tending to children and domestic affairs.”

As we celebrate Women’s History Month, let’s all salute Chief Justice Theis, and Justices Cunningham, Holder White, Rochford, and O’Brien, and congratulate them for being the trailblazers they have been throughout their careers. Let’s also pause to congratulate and honor all our female colleagues—judges, justices, and practicing lawyers—who day in and day out are living examples of just how wrong SCOTUS got it 153 years ago in Bradwell v. Illinois.

However, while we celebrate great achievements, let us not forget that work remains to be done in the battle for gender equality. Our female colleagues continue to experience sexual discrimination, harassment, and downright misogynistic behavior, all of which are too prevalent in such a learned profession. Income inequity, partnership opportunities, work-life balance, and other systemic issues remain to be addressed. As we celebrate how far we have come, let’s all remember that it is our responsibility—each of us as individuals and collectively—to assure that the path in our profession for our daughters and granddaughters will be one of true equality.