Women who blazed the trail in Maine law

The recent passing of Maine’s first female Supreme Court Justice, Caroline Glassman has renewed interest in both her own role as well as that of other women who preceded her in Maine’s legal profession. Included among them is a woman admitted to practice in Farmington in 1900, one of Maine’s first female attorneys.

Glassman, named in 1983 to the state’s highest court, was indeed a pioneer for modern women attorneys in Maine. This was not only because she became a prominent judge but also because she was in the 1960s and ’70s one of the state’s first female trial attorneys.

The almost solitary course of her early career stands in contrast to contemporary conditions. Today, for example, with women numbering 63 percent of the 184 Maine attorneys under the age 30, it’s clear that not only are women achieving some degree of parity, but may also be the dominant gender in the profession in the future. To be sure numbers may not by any means tell the whole story. The statistics are probably more than merely symbolic, however.

Though Caroline Glassman was one of those who made this possible there were indeed other women – now virtually forgotten – who also blazed a trail ahead of her and who like Glassman confronted obstacles to success. It’s now perhaps a fitting occasion to take a glimpse at a few of them.

One would have thought that with the formation of the modern world’s first democratic government more than 225 years ago that the United States would also have opened its doors to women lawyers. Moreover, America’s Anglo roots had featured Elizabeth as one of the most successful monarchs in world history. In this same Elizabethan era, Shakespeare celebrated the Italian judge Portia as one of the strongest theatrical characters on the stage.

It would be almost a century after a nation founded on supposedly egalitarian principles would begin to open some of its leading professional doors to women. The Maine legal profession was opened up for one of them in 1872 with the admission of Clara Hapgood Nash in Machias. Hers was the first in New England and the sixth in the nation. Nash, like Caroline Glassman a century later, took on clients as a jury trial attorney and appeared in courtroom cases. This would set her apart from most other early women attorneys, who typically stayed away from trial law.

The Machias Republican newspaper reported on one of her first cases:

“Wednesday afternoon, the case of J. D. Allen vs. Town of Jonesboro for damage to a horse

Was taken up. The case attracted some attention from the fact that the defense was to be

Managed by F.C. and C.H. Nash, and that Mrs. Nash would open the case to the jury,

Which she accordingly did. We were not fortunate enough to be present, but several members

Of the bar admitted it would have been done in a most creditable manner, giving authorities

And decisions promptly and in excellent style. There are other members of the bar who do

Not relish the innovation.”

That other members of the bar did not “relish the innovation” was evident from the fact that it would be another 27 years before the second woman would be admitted in Maine. For the decision of Maine Justice William Barrows of Brunswick, who admitted Nash, would not be a precedent quickly followed by his successors on the bench. Thus, when in the late 1890s, Rockland’s Helen Knowlton applied, the state’s Chief Justice, John Peters, ruled that Maine law allowed only men to be admitted. So spurned by the system, Knowlton’s advocates then sought to have the ruling overturned by the Maine Legislature.

They were successful in doing so in 1899. In language that has something of a mid-20th century resonance, the Legislature decreed that “No person shall be denied admission…on account of sex.”

Though the admission of lawyers has often been regarded by judges as the prerogative of the courts and not the Legislature, the Maine judiciary acquiesced in the legislative judgment and Knowlton was accordingly admitted. Her admission was followed the next year by that of Sanford’s Belle Ashton and Agnes Robinson. Robinson though from Sherman Mills in Aroostook County, was nevertheless admitted to practice in a session before a Maine Supreme Court Justice conducted in Farmington June 9, 1900, making her not only the fourth woman to be admitted to practice in Maine history but clearly the first in Franklin County. (She was the great aunt of long-time Farmington resident Jeanne Drechsel.)

Nash, Knowlton, and Ashton prepared for their bar examinations by the informal apprentice system then prevalent in America, in effect “reading” or studying law under the guidance of an already admitted attorney. Nash, for example, studied under her husband. After her admission they would continue to collaborate, as in the Allen v. Jonesboro case. Knowlton and Ashton studied under lawyers for whom they had been stenographic secretaries.

Robinson, however, pursued a more formal academic route, one that would eventually be the ordinary means by which aspiring lawyers would prepare for admission. For Robinson was a member of the first graduating class of Maine’s first law school, the University of Maine College of Law in 1900. (By contrast some of the nation’s leading or “elite” law schools barred their doors to women until much later. Columbia refused to admit women until 1926 and Harvard did not admit women to its law school until 1950.)

Neither Nash, Knowlton, Ashton, nor Robinson achieved the professional acclaim of Carolyn Glassman. Nash, for example, gave up her legal career after a few years and relocated with her family to the Boston area. A son, Hapgood Nash, would become the noted author of a leading treatise on insurance law.

Knowlton gave up her Rockland practice on marrying her husband Arthur Orne in 1906. Though a trailblazer in the profession she was not, nevertheless, an advocate of other feminist causes and even refused to vote until 1932, a dozen years after women had won that right.

Ashton – later known after her marriage to James Leavitt as Belle Leavitt – continued working in a quiet private practice, at first with the same Sanford attorney for whom she had been a stenographer before her admission. Within a few years she struck off on her own, however, and maintained an independent practice in downtown Sanford for over 40 years.

Robinson, two years after her own admission to practice, married a Methodist minister, Othello Goodwin. He died three months after their wedding, after which she returned to Sherman Mills where she devoted her professional energy to helping operate her family’s lumber business until a lingering illness that occasioned her own death at age 39 in 1915.

It’s doubtful if any of these early forerunners to Justice Carolyn Glassman ever nurtured attaining her professional achievement: an appointment to Maine’s highest judicial tribunal. They did, however, set the stage by which such an aspiration might one day be fulfilled.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine.He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net.