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Myra Bradwell
Myra Bradwell, who was from Chicago, was the first female lawyer in Illinois. She also founded the Chicago Legal News. Her husband was a judge so for years Myra did unofficial clerking that gave her a good background knowledge of legal education. When Bradwell applied for a state bar, the state denied her to have a license to practice law. When Myra went to the Illinois Supreme Court, they stood by the bar's decision and did not grant her the license because "of the disability imposed by...your married condition." This disability was a women's lack of legal standing in making contracts, owning property, suing, or being sued, the same as children. Bradwell then went to the highest court of the country, the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court argued, "The peculiar qualities of womanhood, its gentle graces, its tender susceptibilities, its purity, its delicacy, its emotional impulses, its subordination of hard reason to sympathetic feeling are surely not qualifications for forensic strife. Nature has tempered women as little for judicial conflicts of the courtroom as for the physical conflicts of the battlefield." Bradwell then turned to helping other women. However, they went about it in a different way, they prepared a bill that made it illegal to "deprive citizens of employment because of their gender". In 1873 the legislature passed the bill and Myra Bradwell was granted a license in 1890.
Myra Bradwell, who was from Chicago, was the first female lawyer in Illinois. She also founded the Chicago Legal News. Her husband was a judge so for years Myra did unofficial clerking that gave her a good background knowledge of legal education. When Bradwell applied for a state bar, the state denied her to have a license to practice law. When Myra went to the Illinois Supreme Court, they stood by the bar's decision and did not grant her the license because "of the disability imposed by...your married condition." This disability was a women's lack of legal standing in making contracts, owning property, suing, or being sued, the same as children. Bradwell then went to the highest court of the country, the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court argued, "The peculiar qualities of womanhood, its gentle graces, its tender susceptibilities, its purity, its delicacy, its emotional impulses, its subordination of hard reason to sympathetic feeling are surely not qualifications for forensic strife. Nature has tempered women as little for judicial conflicts of the courtroom as for the physical conflicts of the battlefield." Bradwell then turned to helping other women. However, they went about it in a different way, they prepared a bill that made it illegal to "deprive citizens of employment because of their gender". In 1873 the legislature passed the bill and Myra Bradwell was granted a license in 1890.
