The Search for Women’s Organisations and Lay Lawyers

Given my own regional prejudices, in which I understood New York to be at the forefront of modern trends during the progressive era, I thought that the story of the WWPU and the New York Legal Aid Society might be exceptional.

It was at a conference of the American Society for Legal History that I first met Gwen Hoerr Jordan. We were on one of the very few panels, at the time, which discussed women in law. She had been working on women lawyers in Chicago. It was from her that I learned of Chicago’s Protective Agency for Women and Children. This organisation became crucial to my thesis that women’s organisations and women lay lawyers were directly providing legal aid to clients. Again, it was my dream that the archive would yield case records, letters, and personal reflections of women legal aid providers, but instead, like almost every other women’s organisations’ papers that I would use, I primarily had the organisation’s annual reports.

The Protective Agency for Women and Children, founded in 1885, essentially provided a full-service legal aid office to women. It was sup­ported by a host of other women’s organisations in Chicago and possessed an ideology that saw women as often exploited by men, especially working­class men, and that middle-class women had a duty to help poor women. The organisation embraced suffrage and other reforms and saw the need for women to take on public and political roles, believing that men had failed in their endeavours. Instead, they imagined that virtuous middle­class white women would create the just state.^[926] Unlike many lawyers, they were deeply suspicious of courts and the ability of male judges or lawyers to deliver justice to women and believed that women had to take matters into their own hands.^[927] Indeed, as we have seen in other chapters in this book, they were especially critical of non-elite lawyers, often immigrants, whom they argued preyed upon the poor and went so far as labelling such lawyers vampires.^[928] Indeed, virtually all the early legal aid organisations in the U.S. made a similar argument about the “shyster” lawyer. In fact, as shown in multiple chapters in this book, the need for organised legal aid to combat such lawyers swirled between continents.

Like other women’s legal organisations that I would come upon later, the Agency was well aware of New York’s WWPU and found it inspira­tional, an example of what women might do in terms of providing legal assistance to other women.^[929] The Agency employed a full-time woman supervisor and staff and also relied upon women volunteers to provide legal assistance to other women on a range of topics and cases.

Most uniquely, the Agency never shied away from claims involving domestic relations cases. Often these involved wives whose husbands had abandoned them, and they wanted such husbands to pay support as the law required. Most controversially, the Agency early on made the decision to take a limited number of divorce cases. This was something that virtu­ally no other legal aid organisation in the U.S. did at the time.^[932] There was a widespread understanding that divorce was immoral and that taking such cases could alienate those who donated funds.^[933] The Agency’s treat­ment of domestic relations cases was extraordinarily different than that of the New York Legal Aid Society which often dissuaded women from bringing cases for support against husbands and pressured women to stay in marriages.^[934]

Knowing that I now had a significant story to tell both about women’s roles in legal aid, the history of legal aid, and more generally the practice of law, I began searching in various archives for keywords such as “women and protective” or “women and union.” The terminology was slowly becoming clear to me. What I realised was that late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s organisations often did not use the language of legal aid in their title. Rather they used the language of “Protective” or “Union.” The terminology of “Legal Aid Society” was used for lawyer­run organisations and had sent me, and doubtless many historians, down only one research path.

From culling sources on Chicago’s women leaders at the turn of the century, I also came upon a woman, Minnie Low, who ran a legal aid ser­vice for Jewish immigrants in Chicago called the Bureau of Personal Service which was founded at the turn of the century.^[935] Low entitled her­self a social worker and made a strong argument for why women social workers, rather than lawyers, should be charged with providing free legal services to the poor. Luckily, she had published a number of short articles on the topic, arguing that lawyers viewed their clients as having technical legal problems whereas social workers saw the client holistically and as having multiple needs.^[936] Thus, I began a new search for documents involv­ing Low or the Bureau of Personal Service. Month after month in various Jewish archives, I turned up very little. Speaking to a variety of archivists, I heard stories of floods that destroyed boxes of documents containing the materials of turn-of-the-century Jewish organisations. One archive was basically closed due to a lack of funding brought about by the massive investment fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff in the 2000s in which investors, including a large number of Jewish organisations, lost their funds. I also intended to go through a variety of documents from the syna­gogue that she attended, but I was never able to locate them. There was a small collection of her letters to Julius Rosenwald, an important business­man and Jewish philanthropist, in his papers now located at the Regenstein Special Collections at the University of Chicago. From these documents one could see that she knew that she would be forgotten. As she wrote, “I am merely a social worker. I am merely a woman.”^[937]

Yet, here, I had absolute evidence that a cadre of women, now calling themselves social workers, were providing legal assistance to individual clients.

Like so many women historians, I soon found myself at the mecca of women’s history—the Schlesinger library at Radcliffe, what had been Harvard’s sister college before their merger. Here, I located the material of the Boston Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (BWEIU), a large and important women’s organisation. Although women’s historians had written about the BWEIU, as a women’s organisation involved in various first-wave feminist issues, they had not focused on its legal aid division.^[940] In part, and at its most idealistic, the Union had been formed to bring together working-class women and middle-class women in order to heal class rifts and it was driven by the Christian social gospel and a belief in women’s equality.^[941] The BWEIU’s legal committee was formed in 1878, and it continued providing legal services to women until the 1920s. I was immediately struck by handwritten ledger books with fading lists of clients, opposing parties, and the claim being pursued.^[942] The founders of the committee were very explicit that they knew of New York’s Working Women’s Protective Union and were using it as a model.^[943] The Union made a specialty of bringing claims on behalf of domestic workers, includ­ing laundry women, housekeepers, and dressmakers, and the Committee used women volunteers to provide legal advice to such women.^[944]

For years, the organisation had worked to collect the wages owed to domestic workers—taking their complaints, investigating claims, writing letters, threatening legal suit, and reaching settlements for even small dol­lar figures.^[945] The records made clear that these women volunteers under­stood themselves as providing legal aid and urged other women to learn the law.^[946] As one report boasted, “Mrs.

Like Chicago’s Protective Agency for Women and Children, and unlike attorney-run legal aid societies, the Boston Union understood legal aid to be broad and inclusive and they worked with clients to provide them with jobs, food, clothing, and housing. Crucially, its leaders also made clear that it was unwilling to merge with the male and lawyer-run Boston Legal Aid Society for fear that its lawyers would neglect women clients, and deliver only a narrow notion of legal assistance.⁷⁰ This, in fact, was a well- founded fear. Like the WWPU, the Boston Union provided a model for others, and women formed Women’s Educational and Industrial Unions that in part provided legal aid in other cities including Rochester, New York; Jersey City, New Jersey; Washington D.C.; and elsewhere.⁷¹

Yet, when the leaders of the New York Legal Aid Society organised the first national conference on legal aid in 1911, women’s organisations that provided legal aid were not invited to attend. The head of the Boston Union, learning of the conference, contacted the organiser asking for a member to be invited and she was severely rebuked. She was essentially informed that her organisation did not qualify as a legal aid organisation and thus would not be invited. As a long-time leader of the New York Society wrote of the Boston Union and other women run legal aid organ­isations: “[They were] in the hands of ladies only, who did not understand its real object, and who would not take interest in the sufferings of men, and who confined their attentions to cases brought by women, who com­plained of their husbands.”⁷² In other words, real legal aid required male lawyers and male clients.

“Copy of Resolution Passed at the Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Legal Aid Society on September 22, 1910,” box 5, folder 16, Briesen Papers.

⁶⁹Letter to A.L Everette from Arthur von Briesen, 19 May 1913, box 4, folder 4, Briesen Papers.

⁷⁰ Batlan (2015), pp. 44 45.

⁷¹ Batlan (2015), p. 45.

⁷² Letter from Arthur von Briesen to Carolina Cook, 27 Apr. 1912, and Letter from Arthur von Briesen to Thomas Clafin, 27 Sept. 1912, box 5, folder 19, Briesen Papers.