On March 8

On this day in ...
... 1884, Susan B. Anthony testified before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives in support of a constitutional amendment that would extend the right to vote to women. She began:

We appear before you this morning…to ask that you will, at your earliest convenience, report to the House in favor of the submission of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Legislatures of the several States, that shall prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.

As detailed in posts available here, such an amendment -- the 19th -- would not be ratified until 1920. (credit for photo of Anthony, an IntLawGrrls foremother, circa 1880-1906) Food for thought this 100th anniversary International Women's Day.

(Prior March 8 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

How 'bout a women's legal history trial?

A prince is about to stand trial for murder.

He's Hamlet, fatal assailant of the meddlesome man destined (if Ophelia had her way) to become his father-in-law.

At issue: given the welter of woe in which Shakespeare situated the troubled Dane, is the prince mentally competent to face judgment?

"The Trial of Hamlet" will take place January 31 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. (here for tickets & image credit) Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who created the play, will preside. A jury including celebs like Helen Hunt will decide.

Karen Wada of the Los Angeles Times properly places the staging in a Court tradition, writing that "[i]n 1987, for instance, three high court jurists heard arguments over who really wrote Shakespeare's plays." (On continuing high court furor over the question, see this article by Jess Bravin.)

Blog readers no doubt also are familiar with the many trials of this sort staged by the American Bar Association.

So here's a thought:

How 'bout retrying some signature event of women's legal history? (And see here and here.)

Jumping to mind are 2, both involving IntLawGrrls foremothers:

► The 1873 conviction of Susan B. Anthony (by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice) for the offense of illegal voting.

► Any number of 1917 jailings -- at times brutal -- of Alice Paul, Lucy Burns (left), and their National Woman's Party colleagues for the "direct action campaign" against U.S. entry into World War I. As IntLawGrrls alumna Catherine Lanctot has posted, they took that campaign to "the very doorstep of the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson."

Additional nominations welcome.

Look On! Suffragists

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.)

Just finished watching Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony. The several-years-old documentary is available on Netflix as well as in DVD.

It's worth watching, though best watched in several segments. By filmmaker Ken Burns, it 1st aired as a documentary series on PBS, which maintains an informational website. As is common in works of the kind, the repetition of static photos (necessary given how little motion picture footage there was back in the day), coupled with folksy-Americana music, can make one a bit drowsy at times.

But stick with it. The story's a good one -- one of which this 'Grrl knew precious little.

Told well are the life journeys of 2 very different persons, at one in their passion for changing the role of women in the United States:

► Elizabeth Cady Stanton (near right), a mother, wife, and writer, loved good food and took care to keep her hair curled.

► Susan B. Anthony (far right) was an austere, cerebral woman who never married.

They met in 1851 in Seneca Falls, New York, where 3 years earlier Stanton had convened the 1st-ever women's rights convention. From then on, the 2 (both IntLawGrrls foremothers) worked tirelessly together for women's rights -- especially, for the enfranchisement of women.

Particularly interesting in Not for Ourselves are the moments when that last, singular goal conflicted with others. The conflict saw the women, who'd been staunch activists on behalf of abolition, oppose post-Civil War Reconstruction Amendments because they kept from women what they granted to former slaves. And as the goal of women's suffrage grew nearer, they distanced themselves from African American women in an effort to shore up support in the South. Conflict also arose between the 2 women themselves. The 1890s publication, by an ever-more-radical Stanton, of The Woman's Bible drew censure from the movement she'd started -- a movement that Anthony chose to continue to lead notwithstanding its ouster of her longtime friend and ally. As a result Anthony, alone, appears on the 1st U.S. coin depicting a woman.

Both women would pass away more than a decade before their work took form in the 19th Amendment. This film serves as a reminder of their legacy.

On August 13

On this day in ...
... 1818, Lucy Stone was born, the 8th of 9 children, into a poor farm family in Brookline, Massachusetts. She began teaching school at age 16, and did so in between college-level studies, becoming the 1st Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree when she was graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio at age 29. By this time Stone was an activist for women's rights and against slavery; her work aided passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as suffrage laws in many states. She was a close ally of foremothers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Before her death in Boston at age 75, Stone would campaign for temperance, for less restrictive women's clothing (welcoming the advent of bloomers, above left (credit)), and for reform in social mores and family law (keeping her own name after marriage).

(Prior August 13 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 12

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), began, in Toronto, Canada, the 1st-ever convention of the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association. During the 2-day meeting, members of the association, whose forerunners included the Toronto Women's Literary Club founded in 1876, re-elected Dr. Emily Stowe (left), Canada's 1st woman physician, as President. Among those in attendance were suffragists like Susan B. Anthony (an IntLawGrrls foremother), Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, and Stowe's sister, Dr. Hannah Kimball.

(Prior June 12 posts are here, here, and here.)

On April 4

On this day in ...
... 1887, Argonia, Kansas, a "little Quaker village, with a population of less than five hundred," became the community in the United States that 1st elected a woman as mayor. Elected was Susanna Madora Salter (left), then 27, the daughter of the town's 1st mayor, and the wife of its city clerk. The convoluted process by which she was elected is detailed here. In the single year that she served before declining to seek re-election, Salter became world famous -- so much so that when she was introduced to Susan B. Anthony at a women's suffrage meeting, the latter "slapped her on the shoulder and exclaimed":

'Why, you look just like any other woman, don't you?'

Salter died in 1961, 2 weeks shy of her 101st birthday.


(Prior April 4 posts are here, here, and here)

On March 15

On this day in ....
... 1852, one Ellen Clark married, and taking her groom's surname, became Ellen Clark Sargent (left), the name by which she would become a leading suffragist. She allied with IntLawGrrls foremother Susan B. Anthony and others. Ellen's wedding day is among the few precise dates in her life to be found online; many accounts subsume mention of her in stories principally about her husband, U.S. Senator Aaron Augustus Sargent (R-Calif.), who introduced into Congress the text of what would become 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women's suffrage. Yet when she died in 1911 Ellen -- a president of the California Woman Suffrage Association -- was prominent enough that a memorial service was held in her honor in downtown San Francisco's Union Square.

(Prior March 15 posts are here, here, and here)

On August 12

On this day in ...
… 1833, Lillie Devereux Blake (left) was born in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1857, she began writing short stories for Harper's Weekly and the Knickerbocker. After her husband’s death, she supported herself and her 2 children with her writing, working as a war correspondent during the Civil War as well as writing novels and short articles. In 1869 she joined IntLawGrrls' foremothers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to fight for women’s suffrage. She was president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association from 1879 to 1890 and of the New York City Woman Suffrage League from 1886 to 1900. Blake died in 1913. (image credit)
… 1825, Simón Bolívar (below right), known as "The Liberator," became the 1st president of the Republic of Bolivia. (image credit) A descendant of rich Spanish aristocrats, Bolívar was one of the major architects of South American independence from Spain. He consolidated the independence of several South American countries through multiple military campaigns over the course of the early 1820s. In 1821, Gran Colombia (a federation covering much of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador) was created, and Bolívar became its president. Then followed the presidenc of Bolivia on this day.

(Prior August 12 posts are here and here.)

In search of Miss McGeachy

The search started due to an offhand comment in the memoir of a mid-20th C. U.S. diplomat, respecting a then-much-talked-about report co-authored by Miss McGeachy at the British Embassy. A certain snark in the comment, coupled with its reference to a woman in the Foreign Office at that time, sparked curiosity.
No online biographical info on Mary Craig McGeachy (left) immediately available, the search required resort to books.
Most interesting was the entry at pp. 430-32 of Current Biography Yearbook 1944. That year, with the Allies still locked in global battle against the Axis Powers, McGeachy had been appointed Director of the Welfare Division of the United Nations' Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. She bore a dual responsibility: 1st, to assure that "'specially dependent groups such as the aged, children, and nursing and pregnant women'" received necessary aid as soon as Allied troops freed the territories in which they lived; and 2d, to rebuild the "'welfare organizations'" in those territories so that they could resume providing care, to displaced and returning persons, as soon as possible.
As would be expected, the unnamed author of the 1944 entry detailed McGeachy's background:
► Born in Ontario, Canada, she'd earned degrees in history and philosophy at the University of Toronto, and then studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Graduate School of Higher International Studies at the University of Geneva.
► In 1930 she'd joined the Permanent Secretariat of the League of Nations, working in its section on public health, social welfare, and economic studies, and serving as the League's liaison with British dominions and with women's groups.
► In 1940 she'd moved to Britain's Ministry of Economic Warfare, beginning in London, and then transferring to Washington, D.C.
► On October 1, 1942, she was appointed the 1st Secretary of the British Embassy in the United States, the 1st woman diplomat so to represent Britain (as the entry put it, the "first woman to receive an appoinment as a full-fledged British diplomat to a major power"). The only other woman said to have held even "a comparable post in the British diplomatic corps" had been Gertude Bell, in Iraq.
Clearly, at the time of her UNRRA appoinment, McGeachy was up to the task. Interesting, then, the extent to which the unnamed author focused on the fact that McGeachy was not a man.
Of McGeachy, who, it said, turned 40 in 1944, the entry made references to "the blond Canadian," "the young diplomat," and "'that competent young woman'" (twice, the 1st time quoting New York's Herald Tribune). And then there was this paragraph:

The young executive who will administer this great work is not only capable but attractive. A woman interviewer described her as 'disarming,' and a man wrote that she is 'remarkably pretty.' Her eyes are piquantly slanted under strong, arched brows, and her firm-jawed face has an expression of quite humor. Her skin is fair, as befits the copper-blond hair ...

It went on, praising her clothes, her cooking, and her hostessing, then ended with a wee mention that, as of December 1944, Miss McGeachy was married.
Little surprise that a recent profile reads rather differently.
Vol. 35, pp. 393-94 of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), indicates without further comment that McGeachy -- birthday November 7 as stated in the 1944 entry -- was in fact born in 1901, and thus was a few years older than the author of that entry had thought. In this new profile, entry author Mary Kinnear (right) remarks not at all on appearances. Kinnear begins by giving McGeachy the worthy title "international civil servant," then reports that she continued as UNRRA's welfare director till the agency shut down in 1946. Thereafter McGeachy devoted her time to the International Council of Women. A nongovernmental organization founded in 1888 by suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and May Wright Sewall, the ICW now holds U.N. consultative status; McGeachy served as its President from 1963 to 1973. McGeachy endured a private life that, in Kinnear's words, "was not smooth," and died on November 2, 1991, in Keene, New Hampshire.
In her entry Kinnear -- a University of Manitoba historian and the author of Woman of the World: Mary McGeachy and International Cooperation, the 2004 biography depicted above left -- concludes:

McGeachy's life sheds light upon the contrasting twentieth-century conventions affecting men and women. ... At a time when married women were expected to retire from paid work she saw voluntary work as a way for women to serve society as citizens.

The life story of this pathbreaking diplomat is well worth contemplating in our new century.

(A very deep tip of the hat to Peg Durkin, Head of Public Services at the Mabie Law Library, the University of California, Davis, School of Law, whose research helped make this post possible.)

On July 23

On this day in ...
... 1920, May Wright Sewall died in Indianapolis, Indiana, 76 years after her birth in Wisconsin, and just a month before women's suffrage -- an issue to which she'd devoted her lifework -- would come into effect in the United States via ratification of the 19th Amendment. She had earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Northwestern Female College in Evanston, Illinois, now part of Northwestern University. She taught throughout the Midwest, founding a girls' school in Indianapolis. Elected president of the National Congress of Women in 1891 and of the International Congress of Women (ICW) in 1899, Sewall, like many feminists of the day, combined her work for women's rights with work for peace. Thus she chaired the ICW standing committee on peace and arbitration and a 1915 Organized Conference of Women Workers to Promote Peace, and sailed in 1915 on Henry Ford's Peace Expedition. As we've posted, Sewall, along with IntLawGrrls transnational foremother Susan B. Anthony and others, led a women's rights meeting at which abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave the last speech of his life. (credit for portrait of Sewall on display in Indiana's capital)
... 1962, in Geneva, Switzerland, Laos and more than a dozen other countries signed the International Agreement on the Neutrality of Laos, the result of a 2-month conference. They "pledged to respect Laotian neutrality" and "to refrain from interference 'direct or indirect' in the internal affairs" of that country. The agreement would be breached in the course of the Vietnam War.

(Prior July 23 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: Deborah W. Denno

It's IntLawGrrls' distinct pleasure today to welcome Dr. Deborah W. Denno (left) as a guest blogger.
The Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, Debby is a foremost expert on the law of capital punishment, an issue of global consequence that's often the subject of IntLawGrrls posts. For nearly 2 decades she has written on, and testified as an expert in state and federal courts about, the constitutionality of lethal injection and electrocution. This expertise is evident from a glance at her publications list, on which also may be found many studies of other issues relating to criminal law, criminal procedure, and social sciences and the law. Currently Debby is working on a book-length project analyzing the neuroscientific correlates of criminal intent and conduct; she already has published Biology and Violence: From Birth to Adulthood (1990). She was a member of the Drugs/Violence Task Force of the U.S. Sentencing Commission, and in 2007 was selected by The National Law Journal as one of the “50 Most Influential Women Lawyers in America.”
Debby holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia, an M.A. from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. and J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the Managing Editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. She clerked for Anthony J. Scirica, now Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and also practiced at a law firm before entering academia. She has held visitorships at Columbia, Vanderbilt, Princeton, the University of London, and the London School of Economics.
In her guest post below, Debby recounts the story of a condemned teenager twice electrocuted by the State of Louisiana, and relates that mid-20th century case to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2008 judgment in Baze v. Rees, a case involving execution by lethal injection, in which she gave expert testimony.
The guest post is dedicated to a woman oft-noted on this blog, Susan B. Anthony (below right), about whom Debby says:

Anthony overcame early economic adversity and extraordinary sexism to propel women's suffrage into the United States by way of her intellect, activism, writing, and steel-strong courage.

Today Anthony joins the list of IntLawGrrls' transnational foremothers just below the "visiting from" map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Tracy A. Thomas

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome Tracy A. Thomas (left) as a guest blogger.

Professor of Law and Director of Faculty Research and Development at the University of Akron School of Law in Ohio, Tracy teaches Remedies, Women’s Legal History, and Family Law.
She was graduated Order of the Coif with her J.D. from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where she was also Production Editor of the Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review (then called Journal). She also holds a a B.A., cum laude, from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and an M.P.A. from California State University-Long Beach.
Prior to joining the Akron Law faculty in 1998, she clerked for Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and was an attorney for Covington & Burling and Neighborhood Legal Services in Washington, D.C.
Tracy's publications include numerous articles and essays on equitable remedies, and she is newly a co-editor of Remedies: Public and Private (West, forthcoming 5th ed.). Much of her scholarship forms a part of the nascent field of women's legal history, about which she guest-posts below. Among Tracy's current research projects is a book, under contract with New York University Press, entitled Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Feminist Foundations of Family Law. Not surprisingly, she chooses to dedicate her guest-post below to her research subject. Stanton (prior IntLawGrrls posts) is depicted below in 1856 as she holds 1 of her daughters, Harriot. (credit)

Tracy writes that

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a formidable intellect, whose holistic concepts of gender equity enabled her to envision individual, collective, and systemic change. She was able to articulate legal philosophies that are much of the basis of our work today. She did all of this while mothering (single-handedly) seven children. Her radical ideas led to her historical ostracization even though it was she at the time, rather than her colleague, Susan B. Anthony, who was the familiar national figure.

Today Stanton joins other honorees (albeit, we note, not yet Anthony) on the list of IntLawGrrls' transnational foremothers just below our "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On February 20

On this day in ...
... 1895, an hour after he left the meeting of a women's rights group led by May Wright Sewall, Susan B. Anthony, and Anna Howard Shaw, 77-year-old abolitionist and suffragist Frederick Douglass collapsed and died at his home in Washington, D.C. The New York Times obituary said of the man depicted below left in a Rochester, New York, statue of him and Anthony at tea:

It is a singular fact, in connection with the death of Mr. Douglass, that the very last hours of his life were given in attention to one of the principles to which he has devoted his energies since his escape from slavery. This morning he drove into Washington from his residence, about a mile out from Anacostia, a suburb just across the eastern branch of the Potomac, and at 10 o'clock appeared at Metzerott Hall, where the Women's National Council is holding its triennial. Mr. Douglass was a regularly-enrolled member of the National Women's Suffrage Association, and had always attended its conventions.

... 2005, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega (right), Spain's Vice President, announced that 76% of the electorate had voted for the Constitutional Treaty of the European Union in the 1st referendum on the charter. The treaty faltered in other countries, however, and its successor, the Lisbon Treaty, likewise remains unratified, as IntLawGrrls posted.

(Prior February 20 posts are here and here.)

On June 18

On this day in ...

... 1953 (55 years ago today), nearly a year after "a bloodless revolution" led by Gamal Abd El-Nasser "allowed King Farouk to leave the country with a full royal salute," monarchy ended in Egypt as the Republic of Egypt was declared and Mohamad Naguib named its 1st President. In a year Nasser would become Egypt's 2d President.

... 1873 (135 years ago today), in Canandaigua, New York, suffragist Susan B. Anthony (below left) was convicted of the crime of unlawful voting and fined $100 plus court costs. Certain male voting officials having proved sympathetic to women's suffrage, Anthony and 14 other women had managed to register and cast votes in the Presidential election held on November 5, 1872. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt, hearing the case while riding circuit, was not sympathetic, however. Hunt (about whom Oyez reports that "[t]o say that Hunt accomplished little on the Court would be an overstatement") ordered jurors to convict:

'I have decided as a question of law . . . that under the Fourteenth Amendment, which Miss Anthony claims protects her, she was not protected in a right to vote. . . . I therefore direct you to find a verdict of guilty.'

On hearing her sentence, Anthony declared:

'May it please your honor, I will never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.'

And she never did.

On May 15, ...

...1937 (70 years ago today), Madeleine K. Albright (left), the United States' 1st woman Secretary of State (1991-97), was born in Prague, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
...1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, an organization dedicated to securing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would extend the franchise to women.
...1252 (755 years ago today), Ad exstirpanda, a bull issued by Pope Innocent IV, authorized the use of torture to extract confessions from presumed heretics. Succeeding popes reaffirmed the proclamation, and torture became widespread in Catholic Europe.