Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center Dedication

At the Re-dedication ceremony,
Professor Babcock presented the portrait of Clara Foltz,
reproduced on this website,
to the City of Los Angeles for display in the newly christened:
Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center.

Read Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's speech for the event

Read Professor Babcock's program notes for the ceremony

 
[The Women: Pioneer Profile Index]
[Biographical Chapters][Articles][Research Leads]
[Bibliographies][Obituaries][Photos]
[Clara Shortridge Foltz][Links][Guest Registry][Search]

Articles on the Women's Legal History Project Website and Biographical Chapters:

A Real Revolution by Barbara Allen Babcock
The University of Kansas Law Review, Volume 49, No. 4, p. 719 - 731 (May 2001)

The Women's Legal History Biography Project in Cyber Esq.
[HTML] [PDF]

Introduction

     Our primary purpose in building the website is to extend the historiography of women as lawyers in the United States. To date, there are few texts on the aspirations and accomplishments of pioneer women lawyers, and even less on how the profession has changed as a result of their entry.

     We want to encourage and enable both kinds of work through the material we collect here, and we hope in interactive cyber-fashion that visiters will use what they find to become contributors. We welcome submissions to the website, proposed links, and suggestions for articles and sources for the bibliography.

     Our method is biographical. The fundamental documents at the site are the papers done in the Stanford Law School course on Women's Legal History. Each student chooses an early woman lawyer and writes a chapter about her. We expect that future students will add on to the work of their forbears until we have a complete picture of many of the lives. An example is the two papers on Lelia Robinson -- the first an overview or introduction, and the second focussed on her early practice in Washington Territory, and on uncovering more about the nature of her feminism.

     Professor Babcock has described the class and the website in Feminist Lawyers (see Articles):
Short and intense, the history of women lawyers makes a good story, and an instructive one for those of us who today would change the profession from within. It is, more than most histories, a composite, yet the accounts converge around the modern movement's central insight -- the personal is indeed political when it comes to women lawyers.



The website grows out of Professor Barbara Babcock's course at Stanford Law School on Women's legal history. The librarians of the Robert Crown Library conceived and maintain the site: Andrew Gurthet, Paul Lomio and Erika Wayne, with special credit to Rita Lomio (Summer 1998), H. Katharine Lo (Summer 2001) and Rachel Hsu (Summer 2002).



Contents

The Women: Pioneer Profile Index
The pioneer lawyers who are the subject of work found under other headings are listed alphabetically. Clicking on the entry takes the reader to other places on the website where the woman is discussed. As an example, click on the Lelia Robinson entry. Eventually, we hope that the Index will be complete to all materials on the website (thus, for instance, each individual woman on the index will be linked to articles that discuss multiple women).

Biographical Chapters
For the Stanford course on Women's Legal History, each student chooses a biographical subject, and writes a chapter of a life. For the first two years of the course, living subjects were allowed. But the difficulty of writing fully and honestly for publication on the web about contemporary lawyers has not proven to be the best use of our resources. Thus, in the future only women lawyers of the past will be included.

Articles, Research Leads and Bibliographies
We aspire in this section to a comprehensive collection of the historiography of women lawyers in America. Books and articles are listed, and where permission could be obtained, the actual article is available by clicking on its citation.

In addition each of the Biographical Chapters has a bibliography, and many of them have suggestions and sources for future researchers. These may be reached by clicking on the Bibliographic entry or on the Profile Index.

This location has three kinds of articles. First are texts, charts and timelines that give an overview of women's entry into the legal profession in the United States. We start with Lelia Robinson's survey in 1890, followed by Professor Babcock's introduction to its reprinting in 1998. Another gloss on the Robinson piece is Julia Steele's graphic representation of the 134 women in Robinson's survey.

Also in the first section are pictorial and graphic tables prepared by Carolyn Sleeth, depicting the first woman lawyer in each state.

Obituaries
This is an on-going collection of the obituaries of women lawyers. Site-users are encouraged to send us clippings from local papers.

Photographs
A collection of photographs of pioneer women lawyers.

Clara Shortridge Foltz
This part of the website is devoted to Professor Babcock's biographical subject who was the first woman lawyer on the Pacific Coast (California, 1878). Included here are articles and speeches that she has published in the course of the biography-in-progress, with multiple citations to sources for other women lawyers. Generally, these articles show the relation of the early women lawyers to the movements for suffrage and other reforms.

Links
Through this location, you may reach other websites related to this one. Many of these links were discovered by students doing research for their biographical chapters. We encourage and welcome anyone working on a project involving the history of women at the Bar to join up with us. Please let us know if you would like to link up.

Guest Registry
Please register, and let us know of any sources that we should list or reprint on the site.

Mail questions and comments to reference@law.stanford.edu