Clara Shortridge Foltz

Someday an inquisitive biographer will find these many scapbooks
that lumber my study, and write the biography of the first woman
to practice law on the Pacific Coast. Then indeed, in the words of Pope,
'let wreaths of triumph my temples twine.'
                                                        -Clara Shortridge Foltz (1916)

Clara Shortridge Foltz (1849-1934), was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and died in Los Angeles, California.  Foltz was the first woman to be a lawyer on the Pacific Coast (California, 1878).  She kept extensive career scrapbooks, wrote many letters and was in the process of writing her autobiography when she died.

This part of the website is devoted to Professor Babcock's biographical works regarding Foltz. Included here are articles and speeches that Professor Babcock 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.

Please contact Professor Babcock at Stanford Law School if you have any of Clara Shortridge Foltz's papers, scrapbooks, letters, etc. (or know of their possible location).   Thank you.

[Truman Toland, great grandson of Clara Shortridge Foltz painted the above portrait in 1992.]

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

Barbara Allen Babcock, Women Defenders in the West, 1 University of Nevada Law Journal 1 (Spring 2001).

Barbara Allen Babcock, 150th Anniversary of the Supreme Court, 22 Official California Reports 4th 1275 - 79 (2000).

Barbara Allen Babcock, 'Contracted' Biographies and Other Obstacles to 'Truth':  Commentary, 70 New York University Law Review 707 (1995).

Barbara Allen Babcock,  Clara Shortridge Foltz:  'First Woman', 28 Valparaiso University Law Review 1231 (Summer 1994). 

Barbara Allen Babcock, Remarks on the Occasion of the Publication of Called from Within:  Early Women Lawyers of Hawaii [March 12, 1993], 16 Biography 3 (1993).

Writing biography has its distinctly autobiographical moments -- as Professor Babcock found from being on a short list of Attorney General nominees.

Barbara Allen Babcock, A Place in the Palladium: Women's Rights and Jury Service 61 University of Cincinnati Law Review 1139 (1993).

Barbara Allen Babcock, She Blazed the Trail:  Clara Foltz Opened a Major Door for Women in 1878, When She Became the First Female Member of the State Bar, 106 The Los Angeles Daily Journal S16 (October 7, 1993).

Barbara Allen Babcock, Western Women Lawyers, 45 Stanford Law Review 2179 (1993).

"The life I take as my example is that of the first woman to be a lawyer among all the states of the Ninth Circuit -- the Portia of the Pacific -- Clara Shortridge Foltz."

Barbara Allen Babcock, Clara Shortridge Foltz: Constitution-maker, 66 Indiana Law Journal 849 (1991).

This is a book length article, with a detailed table of contents, note on documentation and numerous, rich footnotes.

Barbara Allen Babcock, Reconstructing the Person:  The Case of Clara Shortridge Foltz, 12 Biography 1 (1989).  

Clara Foltz, San Francisco, Cal. 1 The Law Student's Helper 263 (October 1893).

 

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