The First Woman Lawyer in Massachusetts
BU Alumna Paved the Way
Lelia Josephine Robinson, an alumna of the BU School of Law, class of 1881, was the school's first woman graduate and the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts bar.
Long before Betty Friedan, or even women's suffrage, an 1881 graduate of Boston University School of Law waged a lonely battle to become the first woman lawyer in Massachusetts. Lelia Josephine Robinson triumphed in 1882, when the state legislature unanimously passed a bill permitting women to practice law under the same conditions as men.
"The woman lawyer in the abstract has not yet attained her majority," Robinson wrote in a magazine article several years later. "The novelty of her very existence has scarcely begun to wear off and the newspapers publish and republish little floating items about women lawyers along with those of the latest sea-serpent, the popular idea seeming to be that the one is about as real as the other."
The reality seems to have sunk in. Women now occupy many powerful positions in the legal profession, not to mention a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and recent statistics show that more than 50 percent of students admitted to law schools in the United States are female.
Pioneering BU alumnae include Robinson, the school's first woman graduate, Sadie Lipner Shulman (LAW'11), one of the first two women judges in New England (she and Emma Fall Schofield, a 1908 LAW graduate, were sworn in on the same day), Consuelo Northrop Bailey (LAW'25), a lieutenant governor of Vermont and the first woman in the nation to be elected to such a post, and Elizabeth Holloway Marston (LAW'18), who collaborated with her husband, William Moulton Marston, on the development of the polygraph. (When William Marston dreamed up the comic book character Wonder Woman as a crusader against prejudice, sexism, and other evils, Elizabeth was his inspiration. See www.bu.edu/alumni/bostonia/2001/fall/wonderwoman for details.)