Bradwell, Myra (1831-1894)

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Myra Bradwell (1831-1894)

Advocate of womans rights

New England Inheritance. The early years of Myra Colby Bradwell illustrate the extension of New England influence westward during the nineteenth century. Descended on both sides from early settlers of Boston, she was born in Manchester, Vermont, and moved shortly afterward with her parents to the Genesee River valley of New York. Her parents were friendly with abolitionists in the famous “burnt-over district,” so called because of the frequency and intensity of evangelical revivals. When Myra was twelve, the family moved to a township near Elgin, Illinois, where she attended the Ladies’ Seminary. Like many New England women of her generation, she then taught school for several years. In 1852 she married James Bradwell, and together they conducted a successful private school while he completed his studies for admission to the bar.

Chicago. After James was admitted to the Illinois bar, he and Myra’s brother opened a law firm in Chicago. In 1861 James was elected county judge of Cook County. Myra read law with her husband and had four children between 1854 and 1862. As with many women of her generation, the Civil War provided Myra Bradwell with a valuable opportunity to demonstrate her executive skills. She was active in the Northwestern Sanitary Commission and helped to organize the massive fund-raising fair held in Chicago in the last year of the war. After the war she maintained a lasting interest in the Soldiers’ Aid Society, of which she was president, and continued contacts with other leaders of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission, including Mary Livermore, one of the best-known advocates of woman suffrage.

Editor and Businesswoman. In 1868 Bradwell began to publish the Chicago Legal News, a weekly legal newspaper. For the next twenty-five years her editorials influenced legal opinion in the Midwest. She was an early advocate of legislation regulating railroads, a proponent of temperance, prison reform, and woman’s rights, and a strong supporter of the bar associations and law schools that institutionalized the development of the profession. She was effective as an entrepreneur as well as a contributor to political and social debates. As the president of Chicago Legal News and an affiliated printing company, she secured the most advertising business of any Illinois newspaper and also prospered in the sale of stationery and legal forms. The Bradwells purchased a mansion on Michigan Avenue and traveled extensively in Europe. Myra was a potent civic force in countless Chicago initiatives from the rebuilding after the 1871 fire through the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892.

Political Advocate. Bradwell participated actively in the woman suffrage movement. She lobbied for extension of the franchise to women in the Illinois constitution of 1870, helped to organize the American Woman Suffrage Association, and served for many years on the executive committee of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association. While her husband served in the state legislature between 1873 and 1875, Myra Bradwell pushed through legislation that made women eligible to hold school offices, to become notaries public, and to enjoy equal guardianship of children. Bradwell exercised her greatest political influence in the movement to provide women with equal property rights. She drafted the law passed by the Illinois legislature in 1869 that recognized the right of married women to their own earnings and also led a successful campaign to protect the interest of a widow in the estate of her husband.

Bradwell v. Illinois. In 1869 Bradwell applied to join the Illinois bar. Although her qualifying examination reflected her superb qualifications and although Arabella Mansfield of Iowa had earlier in the year become the first American woman admitted to the practice of law, the Illinois Supreme Court refused to admit Bradwell because she was a woman. She petitioned the Supreme Court to compel Illinois to admit her in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment, drawing on the recent promise of Cummings v. Missouri that federal law would prevent arbitrary denial of the property interest in pursuit of a profession. In Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), however, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not require states to admit women to the practice of law. Before the Court announced its decision, Illinois passed a new law that opened the bar to women, but Bradwell did not reapply. In 1890 the Illinois Supreme Court admitted her to the bar on the basis of her 1869 application. By that time she had served four terms as vice president of the Illinois State Bar Association, of which she was an honorary member. Bradwell was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1892, ten years after her daughter graduated at the head of her class at the Union College of Law (later Northwestern University Law School). Myra Bradwell died in 1894.