Mrs. Lockwood continued practicing before the courts of the District and elsewhere, outside of United States courts, until Congress passed a bill providing, “That any woman who shall have been a member of the bar of the highest court of any State or Territory, or of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, for the space of three years, and shall have maintained a good standing before such court, and who shall be a person of good moral character, shall, on motion, and the production of such record, be admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States” (Approved, Feb. 15, 1879). Mrs. Lockwood drafted the bill and secured its passage. She was the first woman to be admitted under the law and to practice before this Supreme Court. (Since then, six others have been admitted, viz.: Laura De Force Gordon of Stockton, California; Ada M. Bittenbender of Lincoln, Nebraska; Carrie Burnham Kilgore of Philadelphia; Clara M. Foltz of San Diego, California; Lelia Robinson-Sawtelle of Boston, and Emma M. Gillet of Washington, D. C. Mrs. Bittenbender moved the admission of Miss Gillet, the first instance of one woman moving the admission of another to the highest court in the country.) A few days after Mrs. Lockwood’s admission, she received word from the Court of Claims that she could now plead before it. The next State court to be heard from on the subject was the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, in 1875. The matter was the motion to admit Miss R. Lavinia Goodell to the bar of that court. Miss Goodell, the year before, had been admitted to the bar of the circuit court of Rock county in that State. The argument, read on the hearing of the motion by I. C. Sloan, Esq., was prepared by her. The motion was denied, it being held that “To entitle any person to practice in this court, the statute requires that he shall be licensed by its order, and no right to such an order can be founded on admission to the bar of a circuit court. The language of the statute relating to the admission of attorneys (which declares that ‘_he_ shall first be licensed,’ etc.) applies to males only; and the statutory rule of construction that ‘words of the masculine gender _may_ be applied to females,’ ‘unless such construction would be inconsistent with the manifest intention of the Legislature,’ cannot be held to extend the meaning of this statute, in view of the uniform exclusion of females from the bar by the common law, and in the absence of any other evidence of a legislative intent to require their admission.” Chief Justice Ryan delivered the opinion of the Court. The following extract from that opinion we believe will be read with interest, and remain of historic value as showing the fossilized misconceptions woman combated with in attaining the generally acceptable position in the legal profession in this country which she now holds: