Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
But opportunities for professional advancement for women in law have
been exceedingly limited. It is on the judge’s bench, in every land,
that their masculine colleagues have most stubbornly refused to move
up and make room. So it is noteworthy that Georgiana P. Bullock was
in 1916 made a Judge of the Woman’s Court in Los Angeles, the first
tribunal of its kind in the world. A few women have been allowed a
place as judges in the children’s courts. Catherine Waugh McCulloch
of Chicago, who some years ago as justice of the peace was the first
woman anywhere in the world to have arrived at any judicial office,
scored another victory in December, 1917, when she was made a master in
chancery, the first woman to receive such an appointment. Litta Belle
Hibben, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles in 1915, and Annette
Abbot Adams, assistant United States district attorney in San Francisco
in the same year, were the first women to arrive at these appointments.
Helen P. McCormick, in 1917 assistant district attorney in New York,
is the first woman in the more conservative East to become a public
prosecutor. There is a reason for this advance. Could a woman really
be accepted as an expert in the interpretation of laws, so long as she
was permitted no share in making them? With the pressure of the woman
movement at the gates of government resulting in enfranchisement, that
handicap of civic inferiority is being removed.
Like this even in the United States farthest from the war zone, the
rear guard of the women’s lines in the legal profession are moving. At
the front “over there,” every country reports distinct progress. Even
a deputation of Austrian women have been to their department of state
to demand admission to the legal profession. In October, 1917, on a
petition from the German Association of Women Lawyers, the Prussian
Ministry of Justice made the first appointment of women in the Central
Berlin law courts, three women having legally qualified there as law
clerks. In Russia directly after the revolution one of the first
reforms secured by the Minister of Justice was the admission of women
lawyers to the privilege of conducting cases in court on equal terms
with the men of the profession. The Italian Parliament in 1917 passed
a bill granting to women in that country the right to practise law.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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