Kate Kane, a criminal defense attorney in Milwaukee, gained notoriety in 1883 after tossing a glass of water in a judge’s face. She had grown tired of his insults, she explained to the press, and said that he had been trying to drive her out of his courtroom for some time. The bedraggled judge seized the opportunity to do so after her outburst, jailing her on contempt charges. In one of its seven articles on the incident, the New York Times referred to Kane as being “mad as a wet hen” and criticized her method of “getting even” as “decidedly feminine.”
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Until recently, information about the pioneering women lawyers in Illinois was hard to come by. But after a massive three-year undertaking sponsored by the Chicago Bar Association Alliance for Women and the Chicago Public Library, their stories are now documented in the exhibit “Bar None: 125 Years of Women Lawyers in Illinois” and its companion book of the same name.
McNamee intends for the project not only to celebrate the women’s lives but to straighten out the record of their overall contributions to the legal profession as well. “The dominant historical discourse has early women lawyers either being so extraordinary that you can’t use them as typical examples of what women were like in the 19th century or represents them as wives of lawyers who helped their husbands as glorified secretaries,” she says.
After Hulett’s law removed the gender barrier, “Chicago became the center of women’s legal practice in the United States,” says Patricia McMillen, a special adviser to the exhibit and one of the book’s contributing authors. “We had this wonderful shining moment.”
“Bar None: 125 Years of Women Lawyers in Illinois” is at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State, through July 26. It’s free; call 312-747-4300 for exhibit hours or see the museum listings in Section Two.
