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Chapter 9: Opening the Portals

Women Lawyers in British Columbia, part 2

The story of how women such as these first came to be permitted to study for the British Columbia legal profession is a sorry one that casts neither the law society nor the judicial bench of the province in good light. Just two years after Bass’s letter to Pawley, the law society was confronted with Hilda S. Cartwright’s enquiry as to her eligibility for the legal profession. Cartwright, a stenographer with the Russell firm at the time, forced the organized legal profession to consider its position on the matter for the first time. According to Alfred Watts, Bass "superciliously advised the Committee, ‘I do not know what the objection is that is raised to those persons being put on the rolls, except that neither the Statutes or the Rules of the Law Society authorize it.’ " The Benchers went along with Bass and slammed law’s portal in Cartwright’s face. In their very fine account of Russell and DuMoulin: The First Century, 1889–1989 Christine Mullins and Arthur Harvey report that Cartwright "remained a secretary and law clerk to Finley Russell until, in 1917, she formally began her articles and . . . was called in 1921. She did estate work and other duties with Finley, and later with Alan Russell, until her retirement in the late 1940s." What had happened between Cartwright’s rejection by the law society and her eventual admission as an articling student in lawyer 1917 had little to do with any process of gradual enlightenment. The Benchers of the law society fought long and hard to keep women out of the legal profession. They were supported in their efforts by the judicial bench and did not give in until they were forced to do so.

When Mabel Penery French presented herself for admission to the Law Society of British Columbia in 1911 the Benchers faced a considerably more difficult issue than either the abstract question raised by Pawley in 1908 or the 1910 application of a Vancouver stenographer. French had graduated with distinction from the law programme of King’s College of Law in Saint John. David Bell’s outstanding account of Legal Education in New Brunswick: A History quotes the Saint John Globe of 1905 as reporting that:

[D]uring the last three years [she] easily led her classes in every branch and at the closing examinations made a brilliant record. Mr. [Stephen] Bustin [her principal] said Miss French was one of the brightest students he had ever met. She has a wonderful memory, a great capacity for work and is as well grounded in law as any student who has gone up for examination in recent years.

Despite these achievements she had also won status as a fully qualified lawyer in New Brunswick from a reluctant law society forced to admit her by the legislature. That struggle had revealed her to be a formidable opponent. When the Supreme Court of New Brunswick upheld the law society’s assessment that women were not "persons" and hence not eligible for admission under the terms of local legislation governing the legal profession, French resorted to a form of orchestrated civil disobedience to draw attention to her cause. According to Mullins and Harvey, she deliberately ran up personal debt and, when sued by her creditors, developed "the novel defence that, as she was not a person, she could not be sued for debt. The defence failed, but she accomplished her purpose of making one court effect a reductio ad absurdum of another’s judgment". As a result, a 1907 statute was passed that explicitly permitted women to be admitted to the legal profession.

By the time she applied to the British Columbia law society then, French was a law graduate and a qualified lawyer of over three years’ standing who had developed a reputation as a formidable opponent. Entirely consistent with their previous decisions, the Benchers eventually told French that "in their opinion they had no power . . . to admit ladies to the practice of law". French, who at the time was employed by the Russell, Russell and Hannington law firm, initiated court proceedings to force the law society to admit her. Despite her obvious qualifications and the courtroom assistance of Joe Russell, French lost her case at its first hearing and on appeal. The Court of Appeal of British Columbia concluded, as the New Brunswick courts had earlier, that she was not a "person".

Where "law" fails, politics invariably come into play. One of the lawyers with whom French worked in Vancouver was Bob Hannington, a social friend of Senator Wallace Farris and Evelyn Farris. Evelyn Farris, described by Mullins and Harvey as "an elegant, intelligent and determined woman", was a powerful political force in her own right and "a strong advocate of women’s rights". On learning of French’s situation from Hannington she immediately launched a campaign to have the law changed. As president of the University Women’s Club, Evelyn Farris established a committee to consider the issue, contacted the press, and scheduled a meeting with provincial Attorney-General Bill Bowser. The Vancouver Daily Province of January 19, 1912, carried an editorial suggesting that permitting women to enter the legal profession would not overturn established gender relations in the province:

Success in that as in every other profession or occupation . . . depends upon personal merit and ability . . . . despite the fact that the bars have been taken down in more than one of the learned professions, the women who seek entrance are few and far between and those who achieve distinction still fewer, [which] seems to indicate that the great masses of women are more concerned with having the door opened than with walking through the . . . door.

Despite initial protestations that insufficient time remained in the legislative session to permit the introduction of new legislation, Bowser eventually gave in to Evelyn Farris’s pressure. He returned to Victoria in late February 1912 and introduced An Act to Remove the Disability of Women so far as relates to the Study and Practice of Law. This bill passed through all three readings in the legislature in only two days and received royal assent the next. It had passed with "virtually unanimous support" of the legislature despite the opposition of the organized legal profession.

The door was now formally opened to the admission of women lawyers. Although French immediately marched through and was soon followed by others, the prediction of the Vancouver Daily Province proved reasonably accurate. Most women did not, apparently, wish to be lawyers and most lawyers did not, apparently, want to work with women as equals. It should not be imagined that the male-dominated profession experienced an immediate feminist conversion on being forced to correct their ways. Transforming attitudes takes far longer than merely bringing about rule changes. One measure of the difficulties women faced is, paradoxically, found in the Russell firm’s extraordinarily good record as a sponsor of women lawyers. This firm’s historians have observed, that "[b]etween 1910 and Finley Russell’s death in 1939, a period when major competitors took few or no women at all, the firm engaged six women students. Behind this record, small though it seems, stood the policy of Joe and Finley Russell". Although this record is a tribute to the firm it also stands as an indictment of the legal profession in general that so high a proportion of the earliest women lawyers qualified through a single firm.

One of the earliest women to enter law’s portal in British Columbia was Leonie (Lalonde) Anderson. Beginning her articles in 1913, Lalonde became the first woman to qualify for the Bar entirely in British Columbia. Interviewed many decades later by Maryla Waters, Lalonde was thoroughly unimpressed by her own extraordinary career decision. "I took it in my stride", she recalled. In fact, a legal career was something of a fall-back position for her. At a time when most of her women peer group was opting for a more traditional career (such as teaching—"Which is, of course, a very natural thing for women, they excel at teaching"), Lalonde briefly considered a career in medicine until she was put off by two uncles whose financial support would have been essential but who were "averse to women doctors". Her legal career was launched by her mother who arranged for S. S. Taylor, a lawyer-acquaintance, to take her on for articles. Lalonde thought that the firm at which she articled was "forward-looking". It is noteworthy that Taylor’s partner Bob Smith was the son of Mary Ellen Smith, one of the prominent women of her generation and an early woman member of the legislature. It may well be, as Maryla Waters has suggested, that the presence of "a partner who was used to a woman taking a pioneering role" was a significant factor in the firm’s sponsorship of Leonie Lalonde.

Lalonde was perhaps an unlikely candidate to attain status as British Columbia’s first home-grown woman lawyer. She was both uninvolved and uninterested in the women’s movement of her day ("It was enough," she explained, "to want to study law.") and agreed with another early woman lawyer, Gladys Kitchen, that a woman’s "place" in law was probably solicitor’s work rather than litigation. Her relations with male law students were distant but cordial—"Everybody was very pleasant. I know that they were well-bred men". She attended but took no part in arranging the activities of the Vancouver Law Students’ Association and worked in study groups only with other women. Despite the time and effort she put into obtaining her professional qualification, Lalonde knew, when she married, that she wanted to have children. For her, as for so many women lawyers at that time and afterwards, this decision more than any other put career in jeopardy. She explained that "I wanted to have children so I knew that I was quite sure I wouldn’t be doing both, being a good wife and mother and practising. It is more than an average woman could do, really. And I was average." As a result, she quit her legal career immediately upon marriage and never again considered returning to paid employment.

Many themes that come through from Lalonde’s legal career persistently recur in the history of women lawyers in British Columbia and, indeed, elsewhere: the assumption that barrister’s work was unwomanly; a certain necessary distance from the professional peer group; and an awful choice, which men rarely encounter, between professional career and family. Not all women who have wanted to be lawyers have been as fortunate as Lalonde. She, at least, could count on a supportive family, positive mentoring, and a peer group that was at least formally courteous as a result of being "well-bred". Others could not.

Chapter 9 continued

Copyright © 1995 The University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. All rights reserved.
Please address questions or comments to Professor W. Wesley Pue, pue@law.ubc.ca