Goodell, Lavinia

As reported in the April 17, 1875 "Woman's Journal" lawyer in 1875, Lavinia Goodell ran for the office of Janesville, Wisconsin city attorney, under the temperance-connected Anti-License party. She did not win. Goodell came from a family of reformers. William Goodell, her father, was a noted New York State abolitionist and publisher of a reform newspaper, first in Utica New York and, later, in Brooklyn, New York. In 1871 Lavinia followed her parents when they retired to Janesville, Wisconsin. In Janesville she studied for the local bar, winning admission in 1874.She established a private practice in which she handled both civil and criminal cases. Goodell began a professional relationship with the local temperance movement in 1874 when asked to represent them in a case involving the illegal sale of liquor. She attended national temperance meetings and lectured on the issue. When she began to practice law Lavinia Goodell was one of less than twenty women lawyers in the United States. She represented both women and men accused of criminal wrong doing. Many of these cases were assigned to her by the Janesville court, which paid her to represent the accused. In letters and in her diary Goodell wrote of her increasing interest in criminal justice reform, her confidence that a criminal could "yet" be useful men, and that "jails are schools of vice and crime." oodell is well-known for her struggle to win admission to the Wisconsin supreme court bar. She was opposed by Chief Justice Edward G. Ryan, a jurist with highly conservative views on the role of women in society. In his opinion rejecting her application for the state bar, Ryan wrote that licensing her would mean "a sweeping revolution of social order." Goodell wrote a lengthy rebuttal that was published in Myra Bradwell's Chicago Legal News, the Woman's Journal, and local newspapers. Having lost at the state supreme court, Goodell launched a lobby campaign at the state legislature for law prohibiting the denial of admission to the bar on account of sex. Members passed the legislation on March 22, 1877. Goodell reapplied successfully for admission to the state bar in 1879 in order to argue a client's case. Goodell's short legal career and political and social activism were cut short by her death from cancer a month shy of her forty-first birthday.