Myra Colby Bradwell

• Myra Colby Bradwell
• Born: February 12, 1831
• Died: February 14, 1894

Lawyer and publisher, was born in Manchester, Vermont, one of the youngest of the five children of Eben and Abigail Hurd Willey Colby, New England farmers and abolitionists who were close friends of the family of Elijah Lovejoy, the antislavery editor killed by a mob in Illinois in 1837. The Colbys moved their family to Portage, on the Genesee River, in western New York, shortly after Myra’s birth. Following the emigration path established by other New Englanders, they went on to Schaum-berg township, near Elgin, Illinois, in 1843. Myra was educated in schools in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a married sister lived, and at the Ladies’ Seminary in Elgin.

Myra Colby entered teaching, the only profession then open to women, working in district schools around Elgin until 1852, when she married James Bolesworth Bradwell, a law student and the son of an immigrant English couple that lived on a farm near her family. James and Myra Bradwells moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where they both taught school and then opened their own private academy. Two years later they returned to Illinois, settling in Chicago. James Bradwell was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1855 and joined a brother-in-law in establishing the law firm of Bradwell & Colby. Encouraged by her husband, who was always supportive of her professional activities, Myra Bradwell began to read law at home.

Knowing the difficulties she would encounter if she attempted to practice law, Bradwell instead founded The Chicago Legal News in 1868, becoming editor, publisher, and business manager. James Bradwell had been elected Cook County probate judge in 1861; he used his position to get the legislature to pass an act setting aside the legal disabilities of married women in the state and permitting Myra Bradwell to become president of the publication and of the Chicago Legal News Company, a printing concern set up by the family at the same time.

Bradwell proved to be an incisive writer and an effective administrator; she even successfully managed her own labor relations, bargaining with the typographers’ union. When the Chicago fire of 1871 burned both the Bradwells’ home and their business, she boarded a train for Milwaukee, carrying the subscription list—saved from the fire by her thirteen-year-old daughter Bessie, who was destined to succeed her mother; the next issue of the paper was published on schedule with the use of borrowed printing facilities. The Legal News quickly became the best legal journal west of the Alleghenies. The Bradwells obtained legislation making notices, laws, and opinions recorded in their publication legal evidence in the courts of the state, and Myra Bradwell insisted that it carry the revised statutes of the state at the end of every legislative session.

After passing an examination, Bradwell applied for admission to the Illinois bar in 1869. Arabella Mansfield of Iowa had just become the first woman regularly admitted to practice law in the United States. But the Illinois Supreme Court rejected Bradwell’s petition, first on the ground that she was a married woman, and after a challenge to that reasoning, simply on the ground that she was a woman. She took her case to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld the decision of the lower court in 1873, assuring state jurisdiction. Bradwell did not reapply to the Illinois courts, but in 1890 that state recognized her distinguished legal career by admitting her to the bar, and two years later the Supreme Court of the United States admitted her to practice in its jurisdiction. She also became a four-term president of the Illinois State Bar Association.

The Bradwells also worked together to obtain feminist reforms. For example, with others they helped in the passage of a state law, in 1869, giving married women a right to their own earnings; in 1873 they persuaded the legislature to forbid sex discrimination in employment; and they also supported a bill giving all persons, regardless of sex, freedom to select an occupation. They attended and publicized the first suffrage convention held in Chicago and lobbied for woman suffrage in Illinois; and took part in the formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland that year. She also served on the executive board of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association for some years.

Myra Bradwell used the platform provided her by the Legal News to advocate other reforms as well. She urged governmental regulation of the railroads and other corporations, and she articulated the need for zoning regulations in Chicago. She lent her efforts to temperance, prison reform, and more humane treatment of abandoned adolescent children. Early in her career she had been associated with the Northwestern Sanitary Commission, which held fairs to raise money for Civil War victims; she was also active in the planning of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.

The Bradwells had four children: Myra (born in 1854), Thomas (1856), Bessie (1858), and James (1862), but only Thomas and Bessie survived their childhood. (Bessie Bradwell took her mother as a role model. She was graduated from the Union College of Law in 1882, and edited and managed The Chicago Legal News until 1925. As Bessie Bradwell Helmer she helped to set up the American Association of University Women’s committee on graduate felowships for women.) Myra Bradwell died of cancer in Chicago at the age of sixty-two and was buried in Rosehill Cemetery.

Bradwell’s career was extraordinary for demonstrating her energy, intelligence, and determination. Often cited as America’s first woman lawyer, she bears an accolade that, while not technically correct, is somehow fitting because of her pioneering role in the legal profession.

Myra Bradwell’s work has been preserved in the files of The Chicago Legal News. Obituaries appear in that journal, (February 17, February 24, and May 12, 1894), and in the Illinois State Bar Association Proceedings, 1895, American Law Review, March-April 1894, and the Woman’s Journal, March 17, 1894. See also Notable American Women (1971); the Dictionary of American Biography (1929); the National Cyclopedia of American Biography, vol. 2 (1891); R. McHenry, ed., Liberty’s Women (1980); and G. W. Gale, “Myra Bradwell: The First Woman Lawyer,”American Bar Association Journal, December 1953.