Ellen Spencer Mussey

• Ellen Mussey
• Born: May 13, 1850
• Died: April 21, 1936

Lawyer, suffragist, and pioneer in women’s education in the law, was born in Geneva, Ohio. The next-to-youngest child among the six sons and five daughters of Piatt Rogers Spencer and Fersis (Duty) Spencer, she grew up in an environment of sustained social activism, and frequent domestic instability. Her father was an inspired yet eccentric personality—a former store clerk and Lake Erie cargo handler, reformed alcoholic, temperance advocate, and abolitionist—who was primarily known as the inventor of the Spencerian script that became the standard handwriting throughout the United States in the late nineteenth century. Because of Spencer’s difficulty in settling down, the family had moved from Ashtabula, Ohio, to a remote Lake Erie farm before Ellen was born; there, in addition to farming, Spencer set up his own school, served as county treasurer, and participated in the Underground Railroad. In 1859 the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where Ellen briefly attended grade school until her mother fell ill; in hopes of restoring Mrs. Spencer’s health, the family returned to the farm in 1861, but she died the following year. After the older daughters married, twelve-year-old Ellen assumed housekeeping responsibilities for her father, who also pressed her into service as a penmanship teacher.

When Piatt Spencer died two years after his wife, Ellen was sent to live with a brother in Milwaukee. The impact of her parents’ deaths, followed by that of her younger sister, precipitated a physical breakdown; over the next four years, she moved from one sibling to another, studying for brief periods at Rice’s Young Ladies’ Seminary in Poughkeepsie, the Lake Erie Seminary, and the Rockford (Illinois) Seminary. At one point she attended a course in business law and was invited to read law with the teacher, but that opportunity was lost when the sister she was living with died, and she moved on to another relative. Finally, in 1869 she joined her brother Henry and his wife Sara (a prominent suffragist) in Washington, D.C., where she remained for the rest of her life.

From 1869 to 1871 Ellen Spencer headed the “Ladies’ Department” of Henry’s Spencerian Business College. In 1871 she married Reuben Delavan Mussey, a widowed lawyer who had been a brigadier general in the Union Army and served as President Andrew Johnson’s military secretary after the war. For five years she remained at home to raise their two sons, born in 1872 and 1874, as well as General Mussey’s two daughters from his first marriage. Although her own health was not good after the birth of their second child, when Mussey caught malaria in 1876, she began to assist him with his law practice and continued to work with him until his death sixteen years later. At that point, left with a son ready to enter college (one stepdaughter and the elder son had died in childhood), Ellen Mussey sought to gain admission to the bar and continue her husband’s law practice. She applied to the diploma programs of the National University and Columbian College (later George Washington University), which would have automatically qualified her to practice, but as a woman, she was denied admission. Obtaining a special waiver, she took an oral exam and was admitted to the bar on March 23, 1893; she was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court in 1896 and the Court of Claims in 1897. Aside from two early partnerships, she practiced alone, concentrating on probate and commercial law; she also served as counsel to the Norwegian and Swedish legations and the American Red Cross. Throughout her career she contributed articles on legal issues to various publications.

In 1894, as chair of the D.C. Federation of Women’s Clubs legislative committee, she began a successful campaign for passage of the Married Woman’s Property Rights Bill, which had bee drafted by another Washington lawyer, Emma Gillett. In 1896, Mussey and Gillett formed a class for women to read law; when their students were subsequently rejected by Columbian College, on the grounds that women lacked the “mentality” for law, they decided to open their own coeducational law school, which was incorporated as the Washington College of Law in 1898. In addition to teaching, Mussey served as the school’s first dean, took primary responsibility for fundraising, and recruited the nonsalaried faculty.

During the same period, she was also active on behalf of children. In 1898 she led a successful campaign for public kindergartens in the District of Columbia, and, as a member of the Board of Education from 1906 to 1912, she obtained additional funding for the kindergarten program, gained approval for compulsory education, and attempted to set up a model school for retarded children. She also worked for passage of the Teachers’ Retirement and Pension Bill and was instrumental in the creation of the D.C. juvenile courts.

Mussey was a long-time member of two women’s civic organizations, the Legion of Loyal Women and the Daughters of the American Revolution; in 1902 she served as chair of the women’s citizens committee for the National Grand Army of the Republic Encampment. As early as 1870 she had met Susan B. Anthony at a suffrage meeting, and in 1895 she was a delegate and speaker at the second convention of the National Council of Women. But it was only after a 1909 visit to Norway and Sweden, where she observed the advances of Scandinavian suffragists (women already had the vote in Norway); that she became an active suffragist herself. Joining the National Women’s Suffrage Association, she returned to Stockholm in 1911 as a delegate to the International Council of Women. Although her health was poor, and she suffered a nervous breakdown in 1912, she nonetheless led a lawyers’ contingent in a March 1913 suffrage parade of some 10,000 women in Washington. That event turned into a riot when hostile spectators, unrestrained by the police, began harassing the marchers, and in the wake of the confrontation, Mussey suffered a stroke. She resigned as dean of Washington College that August but remained active in legal and college affairs. In 1917 she became chair of the National Council of Women’s committee on the legal status of women and drafted the bill protecting women’s citizenship rights that was later passed as the Cable Act (1922). Even after suffering another breakdown in 1930, she returned to her law practice and a fundraising campaign for Washington College but died of a cerebral hemorrhage six years later, just before her eighty-sixth birthday.

Grace Hathaway, Fate Rides A Tortoise (1937) is a biographical memoir of Mussey compiled from personal recollections of friends and colleagues as well as documentary sources. Her activities receive notice in J. C. Croly, History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (1891), and S. B. Anthony and I. H. Harper, History of Woman Suffrage, (1902). Brief profiles appear in Who’s Who in America, 1936-1937, and American Women, 1936-1937; an obituary was published in The Washington Post, April 22, 1936. See also the sketches by S. H. Drinker in The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958) and D. Thomas in Notable American Women (1971).