The First 100 Years
Women at Saint Louis University

By Melody Walker

It’s 1908. Teddy Roosevelt is in the White House. Henry Ford’s new Model T is selling like hotcakes; oil has been discovered in southwest Iran; and it’s an election year: Taft vs. Bryant for president.

In St. Louis, Lindell Boulevard is bustling with activity around construction of the new cathedral. In October, tens of thousands of people lined the boulevard for a procession from the College Church on Grand to the cathedral site where a special papal envoy laid the cornerstone with great pomp and circumstance befitting the occasion and the presence of three archbishops.

Another historical event was taking place that fall several blocks east of the cathedral at the corner of Locust and Leffingwell. Saint Louis University was re-opening its law school after a 60-year hiatus. And for the first time in the University’s history, women would be allowed in the classrooms.

With little fanfare, Bertha M. Bruening, Adele M. Doyle, Mary A. Maguire, Rosie O’Boyle and Anna L. Ross registered as the first female students at the Saint Louis University Institute of Law. Only one local newspaper, the St. Louis Times, reported on the event under the headline, “Staid Old Institution Has Not Become Coeducational, but its New Law Department Is Opened to Both Sexes.”

The First Five
Little is known about our first women students, and photos of only four of the five remain in the archives. Bertha Bruening, who hailed from Louisville, Ky., went on to be one of the first women to receive a degree from the business school — known then as the School of Commerce and Finance — in 1920. Rosie O’Boyle, who at 19 was the youngest member of the original five female students, was admitted to practice by the St. Louis Circuit Court in 1911. Adele Doyle was 31 when she entered law school and is listed in the University’s yearbook, Fleur de Lis, as the secretary of the freshman class in 1908. The 1909 yearbook reports on Mock Trial activities and mentions that “Miss Adele Doyle lost her suit against the Transit Co. ...the fact that there were three ladies in the jury box makes the finding all the more incomprehensible.” Even more “incomprehensible” when you realize women were not allowed to serve on real Missouri juries until 1945.

The Fleur de Lis reports on another “practice court” arson trial that ended in a not-guilty verdict. “The case was an interesting one from start to finish, especially at the finish, when the verdict was read by the foreman, Miss Anna Ross.” We know the least about Mary Maguire, with the exception of a brief mention in Lucile Wiley Ring’s Breaking the Barriers: The St. Louis Legacy of Women in the Law 1869-1969, that reports she founded the Business Women’s Suffrage League in 1912.

Opening the doors of the law school to women was a limited but risky experiment for the Jesuits who ran the University. Coeducation was frowned upon by the Catholic church and forbidden by the Jesuit Order’s headquarters in Rome. Eileen Searls, who was the law school’s librarian from 1952-2000, says the American Jesuits received a questionnaire each year from Rome asking if there were any women at the college. The clergy could answer truthfully that there were not because women were not admitted to the undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences until 1949.

By 1908, Saint Louis University President William Banks Rogers, S.J., had laid the groundwork for the modern university, and the progressive educators among the clergy favored the inclusion of women students. Over the next 40 years, more doors would open to women at SLU, but it was a slow process met with much resistance from the Church and critics in the clergy who deemed coeducation “harmful” and part of “the woman problem.” The “problem” was that women were beginning to demand more rights and independence.

Women wouldn’t get the right to vote until 1920, but they were practicing law in surprisingly large numbers by the turn of the last century. The Census records 1,010 women lawyers in the U.S. in 1900. When our first five women students graduated in 1911, there were fewer than 20 women lawyers in St. Louis. By the next year, 1912, the St. Louis Women Lawyers Club was formed, which would evolve into the Women’s Bar Association of St. Louis.

“Law School Drops Co-Eds Who Blush at Lectures”
Like all trailblazers, the first women students were challenged and confronted by nay-sayers as they navigated the male-dominated legal academy. And it appears some spectators were eager to see them fail. A report in the May 20, 1910, St. Louis Times claimed that the University would rather bar women students than change the curriculum after some female law students complained about a lecture in family law. Father William B. Faherty relates in his history of the University that the report on the demise of women at SLU was unfounded: “Three of the seven young women protested to the Dean when a professor of domestic relations discussed too graphically various pleas that could be used as grounds for divorce. The case became the subject of public discussion….But there is no extant record of an official policy of exclusion.” Nevertheless, the number of women students at the law school did not increase significantly until mid-century.

Roaring Twenties
Women made further strides in their education at Saint Louis University in the 1920s. The law school graduated more women in that decade than any other before World War II. Shedding their corsets, stiff high-necked collars and full-length wool skirts, liberated women of the ’20s were admitted to the Business School (1920) and the School of Nursing (1925). According to Mary Elizabeth Hogan’s 1998 doctoral dissertation, Women and Jesuit Higher Education at Saint Louis University: An Emerging Paradigm, most of the women entering law school in the ’20s were teachers preparing for a second career. Geraldine Collum,’24, became an influential leader of the St. Louis Teachers Association, and Jean Gass Volkerding,’24, became the law school’s first full-time librarian and first female professor. The first year class in 1923 registered eight women, an enrollment record that would not be attained again until 1966.

Post-War Revival
World War II depleted the ranks of faculty and students and forced the School to close from August 1943 to January 1946. The first post-war class had 23 students, and all but two were veterans. Librarian Eileen Searls, who was hired in 1952, recalls discovering with regret and dismay that hundreds of volumes from the library “were pitched in the trash” along with many records documenting the first 40 years of the School. When Searls arrived, fresh from her first job at Yale University after graduating with degrees in law and library science from the University of Wisconsin, Searls began the painstaking task of rebuilding the library collection.

Books weren’t the only things missing after the war. The School needed a faculty and a new curriculum. The daunting task of reviving the law school was given to Paul Fitzsimmons, a 29-year-old Harvard Law graduate who had been an assistant U.S. circuit attorney before the war and then served as a liaison officer for Gen. Eisenhower. In the fall of 1946, 202 students enrolled, tuition was $150 per semester, and there were no women students.

1950-1960
While the post-war years were ones of growth for the School, women did not play a major role. There were only 16 women graduates between 1950 and 1960. Wives of law students, however, had formed the Law Dames Club in 1949 to organize social events, and it evolved into a fund-raising and community service group. The Law Dames initiated the Barrister’s Ball in 1966, raising $75 for the scholarship fund. Quite a feat considering tickets were $4 per couple and drinks cost 50 cents.

Vincent C. Immel became dean in 1962 and would make a long-lasting impression on students and the School. He embarked on a campaign to recruit a more diverse student body from beyond St. Louis, increase financial aid, expand the faculty and raise money for a new building. By 1965, enrollment was at an all-time high of 300, and students hailed from 82 different colleges and universities in 25 states and three foreign countries. But it was still a male stronghold and would remain that way until the women’s movement and social revolutions of the late ’60s.

1970s
A graph indicating the number of women at the School of Law in the ’70s would start at zero and gradually start to climb by the middle of the decade, never to decline again. By the end of the decade, women equaled nearly one-third of the class.

Kathianne Knaup Crane, ’71, entered the law school in 1968. “I was surprised when I started law school and saw few other women at the School. There were so few of us that, even in my second and third years, all of the women in the School easily fit in Eileen Searls’ living room for her annual dinner party for the women students. We experienced some complaints that we were taking a place that should go to a man, or that practicing law was not suitable for a woman, but the law school administration and faculty were extremely supportive of having women in the School. I never met a professor I didn’t feel was 100% behind women studying law. And, I developed friendships among the men in the law school that continue to this day.” Crane is a judge with the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District.

In 1970, Ettie Lee Collier ,’73, and classmates Elbert Dorsey and Charles Bussy were involved in organizing a new national organization, the Black American Law Student Association, and they established the first BLSA chapter at the law school. The same year, the Women’s Law Coalition was founded “as a loosely structured association interested in women’s issues… [that] provides support to its sisters during the rigorous law school experience.”

A 1975 brochure designed to recruit women to the law school addresses those rigors and encourages women to pursue law in order to obtain “Knowledge, Power and Independence.” The brochure provides lengthy quotes from students about dealing with the “ménage a trois” – wife, husband and the law – combination that apparently posed one of the biggest challenges to women entering law school. Thirty years later, work-life balance remains an issue for women juggling career, family, community involvement and caregiving for aging parents. Women of every generation grapple with these conflicting demands.

Doreen Dodson, ’74, remembers how she juggled motherhood in addition to the “ménage a trois”: “Saint Louis University School of Law was wonderfully accommodating, allowing me to take half of my first year classes with one section and half with the other, so I could cram the classes into as short a time as possible and get home to my 1-, 2 1/2-, and 4-year-old children. I went full time, taking summers off with the children and struggling to find childcare (there was no real day care then). I was able to attend law school because of a half scholarship and a student loan and the continuing care of Pete Salsich and others.”

Newly minted women lawyers in the ’70s and early ’80s did not find such an accommodating world beyond the confines of law school. There were few role models in law firms, courtrooms or on the bench. Mary K. Hoff ,’78, was determined to change the male-dominated judiciary. “I joined the Women Lawyers Association shortly after becoming a lawyer. I found the companionship and camaraderie extremely supportive and beneficial. I served as president of that organization from 1986-1987. During that year, our organization worked on getting women appointed to the judiciary. In the spring of 1987, the president of the Kansas City Women Lawyers Association and I met in Jefferson City to encourage the chief judge of the Supreme Court and the governor to consider appointing a woman to the appellate court for the first time in Missouri history. We were delighted when Judge Ann Covington was appointed to the Western District Court of Appeals in 1987 and Judge Jean Hamilton was appointed to the Eastern District Court of Appeals in 1989. We were especially pleased when Judge Covington became the first female Missouri Supreme Court judge in 1988.” Hoff is a judge on the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District.

Today, thanks in part to the diligence, mentoring and role modeling of our alumnae, there are women at every level of the state and federal judicial system. The first five female law students from 1908 probably had no idea of the doors they opened for future generations. One hundred years later, more than half of the student body at the School of Law is female; 105 women received J.D. degrees this May and are on their way to careers in law firms, corporations, government and academia. And this is just the first century of women at Saint Louis University. Wait until you see what our alumnae accomplish in the next 100 years.