Myra Colby Bradwell

Adapted from Women in American History by Encyclopedia Britannia

Born in Vermont in 1831, Myra Colby Bradwell married law student James B. Bradwell and settled in Chicago where James enjoyed considerable success as a lawyer, judge and legislator. 

Myra  Bradwell launched her legal career in October 1868, establishing the first weekly edition of the Chicago Legal News. With her was both editorial and business manager, it soon became the most important legal publication in the western United States. She helped organize Chicago's first woman suffrage convention, and she and her husband were active in the founding of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland. 

In 1869, Bradwell applied to the Illinois Supreme Court for admission to the state bar. The Court refused on the ground that she was a woman. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the refusal in 1873, in Bradwell v.Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873).  Meanwhile the Illinois legislature opened all professions to women in 1872; Bradwell and Bradwell was made an honorary member of the state bar. 

The great Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed the physical plant of the Chicago Legal News but the paper continued regular publication. As editor, Bradwell supported woman suffrage, railroad regulation, improved court systems, zoning laws, and other reforms. With the aid of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore and others, she drafted and secured passage of a bill that gave married women the right to retain their own wages and protected the rights of widows. Later she supported her husband's successful efforts to secure legislation making women eligible to serve in school offices and as notaries public, and to be equal guardians of their children. She was a representative of Illinois at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and played a major role in winning the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 for Chicago. 

In 1890 the Illinois Supreme Court, on its own initiative, took up her 1869 application again and admitted her to the bar. In March 1892 she was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. Bradwell died on 1894. She was followed into the law and the Chicago Legal News by her daughter, Bessie Bradwell Helmer.