Law Commons^™

Agents Of (Incremental) Change: From Myra Bradwell To Hillary Clinton, Gwen H. Jordan

Gwen H Jordan

In this essay, the author asserts that after the Civil War, when the race and gender hierarchies that ordered American society were vulnerable, a little-studied collection of activist women lawyers led a law reform movement that established women’s rights incrementally. They were among those thinking about and experimenting with different ways of framing, securing, and enforcing women’s full and equal citizenship rights. As lawyers, licensed members of the legal profession, they operated within the conventional institutions of power – lobbying the legislatures to enact new laws and urging judges to implement a new form of legal reasoning that supported their …