Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/636

604 to practice as an Attorney-at-law.] And now again comes the said Myra Bradwell, it having been suggested to her that the court had assumed that she is a married woman, and therefore queried whether this would not pre vent her from receiving a license, and files this her additional brief.

Your petitioner admits to your honors that she is a married woman (although she believes that fact does not appear in the record), but insists most firmly that under the laws of Illinois it is neither a crime nor a disqualification to be a married woman.

I propose to state very briefly,

1. What is an attorney?

2. Who may act as attorneys?

8. The rights and powers of married women in relation to their business and property under the common law.

4. Their rights and powers as to transacting business under the recent statutes of our State, with reference to their transacting business in their own names and acting as attorneys.

5. The avenues of trade and the professions opened to women by the liberal enactments of the law-makers, and the construction of the courts.

6. How the Legislature has regarded petitioner with reference to her rights to carry on business in her own name and act for herself.

I. ?—An attorney is "one who takes the turn or place of another."—-Webster. "An attorney at-law," says Bouvier, "is an officer in a court of justice who is employed by a party in a cause to manage the same for him." All attorneys are agents. They transact business, and appear for, and in the place of their clients who have not the requisite learning, time, or desire to appear in suits for themselves.

Mr. Story, in his work upon "Agency," and Mr. Bouvier, in his "Institutes," in treating of the different kinds of agents, both speak first of attorneys-at-law. All the elementary writers upon law tell us that attorneys are agents. Without reference to our recent statutes modifying the common law, we will open the books and see who may be attorneys or agents.

II. .—Mr. Story, in his work on Agency, says, sec. 7:

Secondly, who are capable of becoming agents? And here it may be stated that there are few persons who are excluded from acting as agents, or from exercising an authority delegated to them by others. Therefore, it is by no means necessary for a person to be sui juris or capable of acting in his or her own right, in order to qualify himself or herself to act for others. Thus, for example, monks, infants, femes covert, persons attainted, outlawed, or excommunicated villains, and aliens, may be agents for others. . .. . A feme covert may be an attorney of another, to make livery to her husband upon a feoffment; and a husband may take such livery to his wife, although they are generally deemed but one person in law. She may also act as agent or otherwise of her own husband, and as such, with his consent, bind him by her contract, or other act; or she may act as the agent of another, in a contract, with her own husband.

III. .—In Cox vs. Kitchin, I Bos. & Pul., 438, where a feme covert represented herself falsely to the tradesman to be a feme sole, and obtained goods on credit, it was held that she rendered herself personally responsible.

In Derry vs. Mazarine, I Ld. Raymond, 147, it was held that the wife of an