Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/344

308 4. To exclude women from the bar because there are certain departments of the profession which are peculiarly ill-adapted to their sex and nature, would be to assume arbitrarily that, with entire lack of judgment or discretion, modesty or policy, they would seek or accept such business; and to close to them those avenues of the profession for which they are generally admitted to be eminently well adapted, for such a reason, and upon such an assumption, would be so grossly unjust that no argument can be based on such an impossible contingency.

Your applicant, having faithfully and diligently pursued the study of law for three years, being a graduate of the Boston University Law School, and having complied with the other requirements of the statute and the rules of court upon the subject, respectfully prays that her petition for examination, which was duly filed, may be favorably considered, and that it be included in the general notice to the Board of Examiners of Suffolk county.

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The opinion given by the Supreme Judicial Court, so far as it relates to the main point at issue, is as follows:

The question presented by this petition and by the report on which it has been reserved for our determination, is whether, under the laws of the commonwealth, an unmarried woman is entitled to be examined for admission as an attorney and counsellor of this Court. This being the first application of the kind in Massachusetts, the Court, desirous that it might be fully argued, informed the executive committee of the Bar Association of the city of Boston of the application, and has received elaborate briefs from the petitioner in support of her petition and from two gentlemen of the bar as amici curiæ in opposition thereto. The statute under which the application is made is as follows: "A citizen of this State, or an alien who has made the primary declaration of his intention to become a citizen of the United States, and who is an inhabitant of this State, at the age of twenty-one years and of good moral character, may, on the recommendation of an attorney, petition the Supreme Judicial or Superior Court to be examined for admission as an attorney, whereupon the Court shall assign a time and place for the examination, and if satisfied with his acquirements and qualifications he shall be admitted." St. 1876, c. 107.

The word "citizen," when used in its most common and most comprehensive sense, doubtless includes women; but a woman is not, by virtue of her citizenship, vested by the Constitution of the United States, or by the constitution of the commonwealth, with any absolute right, independent of legislation, to take part in the government, either as voter or as an officer, or to be admitted to practice as an attorney. ''Miuor vs. Happersett, 51 Wall. 162. Bradwell vs. Illinois, 16 Wall. 130''. The rule that "words importing the masculine gender maybe applied to females," like all other general rules of construction of statutes, must yield when such construction would be either "repugnant to the context of the same statute," or "inconsistent with the manifest intent of the legislature." Gen. Sts. c. 3, § 7.

The only statute making any provisions concerning attorneys, that mentions women, is the poor-debtor act, which, after enumerating among the cases in which an arrest of the person may be made on execution in an action of contract, that in which "the debtor is attorney-at-law," who has unreasonably neglected to pay to his client money collected, enacts, in the next section but one, "that no woman shall be arrested on any civil process except for tort." Gen. Sts. c. 124, §§ 5, 7. If these provisions do not imply that the legislature assumed that women should not be attorneys, they certainly have no tendency to show that it intended that they should. The word "citizen," in the statute under which this application is made, is but a repetition of the word originally adopted with a view of excluding aliens, before the statute of 1852, c. 154, allowed those aliens to be admitted to the bar who had made the preliminary declaration of intention to become citizens. Rev. Sts., c. 88, § 19. Gen. Sts., c. 121, § 28.

The reënactment of the act relating to the admission of attorneys in the same words without more so far as relates to the personal qualifications of the applicant, since