Jillian Rayfield

<h1>Laura de Force Gordon was speaking from experience when, in 1893, she described in a speech how “society has sneered at learned women.”</h1>

Gordon, a suffragist, journalist and lawyer, had spent several decades establishing herself in fields that had been historically limited to men, and was frequently met with scorn and opposition.

When she was barred from attending law school in 1878, she was told it was because “rustling skirts” distracted the male students. When she became the second woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar in 1885, a newspaper lamented “hens” piping “shrill clarions” at the justices. And in 1889, as she worked to advocate for women’s suffrage, another newspaper dismissed her as an “apostle of discontent for the profit she can make out of it.”

For the professional woman, Gordon said, “if she has succeeded at all in accomplishing anything outside the nursery, the kitchen or church work, it has been as a warrior battling for his rights against fearful odds.”

Gordon herself successfully fought for some of these rights for women, helping to enshrine protections against education and employment discrimination into California law. A passionate advocate for women’s right to vote, she worked to establish the suffrage movement on the West Coast.

“Woman is no longer content to remain a subject,” she said in the 1893 speech at a convention of women in Chicago.

Laura de Force was born in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 17, 1838. Her father, Abram de Force, had rheumatism and could not work, so her mother, Catherine Doolittle Allen, supported their nine children as a seamstress.

In 1862, she married Dr. Charles H. Gordon, a Scot who was in the 3rd Rhode Island Cavalry. They eventually settled in what would become Lodi, California, in 1870.

Following the death of one of her brothers, Gordon’s family became Christian spiritualists, a religious movement that believed in communication with the spirits of the dead. Spiritualists also believed in individualism and in equality between men and women, and many, like Laura Gordon, became leaders in the suffrage movement.

She began a career as a trance speaker in the 1860s, traveling around the region to give lectures about the religion and other topics.

In 1868, she gave a landmark speech in San Francisco that called for equal rights for women, catapulting her to prominence in the national suffrage movement, and catching the attention of Susan B. Anthony, who said of Gordon, “You can’t imagine how it delights my soul to find such an earnest, noble young woman possessed of powers oratorical.”

Gordon gave more than 100 speeches on suffrage and other topics in California and elsewhere on the West Coast.

“The most chaste, elegant and forcible words in the language poured from her lips like a stream of liquid fire,” The Elko Independent, a newspaper in Nevada, once wrote about a speech she gave in 1870, “and her eyes sparkled with animation, her graceful form swayed to and fro, and her taper fingers moved through the air in unison with her burning words.”

“The whole audience became electrified,” it added.

As her reputation grew, so did her political influence. Gordon helped form the California Woman Suffrage Society in 1870, and later served as its president. In 1871, the Independent Party of San Joaquin County nominated her for state senator, though the move was more symbolic; there was little hope of her winning.

Gordon entered journalism in 1873, and eventually became the editor and publisher of The Stockton Weekly Leader.

She wrote that she was aware of the challenge for a woman running a newspaper, having “already experienced the pressure of the tide which a woman must work against, if she dare deviate from the old routine of dishwashing and cradle-rocking.”

Though the paper was successful, Gordon sold it in 1876 and began considering a more financially stable career in law.

At the time only a “white male citizen” could be admitted to the state’s bar, so Gordon worked alongside Clara Shortridge Foltz, a reformer and women’s rights advocate, to engineer the passage in 1878 of the Woman Lawyer’s Bill, allowing women to practice law in California.

Foltz and Gordon applied to Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. They each paid the $10 tuition, but were expelled just a few days later. They were told “that their presence, particularly their rustling skirts, was bothering the other scholars,” the historian Barbara Babcock wrote in “Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz.”

Gordon and Foltz challenged their expulsions in court, where they were met with similar arguments. “An impartial jury would be impossible when a lovely lady pleaded the case of the criminal,” said one attorney for the school.

Gordon and Foltz broadened their efforts, successfully pushing for measures in the state’s constitution that would prevent discrimination in employment and education “on account of sex.”

This victory helped them win their legal case, and though Gordon never finished law school, she studied and passed the state bar on her own.

She started her own practice for criminal and family law, and in 1880, became the first woman to address a jury in California when she defended a murder suspect. Of this, Gordon said: “I have no fears of the ordeal.”

Though she won many cases, newspapers often focused on her appearance. “Her attire was simple,” one wrote in 1882, “a black dress; her only ornament a rose at the throat.”

Others were more scathing. In 1885, Gordon became the second woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar, after Belva Lockwood. One newspaper described Gordon and Lockwood as “the only hens that have yet perched upon that bar and piped their shrill clarions” at the “grave and reverend Seniors.”

Gordon left her law practice in 1901 because of health problems and family obligations. She and her husband divorced around 1877. Without any children, she had taken in a young boy, and spent many years caring for him. Gordon died in Lodi on April 5, 1907, at 68. The cause was a bronchial illness.

Glowing obituaries recounted her work on women’s suffrage. One, in The Lodi Sentinel, said that “the cause of equality and woman suffrage never had a stronger, a fairer or more able champion.” Another described her as “possibly the most able representative of the woman suffragists of the West.”

Gordon died about four years before women were granted the right to vote in California, and more than a decade before the 19th Amendment established that right for women across the United States. But she was always optimistic: “Woman suffrage is bound to come,” she wrote in 1896.

“There has never been a time when so many men and women took so deep an interest in the subject,” she wrote, “and I am happy in the thought that our day of political freedom is so near.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="e4f30369-51a5-4bab-89aa-94e11babe13e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/obituaries/laura-de-force-gordon-overlooked.html">The New York Times</a>.

Overlooked No More: Laura de Force Gordon, suffragist, journalist and lawyer

When she was barred from attending law school in 1878, she was told it was because “rustling skirts” distracted the male students.

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Jillian Rayfield

Articles written by the author

Overlooked No More: Laura de Force Gordon, suffragist, journalist and lawyer