Maine’s Gail Laughlin takes on the president and other profiles of women pioneers in Maine law

By Paul Mills

The recent passing of Maine’s first female Supreme Court Justice, Carolyn Glassman, occasioned a look at some of the earliest women who preceded her in the annals of Maine law. My last column profiled the first four of them. They included Clara Hapgood Nash, who in 1872 became the first admitted in Maine and the sixth in the nation as well as Agnes Robinson, who in 1900 became the first woman to graduate from the University of Maine Law School.

All the early women pioneers of the law in Maine, except Nash, steered clear of the courtroom. They also as a rule eschewed confrontational tactics. There was one prominent exception.

It’s 1927 – the same year Lindbergh would fly the Atlantic and Babe Ruth would hit 60 home runs for the Yankees. Portland attorney Gail Laughlin, then vice chair of the National Women’s Party and also a recently elected GOP member of the Maine legislature – leads a delegation of 500 activists to personally lobby for President Calvin Coolidge’s support at the president’s South Dakota Summer White House. Laughlin admonished the president that if he wanted his name to rank alongside Lincoln’s he should back the proposed Lucretia Mott amendment giving women equal rights.

Coolidge replied that when most women themselves were unmistakably in favor of wiping out all legal differences between the sexes, they would undoubtedly carry their point. “Men have a habit of giving women what they want,” he added.

Despite the condescension of Coolidge’s remarks, the 30th U.S. president might have had a point on one score. Many leading women of that era including Eleanor Roosevelt opposed the equal rights amendment. An equal rights amendment might be an excuse to deny women eligibility for alimony and risk sacrificing protective laws for both women and children in the work place. Roosevelt came around to Laughlin’s position only with the 1938 enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, a law that Roosevelt felt put in place fairer working conditions for women and thus reduced the risk of “equal oppression” she felt attended the ERA.

Four years later, Laughlin returned to the national spotlight. This time her audience was the nation’s highest court. There she argued against state laws barring women from serving on juries. Despite some years earlier having authored the California law that made women eligible to serve in that state and having successfully – over the objection of the state attorney general – winning a landmark California court decision that upheld the constitutionality of the law there, Laughlin lost her 1931 case before the U.S. Supreme Court. (A victory there on the issue did not occur until 1975.)

Though born in Maine and a graduate of Portland High School she by the early 1890s was off to Wellesley College. As an undergraduate there she won acclaim for writing a pamphlet on the national tariff that sold some 100,000 copies. Compensation for her contributions to economics periodicals helped finance her legal education at Cornell Law. She would have been the second woman to be admitted to practice in Maine had she chosen to start her career here. Instead, she devoted the first 25 years after her initial 1898 admission in New York to interests away from her native state. For several years after finishing law school she stayed in New York to continue her writing career even after passing the bar in that state.

From 1907 until her return to Maine in 1923, Laughlin practiced law in the western U.S., first in Colorado, where she was on the state board of pardons and vice chair of the Progressive Party, and then to California for nearly a decade. There, she rose to become the first president of the National Business and Professional Woman’s Clubs, or “BPW.”

After her return to Maine in 1923, she simultaneously pursued feminist causes while at the same time successfully winning six terms as a Republican state legislator, three in the House and three in the Senate.

As with many progressives of her generation, Laughlin favored Prohibition. Liquor to Laughlin was the root of many of the abuses visited upon women. She stood her ground to oppose Prohibition’s repeal, calling the day in 1933 when beer was legalized “the most shameful” in the state’s history.

In the Legislature she retained her interest in women’s issues and opposed such “protective” measures as limiting the weights that women could carry in their employments as a “nefarious scheme” on the part of organized labor to keep women out of the work place.

In her last two terms in the Legislature, she chaired the prestigious Judiciary Committee, the first woman to do so. She left the Legislature in 1941 to accept appointment as the Reporter of Decisions for the Maine Supreme Court, a position she held until her retirement in 1946, which occurred six years before her death at the age of 83 in 1952.

The generation that followed the end of Gail Laughlin’s career – one that preceded Carolyn Glassman’s accession the bench – actually witnessed a decline in the activity of women in the legal arena. Fewer women in Maine entered the active practice of law in the 1950s through the mid 1960s than had done so in the 1930s and ’40s. Those that attempted to do so then were thus subjected to as many challenges as those that came before. Even such future luminaries as Glassman herself along with Sandra Day O’Connor could not find work as attorneys even though high academic honors were bestowed on their law school diplomas. Among the few who emerged in Maine in this era was Ruth Pullen.

A native of the Aroostook County town of North Amity, one of five children that included the popular Civil War historian John Pullen, Ruth Pullen graduated from Colby in 1933. After brief experiences as a teacher, she embarked on a career as a state parole officer, an assignment that led by the 1940s to a position as an administrator at the Women’s Reformatory in Skowhegan. By 1961, then 52, she resigned as its superintendent to attend Temple University Law School in Philadelphia. Institutions like Temple Law in that time were more like boot camps than law schools. They were designed to be heavily intimidating. Those that either flunked out or fled seeing the handwriting on the wall in the first year alone often exceeded a third of the class.

Pullen, however, despite being one of the only women and one of the oldest to ever to attend the school, graduated three years later. She returned to Maine and started practicing in Farmington with my father, the late Peter Mills. By the time I joined both of them in the late 1970s, it was apparent she had achieved acceptance both among her professional peers as well as the general public. Neither running the state’s women’s prison nor enduring a tough urban law school had deprived her of the careful, steady temperament that was to be the hallmark of her career practicing law. It was one that took her occasionally to court even though the emphasis of her practice was real estate, Chapter 13 wage earner bankruptcy cases, and probate.

She was among only a handful of other Maine women lawyers in her era who bridged the generation between Gail Laughlin and one that saw the rise to prominence of such figures as Carolyn Glassman and others in the last three decades of the 20th century. The fact that she and others did so have made it possible for women to both practice and excel in the legal profession in Maine today.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by e-mail: pmills@myfairpoint.net.