By Laura Brown

“Being a biographer means always having to say you’re sorry,” Barbara Babcock told the members of the Los Altos Morning Forum on Feb. 6. Babcock was referring to the lengthy process of researching the history of Clara Shortridge Foltz, California’s first woman lawyer.

Babcock, the Robert Crown Professor of Law at Stanford University, is working with students in her Women’s Legal History class to document information on pioneering women lawyers in the United States, and writing a biography of Foltz.

Babcock, who served as director of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia before becoming the first female law professor at Stanford in 1972, said that Foltz “invented the public defender. Because she was a woman, poor and desperate people sought her out, and other attorneys sent her their non-paying cases.” Babcock was drawn to Foltz because “I love my work at Stanford, but nothing compares to the public defending I did when I was young,” adding, “Of course, nothing compares to being young.”

Babcock recounted how Foltz, born in 1849 in Lafayette, Indiana, traveled west by stagecoach, became involved in the women’s suffrage movement, and ultimately determined to become a lawyer, partly to further the struggle for women’s rights, but, more pragmatically, to support her five children. Refused admission to Hastings Law School because of her gender, Foltz apprenticed herself in the second-best law firm in San Jose, after the principal in the best firm refused her, suggesting that teaching was the only proper profession for a woman.

Foltz went on to win admission to Hastings for other women, successfully advocating for women’s admission to the bar in California. She practiced law for 50 years, often the only woman in the courtroom, since women were not allowed to be jurors, Babcock said. Foltz also wrote, edited magazines, crisscrossed the country making speeches on behalf of women and lived to cast a legal ballot in California.

“Whatever Clara Shortridge Foltz did, she was the first woman lawyer to do it,” said Babcock.

To learn more about Clara Shortridge Foltz and other early women lawyers, visit the Women’s Legal History/Biography Project Web site: www.stanford.edu/group/WLHP.

The Morning Forum is a members-only lecture series held at the United Methodist Church of Los Altos. Membership is closed for this year. To get on a waiting list for membership, write to Morning Forum, P.O. Box 274, Los Altos 94023-0274.