Forbidden by Susan Johnson (best feel good books txt) 📗

Belva Lock-wood drafted a bill specifically providing for admission of women to the federal courts and persuaded Representative Benjamin F. Butler to submit it. The first and second bills she drafted never got to the floor of the House, but in 1878, the House passed Bill No. 1077, which gave women attorneys access to the federal courts. After another year of buttonholing senators in the corridors of the Capitol, the "Lockwood" bill passed the Senate in 1879 after three years of extensive lobbying, and President Rutherford B. Hayes signed it into law.

3. This speech is excerpted from a longer opinion of a Judge Edward Ryan of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1875 in denying Lavinia Goodell admission to the state bar. Since law practice on the county level often didn't require admission to a state or territorial bar, women lawyers were able to practice locally. But the admission of women to state bars became a state-by-state struggle. Belle Babb Mansfield has the distinction of being the first woman in the United States to be formally admitted to the bar. In June 1869, Iowa allowed her admittance. The following year the Iowa State Legislature ensured the admission of women to the profession by removing the restrictive gender language in its admissions statute. Over the next five decades, women were slowly allowed equal rights to practice as attorneys, Delaware having the dubious distinction of being the last state to admit women to its bar in 1923. Montana's first woman lawyer, Ella Knowles Haskell, was admitted to the bar in 1889.

Many opinions denying women admission to state and federal courts were couched in patronizing distinctions of sex and divine, irrefutable law.

Judge Ryan additionally notes: "The peculiar qualities of womanhood, its gentle graces, its quick sensibility, its tender susceptibility, its purity, its delicacy, its emotional impulses, its subordination of hard reason to sympathetic feeling, are surely not qualifications for forensic strife. Nature has tempered women as little for the judicial conflicts of the court-room as for the physical conflicts of the battle-field. Womanhood is modeled for gentler and better things…"

The U.S. Supreme Court in its 1873 decision ruling against Myra Bradwell, used the same hypocritical arguments at a time when women were settling the frontier, working twelve-hour days in mills, practicing as doctors and lawyers, toiling in sweatshops and sculleries: "The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator…"

4. In Pretty Shield's memoirs, she describes the practice: "… we were given a reservation, a fine one, long ago. We had many, many horses, and even cattle that the Government had given us. We might have managed to get along if the White Chief in Washington had not leased our lands to white stockmen. These men, some of them, shot down our horses on our own lands, because they wanted all the grass for themselves… these white men shot down our horses so that their cows and sheep might have the grass. They even paid three dollars for each pair of horse's ears, to get our horses killed. I wonder if the lease money that is paid to the Government in Washington by the white stockmen will be given to my grandchildren when it is paid in, or if they will have to wear out their moccasins going to the Agency office to ask for it, as I do."

5. The bark of the pussy willow (salix discolor) contains tannin and salinigrin, a glucoside with tonic, sedative, and aphrodisiac properties. Mrs. Grieve's Modern Herbal recommends half a teaspoon of the fluid extract.

6. During the nineteenth century there was considerable debate in France by those concerned with banquets and formal dinners on the respective merits of service à la française and service à la russe. The former method involved placing on the tables all the dishes that were to be served in each service. Guests were thus allowed the pleasure of viewing the food in all its decorative splendor. The dishes would then be taken away to be carved or otherwise prepared for distribution. In the time elapsed before serving, many dishes suffered.

Service à la russe was introduced about 1860. This style of serving had the carving and preparation done in advance so the food was brought in in relays, ready for immediate distribution.

Food intended to be eaten hot was hot, dishes which needed to be served as soon as they came from the oven, such as souffles, were properly served, and ices didn't melt beforetime.

7. According to Alexandre Dumas père's Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, the baba in France originated with King Stanislas Leczinski, father-in-law to Louis XV. When babas were served in his household, they were always accompanied by a sauceboat that contained sweet Malaga wine mixed with a sixth part of eau de tanaisie, the oil obtained by distillation from the tansy plant. Stanislas's Polish court had been transferred to Lunéville in France after his defeat in the War of Polish Succession in 1735. Stanislas adored The Thousand and One Nights; hence the name.

The other dishes served by the Duc de Vec's chefs that night after the opera were all taken from Dumas's cookbook, a fascinating assortment of recipes, anecdotes, personal experiences, and miscellaneous information he'd gathered during a Gulliverian and peripatetic lifetime.

8. Until the Standing Bear decision in May 1879, the U.S. policy concerning citizenship for Native