Phillips also becomes the first female judge in Milwaukee.
Bennett runs for election to the Vernon County bench on the spur of the moment. “I just didn’t think I’d win. I only ran because I thought the voters ought to have a choice.” She added, “I do feel a woman can deal out justice as well as a man.” She becomes Wisconsin’s sole woman judge on Jan. 1, 1970.
The University of Wisconsin Law School offers Abrahamson a professorship in tax law. She agrees on the condition that she and Assistant Professor Margo Melli receive tenure.
Shirley Abrahamson and Assistant Attorney General Betty Brown become the first two women to oppose each other in an oral argument before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The case is State v. Strickland, 27 Wis. 2d 623, 135 N.W.2d 295.
Abrahamson earns her doctorate in American legal history, is admitted to the Wisconsin bar, and becomes the first woman lawyer hired by a private firm in Madison. Within a year, she becomes a named partner.
Abrahamson graduates valedictorian of her law school class and learns that Indianapolis firms will not employ a woman lawyer. She and her husband move to Madison where she pursues a doctorate in legal history and he works on a post doctorate in zoology.
Schlanger, age 19, graduates from New York University, marries Seymour Abrahamson, and begins her legal education at Indiana University.
Schlanger graduates from Hunter College High School at age 16 and begins college at New York University.
Schlanger tells her parents that she wants to be a lawyer. They don’t discourage her because at least she is now being realistic. When she was four she insisted that she wanted to be a U.S. president.
Gov. Phil La Follette appoints Sells to the Florence County municipal court, making her Wisconsin’s first female judge. At her death in 1940, she is still Wisconsin’s only female judge.
Schlanger is born in the Bronx, New York to Leo Schlanger and Ceil Sauerteig, Jewish immigrants from Poland.
Raimey is also the first Black woman known to have graduated from a law school in Wisconsin and the first Black woman to graduate from UW Madison.
Walker is elected Columbia County district attorney at age 23. She is the first woman to hold this position in Wisconsin. The press reports that she is also the first female district attorney in the United States. During her four-year term, she prosecutes over 300 cases.
La Follette says that it did not take much to convince her that she could handle law school without neglecting her baby and her husband, Dane County District Attorney Bob La Follette, who later became Wisconsin’s governor and senator.
Kane, Wisconsin’s second woman lawyer, becomes the first woman to run for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Only men could participate in elections then. She wins three votes.
Lavinia Goodell becomes the first woman to win an appeal in the Wisconsin Supreme Court with Ingalls v. State, 48 Wis. 647 (1880)
In 1875, Goodell is denied admission to the Wisconsin Supreme Court solely because of her gender. She drafts a law prohibiting gender discrimination in the practice of law, persuades the legislature and governor to enact it, and finally gains admission.