Chester: History's Orphan

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
Historys Orphan: Arthur MacLean and

the Legal Education of Women*
RONALD CHESTER**
ABSTRACT
In 1908, Arthur MacLean founded the first womens institution of

legal higher education: Portia Law School. In so doing, MacLean stood at
the forefront of a social movement that would ultimately change the face of
legal education forever. And yet, despite his pivotal role in reshaping the
outmoded conceptions of womens place in society, MacLeans story has
largely been lost to the annals of history.
This article attempts to shed light on MacLeans remarkable American
life by retracing the highs and lows of the law school that he founded and
ran. While he viewed women as different than men, he pled the case for
their excellence both long and well. Above all else, Arthur MacLean
possessed an abiding belief in equal opportunitythat everyone should be
given a chance to succeedand that education marked the doorway to
realizing that success.
Today, MacLeans vision lives on at Portia Law Schoolnow called
New England Law | Bostonwhere men and women of diverse
backgrounds and origins are offered an excellent legal education, one
which draws on the rich history of the law school. This article pays homage
to the man whose strength-of-character and idealism made the dreams of
so many a reality.
* Reprinted with editorial changes and permission of the American Journal of Legal
History, volume 51, pages 305-331, April, 2011.
** Professor of Law, New England School of Law, MA; A.B. Harvard; J.D. and M.I.A.
Columbia University; Diploma Criminology, Cambridge. Professor Chester has taught at
seven American law schools and published over thirty articles and four books, including
Unequal Access: Women Lawyers in a Changing America. The author would like to thank New
England Law | Boston and Dean John OBrien for the summer stipend used to prepare this
article. The author would also like to thank Grace E. Owens, New England School of Law (J.D.
expected 2012) for her exceptional work on this project. Diligent, proactive, and creative,
Grace Owens helped make this article deserving of Arthur MacLean.
65
66
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
New England Law Review
[Picture in Print Volume]
v. 46 | 65
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
Arthur MacLean and the Legal Education of Women
67
[T]here is properly no History; only Biography.1

It is never too late to honor the dead.2
I. Introduction: Beginning of the End at Portia Law School
n the spring of 1941, Arthur Winfield MacLean, sixty-one-year-old

Dean and founder of Bostons Portia Law School for women on
Beacon Hill,3 hailed the largest [class] ever to graduate from
Portias halls.4 Ninety-four women graduated.5 MacLean, divorced for
several years from Bertha Robinson (MacLean), who still taught at the
school, married his second wife, Mary Coleman, that same summer. Things
were looking up, it would seem, for this pioneer in womens legal
education.
But, in fact, the school MacLean founded in 1908 was beginning to
unravel due in large part to the impending war. Women were being
recruited for the war effort both by government and by private industry.
As early as March of 1940, the Lend-Lease Act6 gave President Roosevelt
the authority to sell military supplies to the Allies, and the United States
could no longer claim neutrality.7 The Atlantic Charter8 was signed that
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essay I: History, in ESSAYS: FIRST SERIES 14 (1841).
Felicia R. Lee, Bench of Memory at Slaverys Gateway, N.Y. TIMES, July 28, 2008, at E1
(quoting Toni Morrison), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/arts/design/
28benc.html?pagewanted=911.
3
Beacon Hill was a logical place to situate a womens law school.
For example, it had late in the previous century been home to such
prominent women as Julia Ward Howe (1819-1920) . . . ; Louisa
May Alcott (1832-1888) . . . ; and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894)
founder of the kindergarten movement in the United States. The
well-known Womens New Era Club for African-American women,
founded by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin (1842-1924) in 1894, made its
home at 103 Charles St. until 1903 . . . .
Ronald Chester, A Womans Law School in Boston: Portia Law School 1908-1938, in ATHENAS
DAUGHTERS: THE UNFINISHED STORY OF WOMEN LAWYERS AND JUDGES IN MASSACHUSETTS
(Margot Botsford & Patti B. Saris eds., forthcoming) (manuscript at 2) (on file with author).
4
Arthur W. MacLean, Message, 1941 THE LEGACY 6, 6 [hereinafter Message from the Dean].
Letter from Philip Hamilton, Professor of Law, New England School of Law, to Ronald
Chester, Professor of Law, New England School of Law (Mar. 19, 2010) [hereinafter Letter
from Philip Hamilton] (on file with author).
6
Lend-Lease Act of 1941, Pub. L. No. 77-11, 55 Stat. 31, 33.
Id. 3(a)(2).
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT & WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, STATEMENT BY THE PRIME MINISTER OF

ENGLAND AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, H.R. DOC. NO. 77-358, at 1-3 (1941).
68
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
August, and the first ever peacetime conscription bill followed on

September 14th.9
Though the American people were given no formal declaration, the
country had become engaged in a de facto war. 10 The effect was evident in
Portias enrollment rates.11 The 1941 yearbook showed only about eightyfour women enrolled in the freshman through junior classes.12 By the fall of
1941, as the war loomed, enrollment in the entire school was down to fiftyseven.13 In the spring of 1942, instead of ninety-four graduates like the
spring before, Portia graduated only nineteen.14 By the time MacLean died
in the winter of 1943, there were only twenty-five students in his entire law
school.15
It had not always been so. During the late 1920s, MacLeans all-women
law school was regularly enrolling more than 400 students per year. 16
During the 1920s and 1930s the school was well known both nationally and
internationally. Word of MacLeans travels around the United States were
announced in the newspapers of cities he visited, and the celebratory
articles were accompanied by MacLeans vigorous promotion of his school
and its cause.17 In every way, MacLean and his unique law school were
successful and well known. But first the Depression slowed the growth of
his school, and World War II effectively killed it.
Despite the marked success of his unique venture for more than two
decades and the prominent place both MacLean and Portia Law School
should have in womens history, both have been largely ignored. This first
9 Selective Training and Service Act, ch. 885, 54 Stat. 1177 (1940). The United States was
first drawn into its protective role in response to the vulnerability of commercial vessels
hailing from the United Kingdom and Canada, whose countries were unable to provide
enough protective escorts to fend off German U-boats: *B+ritish and Canadian escort craft
were supplemented by American-built ships as early as September 1940, when the United
States transferred fifty flush-decked World War I destroyers to the British. DAVID SYRETT,
THE DEFEAT OF THE GERMAN U-BOATS: THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC 9-10 (1994).
10
GERARD ROGERS, NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW 1908 TO 1983, at 21 (1983) (With the
war in the forefront of Americas thinking, Dean MacLean announced that the Portia Law
School building would be available for defense and Red Cross training during the 1941-42
school year.).
11
See PHILIP K. HAMILTON, NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW 29 (2008).
12
Letter from Philip Hamilton, supra note 5.
13
Id.
14
Id.
15
HAMILTON, supra note 11, at 29.
16
Id. at 13.
17
Women Win Praise for Law Work, L.A. TIMES, July 19, 1933, reprinted in NEW ENGLAND
SCHOOL OF LAW, ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 6, at 48.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
69
biography of Arthur MacLean attempts to answer: (1) why he was largely

ignored by history and whether such inattention can in any way be
justified; (2) whether MacLeans attitudes toward women and their abilities
are both outdated and irrelevant to modern womens studies or whether,
by contrast, they still have much to teach us; and finally (3) whether
MacLean was indeed a figure of significance in the struggles of women to
enter the profession on equal terms with men.
In answering these and related questions, this article utilizes many
previously unknown primary sources, including the extensive recollections
of Arthur MacLeans sole surviving child. Thus, the primary focus of this
biographical article is upon recreating for the reader MacLeans significant
and underappreciated American life, with secondary historical sources
used primarily for context.
II. A Celebrated Educator Neglected by History
Arthur MacLean died in near obscurity. His second wife Mary was not
socially connected like his well-off Episcopalian first wife from Cambridge,
Bertha Robinson. In fact, Mary Coleman was working-class Irish and lived
in a small apartment on Huntington Avenue near South Boston. 18 No
obituary for MacLean has been found in a Boston newspaper; although
some appeared elsewhere.19 In the year 2010, no one, not even MacLeans
sole living child, Jean MacLean Currie, age eighty-nine, knew where Mary
had buried him.
If one were to view books on womens education or search the Internet,
apart from materials published by his own law school, MacLean is largely
absent from the historical record. He was, however, well known in his
time. This was a man remembered in Who Was Who in America20 and in a
two-and-a-half page spread in the National Cyclopaedia of American
Biography, which included a full-page picture.21 This was a man named
18
Vermont Marriage Records, Certificate of Marriage for Arthur Winfield MacLean and
Mary Teresa Coleman, (Aug. 19, 1941) [hereinafter Certificate of Marriage] (on file with
author).
19
Obituaries, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 1, 1943, at 19; Obituaries, CHI. TRIB., Mar. 1, 1943, at 25;
Obituaries, HARTFORD COURANT, Mar. 1, 1943, at 4; Obituaries, CHRISTIAN SCI. MONITOR, Mar.
1, 1943, at 2.
20
21
Arthur Winfield MacLean, 1880-1943, 2 WHO WAS WHO IN AM. 1943-1950, at 338 (1950).
31 THE NATIONAL CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY 434-35 (1944) [hereinafter

NATIONAL CYCLOPAEDIA]. The NATIONAL CYCLOPAEDIA described itself as *b+eing the history
of the United States as illustrated in the lives of the founders, builders, and defenders of the
republic, and of the men and women who are doing the work and molding the thought of the
present time. Id. at Title Page.
70
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
president of the National Association of Law Schools in 1938-39.22 This was

a man who founded and ran a law school, unique in the world, which
today is the successful New England School of Law in Boston. Yet, when
the author located his grave, all that remembered him was a simple stone
slab laid flush with the cemetery grass detailing only his name and
lifespan. But there is so much more to tell about this quite amazing man
this great friend to women and their professional aspirations.
III. MacLeans Early Years
Arthur Winfield MacLean was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1880,
the son of Winfield S. and Emma G. (Hanson) MacLean of Milltown and
Calais, Maine respectively.23 Both died in Lowell MassachusettsEmma on
August 13, 1933 and Winfield on November 25, 1914. 24 They, like their son,
were proud Scots and Methodists. Arthur had a brother Donald, who,
according to the 1910 census, was living at home with Winfield and Emma
during that year. Not much more is known of Donald, but Arthurs
daughter Jean remembered that he later married a woman named Fanny. 25
Little is known of Arthurs early years, except that he sold newspapers
on the street in Lowell during high school and that he was captain of his
school regiment. He did well enough in high school to be offered
scholarships to three different colleges and took his pick. 26 He chose Boston
University for its location in the city where it would be easier to do
business, and he matriculated in 1897.27 During that summer he sold books
door-to-door, primarily a kind of guide to womens professional
opportunities called What Can a Woman Do, by Martha Louise Rayne. 28 In
22 Id. at 434. The National Association of Law Schools (NALS) was formed for full-time
university law schools. The general stigma against part-time law schools created yet another
hurdle for MacLean to overcome. Eventually, however, all law schools adopted a Harvardtype curriculum, and the NALS no longer exists.
23
Certificate of Marriage, supra note 18.
24
Genealogy Resources, Death Index, Reports of Death 1913, CTR. OF LOWELL HISTORY, UNIV.
http://libweb.uml.edu/clh/Dea1913/DeM1913.Html (last visited
Oct. 19, 2011) and Genealogy Resources, Death Index, Reports of Death 1914, CTR. OF LOWELL
HISTORY, UNIV. OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL, http://libweb.uml.edu/clh/Dea1914/DeM1914
.Html (last visited Oct. 19, 2011).
OF MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL,
25 Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, Daughter of Arthur MacLean (Apr. 23, 2010)
[hereinafter April Telephone Interview with Jean Currie] (notes on file with author).
26 A Dream That Came True, BOS. GLOBE, Jan. 1933, reprinted in NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF
LAW, ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 6, at 3.
27
28
Id.
Id. This book heralded an expansion in employment opportunities available to women.

At the time it was penned, there were about ninety female practicing lawyers in the country.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
71
November of his first year, MacLean teamed with another young Scotsman
Robert Coan and bought the Boston University bookstore to take on as a
business. MacLean soon bought out Coan and ran the store through
college. When he entered Boston University Law School on Beacon Hill in
1900, MacLean purchased that bookstore too.29
MacLean ran these shops for fifteen years until Boston University
decided to run its own stores. To supplement his earnings during the
school year, he worked in hotels throughout New England serving as
everything from waiter to head clerk. He later saw this as good training
for a later career as dean of Portia Law School, which would involve
dealings with all sorts of people.30
IV.
A Lawyer and Legal Educator of Women
When MacLean graduated from Boston University Law School in 1906,

he went into practice with a fellow graduate, Gleason Archer. 31 Soon he
and Archer saw the vast market in Boston for the children and
grandchildren of immigrants who wished to better themselves by entering
the law.32 In a short time, the two men founded two part-time law schools.
Rayne gives descriptions of many of these womens successes and offers detailed instructions
on how to pursue such an education and career. See generally MARTHA LOUISE RAYNE, WHAT
CAN A WOMAN DO: OR, HER POSITION IN THE BUSINESS AND LITERARY WORLD 54-57 (1893).
29
A Dream That Came True, supra note 26.
30
See id.
31
It should be noted that there was a separate battle being fought in the arena of legal
education at this time. See RONALD CHESTER, UNEQUAL ACCESS: WOMEN LAWYERS IN A
CHANGING AMERICA 11 (1985). Full-time law schools, particularly Harvard, were constantly
trying to exclude part-time law students from the bar. Id. When Archer became dean of
Suffolk Law School, he continually attacked the Board of Bar Examiners and the influence of
Dean Pound of Harvard for their blatant discrimination against part-time law schools. Id.
Exemplary of this discrimination was a 1932 Suffolk Law School graduate who passed the
written portion of the bar but was denied admission after the oral portion revealed that he
was in fact a plumber. Id. at 10-11. The element of part-time education was crucial to
MacLeans aspirations to open the law to women: *B+ecause of lack of money, time, and
college training, the majority of women attended part-time schools. Id. at 9. However, despite
efforts to curb the success of the part-time schools, Portia flourished. See id. at 11. While a
similar attempt to exclude part-time medical schools succeeded, CHESTER, supra, the Carnegie
Foundations Reed Report concluded that law schools could successfully be part-time. ALFRED
Z. REED, TRAINING FOR THE PUBLIC PROFESSION OF LAW, CARNEGIE FOUNDATION REPORT 398
(1921). The Reed Report found, for example, that part-time law schools provided training for
those who might attain upward mobility through a career in politics. See id.; Chester, supra
note 3.
32
It seemed that immigrants especially had much to gain from higher education.
Whether native, daughters of the foreign-born, or black, all newcomers had more
complicated identity crises. Those who were the first in their families to attend college
72
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
Archer founded Suffolk Law School in 1906, and MacLean taught there.
However, when young women applied for law courses, Archer refused
them admission, calling them a distraction to men.33 MacLean decided
that he was happy to educate women in the law and opened his doors to
female applicants in 1908.34
From this small beginning, the large and important Portia Law School
for women would grow. At the time, the sphere of womens-only
education was dominated by colleges catering to well-off women who
were riding the high of the feminist movement and sought education and
gainful employment not simply out of economic necessity but because
they enjoyed their particular occupations and found them important to
their existence.35 However, Portia targeted already disadvantaged women
whose reasons for seeking a legal education often were primarily financial.
Not only did Dean MacLean have high hopes for his small school, referring
to it as a permanent institution, [which] will become one of the largest law
schools of the country, but he recognized just how important educating
women in the law was to society.36 Even at its modest beginnings,
especially appreciated the advantages they gained. BARBARA MILLER SOLOMON, IN THE
COMPANY OF EDUCATED WOMEN: A HISTORY OF WOMEN AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA
163 (1985).
33 Gleason Archer made his opinion on coeducation well known. He declared to a
gathering of Bostonian journalists that *m+an is naturally sentimental and inclined to
gallantries towards the opposite sex . . . [w]e feel sure that in admitting lady students to our
classes we would be introducing a distracting element, that might lower the high standard of
scholarship hitherto maintained . . . . GLEASON L. ARCHER, THE EDUCATIONAL OCTOPUS: A
FEARLESS PORTRAYAL OF MEN AND EVENTS IN THE OLD BAY STATE 83 (1915). The barrage of
publicity he received was amplified by the fact that he was assailed by the suffragettes. . . .
But every assault added to the interest taken by the public in *his+ youthful institution. Id. at
84. Excuses for not admitting women at other institutions included the fear that female
students among males would lower educational standards, in addition to the grave concern
that collegiate life would deprive women of their natural delicacy, refinement and
tenderness and even produce sterility and sexlessness, leading to the demise of the entire
race. See Joyce Antler, The Educated Woman and Professionalization: The Struggle for a New
Feminine Identity 1890-1920, in 1 EDUCATED WOMEN: HIGHER EDUCATION, CULTURE, AND
PROFESSIONALISM 1850-1950, at 34-37, 42 (Barbara Miller Solomon ed., 1987) (citation omitted).
34
Opportunity for All, NEW ENG. L. | BOS., http://www.nesl.edu/historyproject/ (last visited

Oct. 6, 2011).
35 PATRICIA M. HUMMER, THE DECADE OF ELUSIVE PROMISE: PROFESSIONAL WOMEN IN THE
UNITED STATES, 1920-1930, at 1 (1979).
36 See Letter from Arthur W. MacLean, Dean, Portia Law School, to Hon. Robert OHarris
(Nov. 10, 1917). He wrote: To be a part of the directing force in this important work of
outlining the policy of education in this School is bound to be not only an [sic] unique
distinction but an honor to all those engaged in it, and a genuine service to ones country. Id.
Although MacLean was mistaken in his prediction that Portia would receive degree-granting
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
73
MacLeans Portia Law School set out to be an important institution.

MacLean did not act entirely alone:
Chesley York, a prominent Boston lawyer was involved in
MacLeans enterprise right from the start. He was later joined on
the faculty by lawyers such as the influential Bruce Wyman, who
also taught at Harvard Law School. But Portia was basically
MacLeans baby, which he nurtured and protected through three
decades of turmoil.37
Ever the entrepreneur, MacLean continued to teach at both Suffolk and

Portia, while running the latter institution. In 1910 he married Bertha
Robinson, nine years his junior.38 Robinson was the daughter of the
successful owner of a sheet-metal business, Jabez Robinson, and had
attended Wellesley College.39 Her daughter describes Bertha as a former
Gibson Girl40 and a thoroughly modern woman.41 She became
interested enough in MacLeans burgeoning enterprise to study law herself
at Portia Law School, graduating magna cum laude from the school in 1920
and passing the Massachusetts Bar Exam in August of the same year.42
Immediately the next fall, she joined the Portia faculty and served in
several administrative capacities at the school during her tenure there in
the 1920s and 1930s.43 According to their daughter Jean, Bertha would not
have let Arthur be anything less than an advocate for women and was
power within a years time, Harris was sufficiently persuaded to become the first president
of the Portia Board of Trustees that year. ROGERS, supra note 10, at 6.
37
Chester, supra note 3 (manuscript at 3).
38
Paul E. Liles, New England School of LawAn Institutional History: Part I: Portia Law
SchoolThe MacLean Era, DUE PROCESS, Mar. 25, 1991, at 6.
39 Catalog for the Term 1930-1931, PORTIA L. SCH., at 18 (1930) [hereinafter Catalog for the
Term 1930-1931].
40
A Gibson Girl, named for the great American artist Charles Dana Gibson who
documented their era, was the ultimate vision of feminine beauty at the turn of the century.
See CATHERINE GOURLEY, GIBSON GIRLS AND SUFFRAGISTS: PERCEPTIONS OF WOMEN FROM 1900
TO 1918, at 29 (2008). Long locks were piled luxuriantly on the top of the head in a chignon
and a tightly bound wasp waist was cinched with a corset. Id. at 29-31. A Gibson Girl was
educated and had some independence. See id.
41
See April Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, supra note 25.
42
Mrs. MacLean Admitted to Massachusetts Bar, reprinted in NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW,
ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 1, at 14. The newspaper stated that Mrs. MacLean was now one of the
happiest women in Rockport. See id. Rockport was the location of the MacLeans summer
home where they would have been vacationing at the time. See id.; see also WHOS WHO ALONG
THE NORTH SHORE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY: BEING A REGISTER OF THE NOTEWORTHY,
FASHIONABLE & WEALTHY RESIDENTS ON THE NORTH SHORE OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY FOR THE
SUMMER OF 1915, at 286 (1915).
43
Chester, supra note 3 (manuscript at 3).
74
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
herself an active suffragette.44 She would not have stood for a mere
entrepreneur who would be more interested in profit than in the cause of
women.45
In 1921, Portia moved into a stately brownstone at 45 Mount Vernon
Street on Beacon Hill.46
Among its neighbors on Mt. Vernon St. were Rose Standish
Howe (1872-1964), the first well-known female landscape
architect and lifelong peace activist; and Margaret Deland (18571945), a popular novelist and social reformer. The only other area
law school to give women a significant chanceBoston
University Law Schoolmade its home nearby at 11 Ashburton
Place.47
The First World War had set the stage for womens success in the early
developmental stages of Portias existence. Women were not only entering
the workplace to fill the vacuum left by men, but they were also enlisting
by the thousands to free a man to fight.48 Common misconceptions about
exactly how much a woman could do slowly fell away, both in the minds
of the employers whose factories were suddenly run by women and in the
minds of the women themselves. Portias newly granted authority to confer
the LL.B. to women in 191949 was accompanied by the victory of full
womens suffrage in 1920.50 Before the war, their status as citizens and
legal persons had been suspect, and holding most elected offices had been
out of the question.51 Now women were adequately equipped to take
advantage of the opportunities Dean MacLean offered. 52
44
April Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, supra note 25.
45
Id.
46
Chester, supra note 3.
47
Id.
48
EVELYN M. MONAHAN & ROSEMARY NEIDEL-GREENLEE, A FEW GOOD WOMEN: AMERICAS

MILITARY WOMEN FROM WORLD WAR I TO THE WARS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN 6, 8-12 (2010).
In addition to the 223 switchboard operators (Hello Girls) and the 21,480 active duty army
nurses (by the time of the November 1918 Armistice), the U.S. Navy began enlisting women in
March 1917, peaking at 11,000. The U.S. Marine Corps followed suit in August 1918, adding
305 female recruits. Id. at 8-12.
49
See CHESTER, supra note 31, at 21.
50
MONAHAN & NEIDEL-GREENLEE, supra note 48, at 14 (*A+fter seventy-two years of

fighting without success to get that right granted by a constitutional amendment, American
women saw the Nineteenth Amendment granting them suffrage added to the Constitution in
1920.).
51
52
HUMMER, supra note 35, at 4.
And they did! An article in the Sunday Herald on August 15, 1920, proclaimed the
greatest year ever for Portia Law School and reported that the success of the school was due
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
75
Arthur and Bertha MacLean lived first in Belmont53 and then moved to
25 Linnaean Street in Cambridge54 as the law school grew and prospered in
the 1920s. Just up the street in the large Victorian house on the top of Avon
Hill (81 Washington Avenue), Berthas sister Ethel lived with her husband,
the successful electrical engineer, Walter Jones. Arthur and Berthas
daughter Jean remembers being in both houses and that her parents often
entertained.55 These were good years for Arthur, Bertha, and the growing
Portia Law School.56 Two years later in 1922, Bertha gave birth to Jean
herself, the couples last child.
V.
MacLeans Views on Womens Abilities in Law
MacLean himself was even busier than usual selling his newly
improved law school. Even though many of the women who had entered
the work force or enrolled in school during the First World War fell victim
to a patriotic incentive to return to the home after the war, 57 Portias
enrollment steadily increased as MacLean began to show the world exactly
what women could do.58 In October 1919, he told the Boston Sunday
Advertiser that women made the best law students. It isnt a theory, its a
fact. Five or six of the Suffolk Law School professors deliver the same
courses of lectures to the women of our school and our women students
rate higher than the men who take the course at Suffolk . . . .59 He went on
to list a number of jobs, in addition to law practice, where knowledge of
partially to the success of its students: Sixty-three per cent. of all students of this school who
have taken the Massachusetts bar examination have been admitted into the practice of law
which is nearly double the general average of successful applicants from all schools, of whom
about 35 per cent. are admitted to practice each year. Women Studying Law in Greater
Numbers, SUNDAY HERALD, Aug. 15, 1920, reprinted in NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW,
ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 1, at 16.
53 See 1910 Census, U.S. CENSUS BUREAU, available at http://www.census.gov/prod/www
/abs/decennial/1910 .html (last visited Oct. 28, 2011).
54
See April Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, supra note 25.
55
Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, Daughter of Arthur MacLean (Mar. 1, 2010)
[hereinafter March Telephone Interview with Jean Currie] (notes on file with author).
56
For those interested in the history of Portias rise and fall, see generally CHESTER, supra
note 31, and VIRGINIA G. DRACHMAN, SISTERS IN LAW: WOMEN LAWYERS IN MODERN
AMERICAN HISTORY 157-62, 167 (1998).
57
See HUMMER, supra note 35, at 3.
58
Portias enrollment steadily increased with 24 students in 1910, 46 students in 1915, 177
students in 1920, and more than 400 students each year between 1925 and 1930. See
HAMILTON, supra note 11, at 14.
59 Women Are Best Law Students, Says Dean, SUNDAY ADVERTISER, Oct. 26, 1919, reprinted in
NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW, ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 1, at 9.
76
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
the law would be helpful to women graduates for legal jobs in city or
federal government, such as court stenographers, private secretaries, and
examiners of land titles.60
In a statement three years later, MacLean focused his attention more
directly on the practice of law, emphasizing that women excel in the work
of handling divorce cases.61 He argued that:
Within a few years, women lawyers will be the only ones
employed by the wife or female corespondent in a divorce case.
Women . . . in divorce cases . . . dislike to reveal the inside details
to a man, but that reticence is not noted when they consult a
woman attorney . . . . [The female lawyer] understands the
workings of a womans mind much better than the best of her
male rivals. . . . Woman lawyers are not so anxious to rush a case
into the divorce court and as a result many marital tangles are
settled in their law offices.62
That same year, MacLean made a rather remarkable statement about

womens general superiority to the nationally syndicated United News
Service. There is no man whom some woman cannot outwit. Women
think straighter than men do, and they attend to business. In a Congress of
Women, there would be no time lost in the cloak rooms and the members
would know better than to introduce foredoomed bills concerning trivial
matters.63 Finally, MacLean asserted that women posses relentless logic
and are far superior to men in detail work.64
According to Virginia Drachman, a noted historian of womens access
to the legal profession, although MacLean was a strong believer in
womens abilities and a vocal defender of women in the law, his views
were shaped more by the Victorian belief in womens uniqueness than
[any] belief in sexual equality.65 Drachman notes MacLeans
pronouncements on womens abilities as divorce lawyers and real estate
attorneys were due to their attention to detail.66 Thus, according to
60
Id.
61
Women Lawyers Best In All Divorce Cases, College Head Holds, SUNDAY TELEGRAM, Sept. 11,
1922, reprinted in NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW, ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 1, at 60.
62
Id.
63
See ROGERS, supra note 10, at 9. Although this phrase was sometimes used to keep
women confined to certain areas of the law, in light of the high praise to women given by
MacLean, it is unlikely he intended it to carry negative connotations.
64 It appears that women graduates of MacLeans time took his views quite seriously.
Strong and capable herself, the graduate felt that a woman probably could have it all,
whatever she wanted. See SOLOMON, supra note 32, at 171.
65
DRACHMAN, supra note 56, at 159.
66
Id.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
77
Drachman, MacLeans traditional views about women created an

atmosphere at Portia that attracted a less activist group of students than
those at the Washington College of Law, a co-educational law school run
by women in Washington, D.C. 67 Portia students often had little family
support and were too busy working and attending law school to become
tangled in the pursuit of social reform.68 The ambivalence felt by many
Portia students was epitomized by one of its most beloved teachers: Bessie
Page. Page felt that women would lose more than they would gain by
equal rights legislation.69 Such sentiments reveal a movement of educated
women parallel to the one advocating for full equality.70
Beatrice Doershuks Women in the Law, published in 1920 to give an
account of womens entry into the legal profession, took a decidedly
different view of womens abilities than Drachman attributes to MacLean. 71
There is nothing in the fifty years of experience of women lawyers to
indicate that they are, as women, better adapted to any one kind of legal
work than any other.72
However, women lawyers in the 1920s saw themselves as negotiators,
mediators, problem solvers, and drafters of legal documents to assist
individuals and families, perhaps in part because of the discrimination
they faced in law practice.73 [Their] major practice areas were probate law,
wills, domestic relations, general office practice, and real estate law [all of
which] relied on qualities traditionally associated with femininity.74
67
See id.
68
See CHESTER, supra note 31, at 28. While the ambitions of Portias students may have
been limited to simply bettering themselves, at its peak the law school may have been
enrolling nearly 30% of the nations women law students. Id. at 12.
69
Id. at 22.
70
See id. Although Portia was a specialized college, the student body was not the only
group to experience this ambivalence: The young college graduate had confidence in her
capabilities as a woman and as an individual. Yet many of her educators, along with
historians, wondered what had happened to activism on behalf of the sex. Few students
thought of themselves as oppressed or perceived feminism as a special cause. See SOLOMON,
supra note 32, at 170.
71
BEATRICE DOERSCHUK, BUREAU OF VOCATIONAL INFORMATION, BULLETIN NO. 3, WOMEN
IN THE LAW: AN ANALYSIS OF TRAINING, PRACTICE AND SALARIED POSITIONS 54 (1920).

72
Id.
73
74
Id. Similar reasoning was being applied in other professional fields. Just as an
attorney/wife would know what every divorcee wanted, in advertising it was soon realized
that the women were the biggest spenders of household income, and businessmen began
seeking them out: Who knew better than another woman what the average housewife would
buy? See HUMMER, supra note 35, at 8-9.
78
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
Although imbued with an optimism born of suffrage and the spirit of the
Roaring Twenties that caused them to believe they could succeed, many
women lawyers continued to encounter discrimination, faced limited
opportunities for advancement, and struggled to balance gender and
professional identity.75 However, they secured for themselves a niche in
the world of small (or solo) practitioners. By the 1930s, women lawyers
had generally achieved modest professional success, but primarily in areas
of the law relating to an office practice,76 as opposed to a courtroom where
they were still viewed as too emotionally weak and delicate to handle
litigation.77
Surrounded by these difficult professional realities, MacLeans law
school still enjoyed remarkable success during the 1920s. Portias
deliberately democratic approach[] attracted hundreds of women and
played a major role in accelerating the sexual integration of the legal
profession.78 MacLean was helped by the pronounced shift for both men
and women during that decade away from the apprenticeship system and
into formal legal education. For women, in particular, a law school
education provided the path to success on an equal level with men.79
It is undoubtedly true that MacLean had identified women as an
untapped clientele in an increasingly competitive educational
marketplace[,]80 and, at least at its founding, Portia was purely a moneymaking venture.81 This was in keeping with MacLeans entrepreneurial
nature, which had been on full display even prior to his founding of Portia.
But by the mid-1920s, MacLean found himself riding the tiger of
womens optimism and demands for professional access. With each effort
MacLean made to promote his extraordinary school, he increasingly
became a spokesman for womens dreams. Although he clearly viewed
women as different than men, we have seen this difference translated
75 See DRACHMAN, supra note 56, at 180. While most discrimination against women lawyers
masqueraded as the prevention of the incompetent practice of law, some evidence indicates
that it was not only fear of the degradation of the profession but also the associated paycheck.
Last but not least we are faced with an ever growing influx of Portias, some of whom are
remarkably efficient and all of whom are willing to work for excessively low wages.
HUMMER, supra note 35, at 72 (quoting Maurice Wormser, Fewer Lawyers and Better Ones, 34
COM. L. LEAGUE J. 129, 131 (1929)).
76
77
Id. at 86.
78
Id. at 166.
79
Id. at 175.
80
Id. at 158.
81
Id. at 159.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
79
into superiority in many particulars. Traditional or not, Arthur

MacLean was womens champion.82
It should be remembered, however, that Portia was a specialized
womens college, not a graduate school. As the 1920s wore on at Portia,
young women with a few years of high school were replaced by women
who had a high school degree or equivalent and some who had finished
their high school degree while at college.83 Portia was part of the
nationwide push to bring higher education to women and faced many of
the same difficulties as other colleges.
For example, when another Scotsman and Methodist, Clarence P.
McClelland, delivered his 1927 annual presidents report on the state of the
Illinois Womans [sic] College,84 in Jacksonville, Illinois, his words reflected
the situation that MacLean himself confronted: Women have not had a
fair chance at higher education. It is only within the last fifty years that
they were allowed to enter this field. During this period, the chief aim of
those fostering higher education for women has been to demonstrate
womans intellectual equality with man.85 Yet, McClelland, like his
contemporary MacLean, saw women as unique. Womans nature is quite
different from mans. Her principal occupations and her chief interests in
life are different. It is time for us to recognize those differences and to
provide curricula which will give a better preparation for the leading
interests and activities of a womans life.86
President McClelland might have been speaking for Dean MacLean
when he focused on the mission of educating women: If you could only
know these young women personally as I know them and as others on the
faculty know them; if you could but watch them grow individually in
82
See DRACHMAN, supra note 56, at 159.
83
Catalog for the Term 1933-1934, PORTIA L. SCH., at 18 (1934) [hereinafter Catalog for the
Term 1933-1934].
84 This school was founded as the Illinois Conference Female Academy in 1846 by a group
of Methodist clergymen. A History of Mac, MACMURRAY COLLEGE, http://www.mac.edu/
campus/history.asp (last visited Oct. 28, 2011). It was one of about fifty pre-Civil War female
colleges, most of them church- or community-sponsored, that had been established during
the period 1825-1875, but lack*ed+ the financial and organizational resources available to
men. See Antler, supra note 33, at 25. Thus, they were unable to develop academic programs
of high quality on a continuing basis. Id. Generally these colleges offered courses of study
above the standard of those given at female seminaries but below those of colleges for men.
Id. at 25-26.
85 Other such colleges were the Georgia Female College, the Tennessee and Alabama
Female Institute (1851), Auburn Female University (1852), Oxford Female College (1852), and
Ohio Wesleyan Female College (1853). 18 BULLETIN OF ILLINOIS WOMANS COLLEGE:
PRESIDENTS REPORT AND FINANCIAL STATEMENT 1926-1927, SERIES I, NO. 6, at 14 (1927).
86
Id.
80
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
knowledge, faith, and service, you would realize that there is no more
important work in all the world than we are doing here . . . .87
MacLean, referring to himself as Your Friend and Dean, later wrote
in a message to the class of 1941: Character and Diligence are the
foundation for which Education is the superstructure . . . . Armed with
these three cardinal qualities, you can go far in your quest for success and
happiness and, in that quest, you may be completely sure that my keenest
personal interest and good wishes will go with [you].88
VI.
An Expelled Black Student Sues the Law School
The part-time legal education offered by Portia appealed to large

numbers of women of working-class or lower middle-class origins.
Occasionally, it also appealed to women of color from the same groups.89 In
general, this seemed to present little difficulty for MacLean or his school.
Most of the women attending Portia came from immigrant groups, which
were still despised by the Brahmin elite, and Boston, after all, was the
historical seat of abolitionism.
However, Jama White, a black woman from Cambridge, who was
expelled by Dean MacLean in 1926 and who later sued the school,
provided a sort of litmus test of his racial tolerance. Virginia Drachman
sees this episode as discriminatory and suggests that MacLean and his
school became more racially tolerant after it.90 A careful examination of the
facts paints a somewhat different picture.
According to her biographer, Katherine Ross, White was only days
away from registering for her fourth and final year of law school and
was a working mother with two young children, whose estranged
husband, William, paid his court-ordered support erratically or not at
all.91 Frustrated by her husbands failure to pay for support, she found
another way to extract it.92 Under the common law doctrine of necessaries, a
third-party creditor could recover from a husband for purchases of
87
Id. at 15.
88
Message from the Dean, supra note 4.
89
But see SOLOMON, supra note 32, at 163 (Black women had special conflicts over
assimilating white values. For many, entering college brought isolation in the new world and
remoteness from the old.).
90
DRACHMAN, supra note 56, at 160-61.
91
Katherine Ross, The Margin Within the Margin: Jama White and White v. Portia Law
School, et. al., 2 (May 5, 2006) (unpublished term paper, Harvard Law School) (on file with
author).
92
Id. at 5.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
81
necessary household items made by his wife.93 Thus, Jama White ran up
huge bills with grocers and coal deliverymen whom she refused to pay,
citing the doctrine.94 Even when successfully sued, she refused to pay.95
At Bessie Pages behest, White found herself in MacLeans office but
remained defiant. She informed MacLean that she never intended to pay
for the groceries including fancy soaps, perfumes, bon bons, and
regarded them all as necessaries. She continued to insist that all of these
items were her husbands responsibility. White had made matters worse by
suing several Everett city officials, including its Police Chief, and the clerk
of the First District Court of Eastern Middlesex for slander, and the Chief
himself for malicious prosecution for their role in the grocer S.S. Pierces
attempts to collect her debts. The fact that [these complaints] were
ultimately non-suited, however, was treated by MacLean as evidence of
their frivolous nature. In conjunction with the matter of the groceries and
coal, as well as Whites obstinate defense of her non-payment of creditors,
this conduct made her presence at the law school intolerable.96
So, with the advice of Portias leading female teacher Bessie Page, Dean
MacLean expelled Jama White.97 Nine months before graduation, [White]
was thwarted in her desire to become a lawyer.98 After an unsuccessful
political attempt to become an Everett City Councilor, she decided in 1929
to file a suit against Portia Law, Dean MacLean, and Bessie Paige. 99 In her
complaint, she said [Portia] holds itself forth as an institution free . . . from
bias and prejudice.100 Instead, she had encountered unfair discrimination
and criticism, which led to her expulsion.101 This lawsuit went nowhere,
but the publicity was not helpful to MacLean and his law school.102 It is
93
Id.
94
Id. at 5-6.
95
Id. at 6. Drachman discusses none of these underlying circumstances of Whites

dismissal.
96
Id. at 9.
97
Ross, supra note 91, at 9.
98
Id. at 4.
99
See White v. Portia Law Sch., 174 N.E. 187, 188 (Mass. 1931); Ross, supra note 91, at 9-10.
100
Ross, supra note 91, at 10-11.
101
White, 174 N.E. at 187.
102
The Masters Report to the Supreme Judicial Court of Suffolk County noted the
negative impact of the case on the reputation of the school in its decision:
[T]here was a danger of a detrimental effect upon the student body
because . . . the petitioner had been apparently successfully utilizing
knowledge obtained at Portia Law School for wrongful uses; and that the
moral, if not the legal, aspects of all of these matters were such, regardless
82
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
noteworthy that the Portia Law School Catalog for the term 1930-1931,
unlike the same catalog during the years of Jama Whites attendance,103
contained the following admonitions:
[T]he school reserves the right and the student concedes to the
school the right to require the withdrawal of any student at any
time for any reason deemed sufficient to it, and no reason for
requiring such withdrawal need be given.
This refers to character as well as to scholarship. When a student
exerts undesirable influence on others . . . she may at any time be
required to withdraw, even if no specific charges are made
against her.104
This rather astonishing lack of due process by modern standards was

founded on the principle that [a]ttendance at the School is a privilege and
not a right.105 Given the details of the White litigation, it serves as an ex
post facto justification for the lack of due process apparently given during
Whites dismissal and as a legal predicate for taking such actions in the
future.
The harshness of this language reflects the degree to which MacLean
had been stung by the entire Jama White episode. He was a man of some
rectitude, serving at the helm of a successful, yet fragile, and somewhat
controversial institution. Despite Drachmans conclusions about race and
Katherine Rosss somewhat more nuanced acceptance of them, MacLeans
response to White probably had little or no connection to race. 106 As
Drachman admits, other black students, including Jacqueline Lloyd Guild,
Blanche Braxton, and Dorothy Crockett, attended Portia without incident
of the petitioners economic necessity, that if her practices . . . were

permitted to continue, or pass unnoticed . . . they could have none other
than a detrimental effect upon the good name and character of Portia Law
School and would tend to be destructive of its established purposes,
moral aims and high ideals.
Report of Master, White v. Portia L. Sch., No. 2744, 32, at 31 (Sup. Jud. Ct., Suffolk
Cnty. 1930).
103 Catalog for the Term 1925-1926, PORTIA L. SCH., at 20 (1926) [hereinafter Catalog for the
Term 1925-1926].
104
Catalog for the Term 1930-1931, supra note 39, at 19.
105
Id.; see generally Ross, supra note 91.
106
MacLeans daughter denied that there was any possibility that her father was
motivated by racism in dismissing White. When asked about the black student who was
expelled from Portia, she wouldnt for one minute believe that it was because *the student+
was black. April Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, supra note 25. Though he was a man
of strict moral code who would not have tolerated deception, he would otherwise have
extended a helping hand to someone in Whites position. See id.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
83
and were often affirmatively helped by the school.107 Guild belonged to the
clique of serious students at Portia (i.e., those who intended to become
real lawyers), and indeed she was the third black woman to pass the bar in
Massachusetts. She went on to practice at her fathers firm.108 In 1923,
Braxton was the first African-American woman admitted to the
Massachusetts bar; in 1932, Crockett was the first African-American
woman to pass the Rhode Island bar. 109
MacLeans response to White would likely have been much the same,
whatever the defiant students skin color.110 MacLean was a master of
publicity in advancing his institution; he simply could not tolerate a
student bringing such disrepute to Portia Law School by misusing the law
she had been taught there. Nor would it seem that MacLean was motivated
by gender. Considering his overall respect for women, albeit in a
traditional way, and his marriage to a woman with strong progressive
views, it appears that even had White been a man, MacLean would have
responded similarly to such a prolonged embarrassment to the school. If
MacLean bears some fault in this incident, this is likely due to his
paternalism (i.e., Father knows best and doesnt have to give reasons.).
His own daughter describes him as warm and friendly, and his letters
reflect the same rather benign paternalism.111 However, he placed a high
priority on manners, he could be very formal. He was rather unforgiving
in general about failures to live up to his high moral standards. 112 A law
school today might give a student exhibiting the same outrageous
disrespect for law and for her institution considerably more due process,
but it likely would have reached the same decision, whatever that students
gender or color.
107
See DRACHMAN, supra note 56, at 161 (describing how MacLean and Paige helped an
African-American student graduate after her family suffered serious financial loss by
providing her with a scholarship and a free bar review course).
108
CHESTER, supra note 31, at 29.
109
See HAMILTON, supra note 11, at 35.
110
Apparently MacLean did not see the following case as casting the same moral shadow
on the school, perhaps because the students suit did not prove to be frivolous: When a
beautiful first year law student, Miss Griffin, was spurned after a promise of marriage from a
man who, unbeknownst to her, was married with five children, she sued for breach of
contract. In April of 1937, a Middlesex Probate Court returned a verdict for $1500. Miss Griffin
went on to graduate in June of 1940, despite the flurry of media that followed her case. His
Kisses Were Not So Hot, BOS. GLOBE, Apr. 24, 1937, at 3, reprinted in NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF
LAW ARCHIVES BOX 16, at folder 8.
111
112
Id.
84
VII.
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
The Law School Thrives and Then Begins to Lose Enrollment
By the end of the 1920s, Portia was enjoying great success. According
to Professor Philip Hamilton, 414 students enrolled in 1928 and 410
enrolled in 1929.113 The stock market crash and ensuing Depression
decreased enrollments significantly during the first years of the 1930s.114 In
1933, Portia enrolled only 275 students, a number that dropped to 240 by
1935.115 Nonetheless, Arthur MacLean emerged in the summer of 1933 as
somewhat of a national spokesman for womens education. He took a
steamship tour aboard the United Fruit Liner Chiriqui to the West Coast,
and notice of his arrival appeared in the newspapers of his various ports of
call.116 Exemplary were his comments in the Long Beach Press Telegram upon
his arrival on July 18th. The article titled Law School Head Thinks Women
Lead as Lawyers: Boston Visitor Sees Mens Supremacy Challenged by the Other
Sex, quoted MacLean saying that mans age-old supremacy in the legal
profession is being questioned by women.117
On the following day, the Los Angeles Times ran the story Women Win
Praise for Law Work: Founder of Portia Law School Here on Sea Trip Tells of
Their Adaptability. Women, MacLean was quoted as saying, are proving
themselves peculiarly adapted by temperament to the practice of law.
Then he launched into his women as uniquely better theme although he
had expanded the areas in which he believed women to have special
expertise: In a criminal case a clients [sic] will invariably confide entirely
in a woman attorney, whereas he often withholds pertinent information
from his male counsel. . . . By nature women attorneys are more thorough
in the exacting detail of civil procedure, as [well as] title examination and
corporation practice.118
Particularly noteworthy, here, was that MacLean believed that even
male defendants in criminal cases would confide better in female attorneys
than they would in male attorneys. Also, womens superiority had been
extended by MacLean, to corporate law, bastion of the Boston Brahmin
Harvard-educated bar, and to civil procedure, the subject necessary for
113
See Letter from Philip Hamilton, supra note 5.
114
See id.
115
See id.
116
See Women Win Praise for Law Work, supra note 17.
117
Law School Head Thinks Women Lead as Lawyers: Boston Visitor Sees Mens Supremacy
Challenged by the Other Sex, LONG BEACH PRESS TELEGRAM, July 18, 1933, reprinted in NEW
ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW, ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 6, at 52.
118
Women Win Praise for Law Work, supra note 17.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
85
courtroom combat.119 No longer was MacLean saying that women were

merely superior law students; he was touting their entry not only into the
big-money corporate world but the courtroom itself, a place like the
surgical suite, where women had historically been considered unfit to enter
due to intelligence and temperament. Faced with declining enrollments,
MacLean was really selling here. Were enough peoplemale and
femalereally listening?
Virginia Drachmans verdict is mixed:
The period from 1900 to the 1930s marked an era when optimism
about the possibilities for women in the law was tempered by a
growing pessimism about the realities of women lawyers
professional achievements. The legal profession remained in
many ways engendered and closed to women. . . . Gradually they
recognized the hard fact that women lawyers were far from
achieving their goal of professional equality with men.120
In continuing to push into the profession, women generally took one of

two basic positions. Some, much like MacLean himself, tried to
reinterpret[] for the twentieth century the notion of sexual differences and
womans unique virtues.121 At the same time, [o]thers turned their back
on these nineteenth-century values . . . claiming the virtues of universal
equality between men and women.122 According to Drachman, women of
both views, like women today, were engaged in the ongoing struggle to
balance gender and professional identity.123
The public followed this struggle with identity closely. Even while
women began accumulating the support and admiration of much of the
media, most articles and pronouncements focus[ed] on spinsters and
widows forced by circumstances to support themselves or on blithe young
girls who would quit their jobs when Mr. Right appeared.124 These
articles often finished with a note on the girls gardening conquests or
other feminine hobbies. Many women who had entered the work force
119
Id.
120
121
Id. at 249.
122
Id.
123
Id.
124
HUMMER, supra note 35, at 8. But even spinsters remained suspect: *The s]ingle
woman is liable at any time to marry, reasoned one judge who ruled against female
attorneys. Id. at 43. The reaction to this so-called liability was often reflected in office
policies. In a 1931 office firm survey, *m+ore than 50% of all firms in the sample would not
hire married women as a condition of policy and discretion. Claudia Goldin, Understanding
the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, in EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY:
LABOR MARKET DISCRIMINATION AND PUBLIC POLICY 24 (Paul Berstein ed., 1994).
86
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
during the First World War fell victim to a patriotic incentive to return to
the home after the war. 125 Articles, like lawyer Lucy R. Tuniss I Gave Up
My Law Books for a Cook Book,126 nudged women away from high-powered
careers in favor of being better homemakers and promised that a
husbands happiness was a rich enough reward to satisfy any aspiring
career-woman.127
As evidence of MacLeans need for funds and his schools lack of a
strong feminist identity, Portia made occasional pleas to the
Commonwealth to allow it to admit men.128 While Arthur MacLean was
clearly aware of womens struggles, he refrained from vocally advocating
for political and social change, in favor of bringing about change at the
grassroots level.129 Most of his attention was being occupied by the very
real financial struggle to keep his law school afloat. In January 1933, he
made a public plea for funds. Noting that [t]he education of woman is still
a comparatively new idea and that [t]he modern belief is that educated
women do become more interesting wives and more valuable members of
the community, he concluded that the idea was not yet old enough to
have touched peoples pocketbooks:
Men have given generously to the education of men. The mens
colleges are gradually being endowed . . . . Compared to the
funds available for the education of men, womens colleges are in
a pitiable condition. The bulk of the nation is still controlled by
125 HUMMER, supra note 35, at 3 (internal quotation marks omitted) (The same patriotism
which induced women to enter industry during the war should induce them to vacate their
positions after the war.).
126
Lucy R. Tunis, I Gave Up My Law Books for a Cook Book, AM. MAG., July 1927, at 14.
127
Id. The vestiges of this era live on today. The authors research assistant, Grace E.
Owens, recalled that when she announced her engagement to her grandmother, the reaction
was shock and disappointment. Her grandmother assumed this meant she would discontinue
her studies and begin her life as a wife. Although many women (as well as society as a whole)
still clung to the idea that home should be a vocation in and of itself and should take up all of
a womans time, a third option beside family or career soon emerged in the 1920s: perhaps
one could do both. Though few in number, women lucky enough to have the support of their
families and educators successfully balanced both a family and a career. Some even thought
this system superior, partially because the extra family income allowed the hiring of
household help: By letting someone inferior in brains do all the drudgery while she devotes
herself to the education and mental and moral training of her children, she should be a far
better wife and mother than the old fashioned woman. DOERSCHUK, supra note 71, at 60-61.
However, supporters of the movement mourned the lack of guidance *+or guidelines to help
them live in the two spheres. SOLOMON, supra note 32, at 176.
128
See Chester, supra note 3.
129
See id.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
87
the male sense of the importance of men.130
At the Illinois Womens College (by then renamed MacMurray College

for a generous benefactor), Clarence P. McClelland referred continually in
his annual reports to the difficult economics of the times and its effect on
his struggling womens college. For example, in the same year as
MacLeans complaint, McClelland wrote: It is not strange that our college
should be affected by the economic storm which has been of hurricane
proportions and devastating in its effects. Of course we know that we are
still afloat, but how seriously have we been damaged?131 McClelland went
on to note: [Our] endowment [has been] most seriously affected by the
economic depression.132 Unlike MacLean, who blamed a shrinking
endowment on lack of giving in the first place, McClelland attributed the
shrinkage as due to investment losses.133
VIII.
A Dream Deferred?
As the 1930s began, economic gloom settled on all colleges (which

Portia still was) and especially those for women. Not only were
enrollments largely on the decline, but whatever opportunities there had
been for women entering the legal field began to evaporate. During the
Great Depression, the argument [that there should be] a family wage 134 was
reintroduced with new vigor, and there was an insistence that women
leave the labor force to make room for men in a scarce labor market.135
Although women were still matriculating at Portia in fairly large numbers
during the 1930s, the optimism of the previous decade began to flounder
on the rocks of largely nonexistent job opportunities.
In 1940, Bessie Page, Portias leading teacher (male or female), reflected
on the hard realities for women in the legal profession during the 1930s:
Years ago I found words which expressed for me my thoughts for Portia
130 Portia Law School Has its Silver Anniversary, Jan. 15, 1933, reprinted in NEW ENGLAND
SCHOOL OF LAW, ARCHIVE SCRAPBOOK 6, at 7.
131 23 BULLETIN OF MACMURRAY COLLEGE FOR WOMEN: PRESIDENTS REPORT AND
FINANCIAL STATEMENT FOR THE COLLEGE YEAR 1932-1933, SERIES 1 NO. 7, at 3 (1933).
132
Id. at 8.
133
See id.
134
Contrived by male trade unionists at the beginning of the nineteenth century to aid in
their efforts to gain better wages, the argument for a family wage rested on the concept that
a single wage (earned by the man) was enough to support a wife and children. OXFORD
DICTIONARY OF SOCIOLOGY 225 (Gordon Marshall ed., 2d ed. 1998), available at http://www.
encyclopedia.com/doc/1O88-familywage.html.
135 PEMINA MIGDAL GLAZER & MIRIAM SLATER, UNEQUAL COLLEAGUES: THE ENTRANCE OF
WOMEN INTO THE PROFESSIONS, 1890-1940, at 242 (1987).
88
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
graduates going into a field not too eager to receive them. She continued:
I love you for what you are, but I love you more for what you are
going to be,
I love you not so much for your realities as for your ideals.
I pray for your desires that they may be great, rather than for
your satisfactions which may be so hazardously little;
You are going forward toward something great, and therefore, I
love you.136
This soulful acknowledgement that the dreams of Portia graduates might

not be realized but that they had participated in something great, which
would eventually bear fruit, would serve as a fitting epitaph for Arthur
MacLeans experiment.
IX.
The Character of an Educator
So, as MacLean sat down to write his message to the Class of 1941, he
may have been composing a valedictory both for himself and for the school
he founded. According to his daughter Jean, MacLean had been sickly,
particularly since a time in the 1920s when he was hospitalized with a
severe pancreatic disorder.137 She noted that he always predicted that he
would not live past his early sixties, and in this, he was to prove
prescient.138
The message penned to the Class of 1941 was aimed toward the past,
not toward the future, and is not without a certain melancholy: If I had
attempted to look ahead, from the time Portia Law School was founded,
thirty-three years ago, to the present, the intervening period of some four
hundred months would have seemed almost interminable, but in
retrospect, the time has been very short.139 After listing the changes in his
institution over the years, MacLean mused: The causes for these changes
were unforeseen and unforeseeable. The day division of the law school was
created to meet a surprising increase of interest in the study of law by
women.140 Moreover, [t]he College of Liberal Arts and Calvin Coolidge
Law School were the direct result of the raising of the entrance
requirements to law school by the Supreme Judicial Court.141
136 Bessie Nadine Page, Message, 1940 THE LEGACY 8, 8 [hereinafter Message from Bessie
Nadine Page].
137
138
March Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, supra note 55.
139
Message from the Dean, supra note 4.
140
Id.
141
Id.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
89
As with institutions, so with individuals, continued MacLean, who

may have been thinking of the strange and unexpected twists and turns his
own career had taken. He emphasized how individuals might one day
find [themselves] engaged in widely different field[s] of employment
from those [they] originally had planned, through circumstances which
[could not] be foreseen.142 To meet these unexpected challenges, as
MacLean himself had, it is elementary that you must strive . . . to achieve
a constant growth in character. . . . [C]haracter and education should go
hand in hand. Character, without education, is easily deceived. Education
without character, often does more harm than good.143
Later in 1941, as the War became a reality and his law school faced
severely diminished enrollment, MacLean married a second time, to Mary
Coleman, an Irish-Catholic from the same area in northern Maine as
MacLeans parents had come from.144 The marriage took place in
Brattleboro, Vermont, and MacLean had to convert to Catholicism in order
to wed. Mary was the daughter of a sea captain and had little or no means.
Mary was certainly no Bertha Robinson MacLean, who, after her
divorce from MacLean, first married her horse trainer and then later
married a prominent Boston lawyer. Although little is known of Mary
Coleman, it is known that MacLeans family did not approve because of
her religion and her working-class origins. She and Arthur were married
only a year and one-half.145
Mary invited the family to her small apartment for MacLeans wake.
As Scottish-English Episcopalians, Berthas children may have been
uncomfortable in this working class Irish-Catholic setting. Apparently, so
was Professor Nelson C. Hannay of Portia, who also attended. 146 The
family did not feel this was the kind of send-off that one would expect for a
man who was so prominent in the Boston areaand to some extent
nationallyand they were upset by it.
As previously mentioned, there were scattered obituaries, but nothing
very detailed.147 By the time of Arthur MacLeans death on February 28,
1943,148 the law school itself was in such bad shape that it, too, failed to
publicize his passing. Only eight people graduated from Portia in the
142
Id.
143
Id.
144
See Certificate of Marriage, supra note 18.
145
See Registry Division, City of Boston, Certificate of Death for Arthur W. MacLean (Feb.
28, 1943) [hereinafter Certificate of Death] (on file with author).
146
March Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, supra note 55.
147
See sources cited supra note 19.
148
Certificate of Death, supra note 145.
90
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
v. 46 | 65
spring of that year.149 The following year saw only two students
graduate.150 In effect, Dean MacLean and the old Portia Law School had
died together, and no one much noticed. There was, after all, a war on.
Mary laid MacLean to rest in a very inexpensive, small plot in the
famous Mount Auburn Cemetery of Cambridge and Watertown. This
burial also drew little attention, and the author had to do research in City
of Boston and cemetery records to find MacLeans simple slab gravestone.
According to cemetery records, the plot was so small that when Mary died,
her casket was buried on top of MacLeans without any marker.151 Arthur
MacLean effectively disappeared from the history books until the 1980s
when the law school that he had founded began to remember him. This
article is in part an outgrowth of that renewed interest.
X.
Conclusion: Arthur MacLeans Significant American Life
Arthur MacLean came from a working-class background and was

buried by a working-class wife. Little attention was thus paid to his coming
and going. But in between, Arthur MacLean lived an amazing American
life; he was living proof that the American Dream sometimes works very
well, indeed.
MacLean was the son of a machinist; he worked his way through high
school, college, and law school; he ran successful businesses and a
flourishing, unique law school. This man was a believer in education, who
read The Aeneid to his children at bedtime and wrote colorful history
lessons into his lovingly written letters.152 Described as dignified,
courteous, even tempered, sociable, and witty,153 Arthur MacLean should
be fondly and adequately remembered. Drachmans viewsthat, at least
in the Jama White case, he was guilty of racism; that he had an oldfashioned view of women; and that he was far more interested in making
profit than in the education of womenare simply not supported by the
facts.
While he viewed women as different than men, he pled the case for
their excellence both long and well. When he incorporated his law school
149
Letter from Philip Hamilton, supra note 5.
150
Id.
151
See Series of Interviews with Robert G. Keller, Dir. of Cemetery Sales, Mt. Auburn
Cemetery (May 2010) (on file with the author).
152 For example, in a letter to his daughter written while MacLean was vacationing in the
seaside town of St. Andrews, he recounted the story of its settlement by loyalist New
Englanders during the Revolution. Letter from Dr. Arthur W. MacLean to Jean Currie (Aug.
18, 1940) (on file with the author).
153
NATIONAL CYCLOPAEDIA, supra note 21.
2011
11/8/2011 11:27 AM
91
in 1919, he did so as a charitable, non-profit corporation, like any college or

university. He had good relations with blacks and several prominent black
women like Jacqueline Lloyd Guild and Dorothy Crockett who graduated
from the law school with no problemsGuild even recalled the help,
financial and otherwise, given to her by MacLean and his ally in the Jama
White case, Bessie Page.154 Arthur MacLean believed that no gender or
stratum of society was inherently inferior to any other.155 He was, in fact,
far ahead of his time.
If one finally is to understand Arthur MacLean, one must focus on
MacLeans abiding belief in equal opportunitythat everyone (black,
white, male, female, poor, or poorer) should be given a chanceand that
chance came largely through education. His part-time law school for
working women embodied that credo. He lived the equal opportunity
dream, and he spent his life offering opportunity where there had been
little. While it can be argued that his efforts were not entirely successful
during his lifetime, the seeds he planted cannot be denied: Today women
of all social classes and ethnicities are entering the legal profession in huge
numbers.
It is the conclusion of this author that MacLean was forgotten largely
because of the circumstances of his death and the concomitant demise 156 of
the womens law school he founded.157 He was a champion of women,
particularly working-women, and a hero in the most American of ways. He
and the womens law school he both founded and ran demonstrated
unequivocally that women were intellectually at least as fit as their male
counterparts and could take their place among men in the competitive
world of law. The author, a law professor himself, sees Arthur MacLeans
legacy in the hopeful face of every woman law student that sits before him
today.
154
See Ross, supra note 91, at 36-37.
155
Chester, supra note 3.
156
After the war, enrollment rates at Portia began to rise again, but nearly all the new
applicants were male (partially due to a G.I. bill facilitating the education of veterans, and
partially due to Portias newly open doors to men). See Letter from Philip Hamilton, supra
note 5. In 1969, the ABA officially granted the law school its approval, and the school changed
its name to New England School of Law. In 1998, New England was granted membership to
the Association of American Law Schools. It has continued to offer part-time and evening
classes, as well as a successful full-time program. One thousand ninety-eight students
enrolled at New England in 2009, more than half of whom were women.
157
However, class issues should not be entirely ignored. Portia was not an elite institution,
nor were many of its graduates successful by the standards of intellectual elites. These
factors undoubtedly contributed to historys orphaning of Arthur MacLean.

Chester: History's Orphan

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Chester: History's Orphan

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

Historys Orphan: Arthur MacLean and

In 1908, Arthur MacLean founded the first womens institution of

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

New England Law Review

[Picture in Print Volume]

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

Arthur MacLean and the Legal Education of Women

[T]here is properly no History; only Biography.1

I. Introduction: Beginning of the End at Portia Law School

n the spring of 1941, Arthur Winfield MacLean, sixty-one-year-old

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Essay I: History, in ESSAYS: FIRST SERIES 14 (1841).

Lend-Lease Act of 1941, Pub. L. No. 77-11, 55 Stat. 31, 33.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT & WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, STATEMENT BY THE PRIME MINISTER OF

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

New England Law Review

August, and the first ever peacetime conscription bill followed on

See PHILIP K. HAMILTON, NEW ENGLAND SCHOOL OF LAW 29 (2008).

Letter from Philip Hamilton, supra note 5.

HAMILTON, supra note 11, at 29.

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

Arthur MacLean and the Legal Education of Women

biography of Arthur MacLean attempts to answer: (1) why he was largely

31 THE NATIONAL CYCLOPAEDIA OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY 434-35 (1944) [hereinafter

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

New England Law Review

president of the National Association of Law Schools in 1938-39.22 This was

Certificate of Marriage, supra note 18.

Id. This book heralded an expansion in employment opportunities available to women.

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

Arthur MacLean and the Legal Education of Women

A Lawyer and Legal Educator of Women

When MacLean graduated from Boston University Law School in 1906,

A Dream That Came True, supra note 26.

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

New England Law Review

Opportunity for All, NEW ENG. L. | BOS., http://www.nesl.edu/historyproject/ (last visited

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

Arthur MacLean and the Legal Education of Women

MacLeans Portia Law School set out to be an important institution.

Ever the entrepreneur, MacLean continued to teach at both Suffolk and

Chester, supra note 3 (manuscript at 3).

Chester, supra note 3 (manuscript at 3).

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

New England Law Review

April Telephone Interview with Jean Currie, supra note 25.

Chester, supra note 3.

EVELYN M. MONAHAN & ROSEMARY NEIDEL-GREENLEE, A FEW GOOD WOMEN: AMERICAS

See CHESTER, supra note 31, at 21.

MONAHAN & NEIDEL-GREENLEE, supra note 48, at 14 (*A+fter seventy-two years of

HUMMER, supra note 35, at 4.

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

Arthur MacLean and the Legal Education of Women

MacLeans Views on Womens Abilities in Law

See HUMMER, supra note 35, at 3.

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

New England Law Review

That same year, MacLean made a rather remarkable statement about

DRACHMAN, supra note 56, at 159.

CHESTER - FINAL (DO NOT DELETE)

Arthur MacLean and the Legal Education of Women

Drachman, MacLeans traditional views about women created an

BEATRICE DOERSCHUK, BUREAU OF VOCATIONAL INFORMATION, BULLETIN NO. 3, WOMEN