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PORTLAND, MULTNOMAH COUNTY; 1900s:

West’s first female lawyer:
A legal Mother Teresa?

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By Finn J.D. John
May 27, 2012

NOT MANY YEARS ago, smug historians thought they understood the story of Oregon’s first female attorney. But — what if they’d gotten it completely wrong? What if the woman they’d blithely pigeonholed as a garden-variety grasping nag was, in fact, a sort of Mother Teresa to the down-and-out prostitutes and working girls of Portland’s notoriously seamy waterfront?

Looking over the historical record, it’s at least a strong possibility.

The historical record of Mary’s life is mostly extrapolation. We know a few facts, and the historian explains those facts by guessing at the reasons behind them. The most well known account, that of Malcolm Clark Jr., is full of that sort of thing.

As long as it’s not labeled as proven fact, there’s nothing wrong with extrapolation. The trouble is, these guesses about Mary come to us filtered through the eyes of 19th-century men (often newspaper reporters), and saturated with that odd (to us) mixture of dismissive condescension and self-interested gallantry with which those long-gone guys viewed women — especially uppity ones.

No great surprise: the resulting picture of Mary Leonard, passed down through the years to us, is of a stereotype-infused caricature, a ridiculous sort of extreme picture of a grasping, nagging, husbandless hag, bereft of brains but making up for it by trading on her protected status as a member of the “fairer sex” and getting her way by burying her opponent under mountains of impassioned but meaningless blather.

Well, today I’m going to do some extrapolation of my own. I’m proposing a theory of Mary’s life. I can’t prove any of it, or most of it at any rate. But I suspect it’s at least closer to the truth than others have gotten.


The Mother Teresa theory:

As you read the following, please remember that it's a theory. None of it is to be taken as proven historical fact. It is, however, entirely possible, and in places (in my view) very likely.

In this, my historical theory, Mary may or may not have been her husband's murderer, but he did kill her: He infected her with syphilis, a case of which he had, in my theory, picked up earlier in his life; remember, he was pushing 60 when they were wed. Mary is now forced to give up any plans she'd had for starting a family. Revulsion, anger and determination not to give birth to a syphilitic child cause her to cut her husband off from what he later referred to as his "marital rights," so he files for divorce and kicks her out of the house. And while that divorce is pending, someone — maybe it was even her! — slips into his house and shoots him in the head.

Now, charged with this crime, Mary is in the Wasco County Jail. She is, in a very real sense, ruined; she can never have a family; no future husband will want a syphilitic wife; she's done. She probably cries a lot. She's in there for a long time — roughly a year — while her case drags on.

But during that time, she meets some other jailbird women. The stories they tell put hers to shame. She soon sees that, poorly as she’s been treated, they’re getting much worse, and they need a friend. She determines that, if she gets out of jail, she will be that friend.

Then she’s declared not guilty, handed her late husband’s complete inheritance, and sent out into the community. She stays in The Dalles exactly zero days longer than she absolutely has to; that much we know. Conventional wisdom is that her reputation as a suspected murderess drove her out of town. But if that’s the case, why would she not take her newly gotten money and go someplace where she was unknown, but could make a fresh start? Maybe open a store in a tiny town somewhere in Idaho, maybe meet a nice not-too-young widower and make a quiet, happy life there?

No. Instead of that, she moves to Portland — where, thanks to the excellent newspaper coverage of her murder trial, she is well known already — and plunges into the worst neighborhood in town and sets up a boardinghouse. A place for girls and women exactly like the ones she met in jail. As historian Clark rather boorishly puts it, a “côte for soiled doves.”

Now, remember, this is a boardinghouse for the lowest-status people in the city. It’s probably safe to assume that year after year, teenage girls are moving into her place, trying to work at the theater or factory, slipping into desperation, becoming prostitutes, getting raped and assaulted, turning to whisky and opium and fading away into oblivion and disappearing. Where do old prostitutes go, anyway? Had you asked Mary, it’s a good bet she’d know. Because, I would argue, she’d made a deliberate decision to spend her life helping them.


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An old portrait of Mary Leonard, found in a family album in Switzerland in 1965, made in Portland in 1890 or 1891 when Mary was roughly 45 years old. (Photo: Oregon Historical Quarterly)


Why she decided to study law (maybe):

She runs the boardinghouse for four years, and then she starts studying law. Now, why on Earth would she ever want to do that? To make money, perhaps? But at that time, there had never been a female attorney in the history of the state. There were a few of them around the country, but they weren’t getting rich at it. And female lawyers were still illegal in most states, including Oregon; there was a strong possibility that she would never be admitted to the profession at all, and those years of study would be utterly wasted. No, money couldn’t be it.

Fame, then? Not likely. Mary’d had a bellyful of fame.

Clark suggests that maybe she thought she might need good legal advice again someday, and that it would be wise to grow her own, as it were. That theory works great … as a punchline for a lame joke, that is. Two years of one’s life is a crazy price to pay for free legal advice that one may never actually need.

The one explanation nobody’s paid any attention to until just recently (a tip of the hat here to historian Kerry Abrams of Stanford) is Mary’s own — delivered to Abigail Scott Duniway in an interview:

“Many are the wrongs I have suffered in my time, and besides, so many inflicted upon others came under my observation that my heart went out to all womankind, and I resolved to do all I could to assist my sisters who were less fortunate,” she told Duniway. “You just let me get a legal clutch on some of those who wrong and plunder members of my sex, and see if they long escape punishment.”

This is the only explanation that makes any sense at all — essentially, that Mary got into law to help the helpess. A woman of independent means and a skeleton in her closet plunges into the worst neighborhood of Portland, starts taking in prostitutes and impoverished girls and women as boarders, decides she’s going to learn to handle herself in a court of law, and then, upon admission, practices primarily in criminal courts representing those same impoverished women — you have to work very hard to make that pattern of facts add up to any other explanation.

Clark gives it a shot, implying dismissively that she practiced mostly in criminal court because she was too incompetent to do anything else. And we do know she wasn’t a detail person. But it seems unlikely that an attorney with her known rhetorical skills — she did, after all, successfully argue for her own admission before both the state supreme court and the state legislature — would have had no more lucrative options available to her.


Madness ruins her reputation

Later in her life, Mary seems to have declined slowly into a sort of low-grade madness. Her behavior got really erratic and more than a little unethical starting in the late 1890s. This can only be explained as some sort of worsening medical condition. My theory, of course, was that it was the syphilis given her by her husband reaching the tertiary stage, the stage that sent Christopher Columbus over the edge of lunacy. Syphilis would explain why she never remarried or, so far as I’ve been able to learn, even indulged in any kind of romance after leaving The Dalles. In any case, her pitiful antics during these later years cast a big, ugly shadow on the legacy of what she had accomplished a few years before.

Mary is gone now, and remembered chiefly as a sort of adorably crazy old nag, to be smiled at indulgently and immediately dismissed, who just happened, through no fault or merit of her own, to have ended up as the first female attorney in the state of Oregon.

I can’t represent my theory of Mary’s story as truth; at best, as I said, it’s informed guesswork. But I can guarantee this much: It's a lot closer to the truth than the conventional wisdom on her story.


(Sources: Clark, Malcolm H. “The Lady and the Law,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, June 1955; Abrams, Kerry. “Folk Hero, Hell Raiser, Mad Woman, Lady Lawyer,” womenslegalhistory.stanford.edu)

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