Clearing the Smoke-Filled Room: Women Jurors and the Disruption of an Old-Boys’ Network in Nineteenth- Century America

Abstract

In May of 1884, Massachusetts lawyer Lelia Robinson arrived in Seattle, Washington Territory, at the end of a transcontinental journey with the " woman question" foremost in her mind. The territorial legislature had just passed a women's suffrage act, and Robinson had been drawn westward by the possibility of witnessing women serve on grand and petit juries. She arrived skeptical, believing that the scope of women's political rights had been extended too far. " [W]hatever might be the policy and the desirability of women's voting," she wrote, "it was carrying the matter a little too far to force them to do jury service." Gradually, she became convinced that the women of Washington represented paradigmatic jurors. She described them as "ladies to whom any one might gladly entrust the settlement of any question, civil or criminal, that must be carried into a court of justice ... ." Robinson's sentiment evolved in response to the changed behavior she witnessed inside the courtroom-a development she attributed to the presence of women. Remarkably, after vigorous discussion and judicious examination of evidence, the women jurors appeared to be less tired and in better health than their male counterparts. The men of the jury found themselves at the end of the trial to have been "great sufferers in being deprived of the use of their favorite weed .... [W]hen women jurors came in, smoking jurors went out-or rather the cigars and pipes went out. Men found that they must be gentlemen in the jury-room as in the drawingroom." 4 By Robinson's estimation, women had entered the proverbial smoke-filled room of the law and quite literally cleared the air.