October 2007

Three Lady Lawyer Legislators Who Showed Us The Way

by George W. Scott

In the 21st century, it goes without saying that women are as capable as men of earning advanced degrees, practicing law, and serving as legislators. But this wasn’t always the case; in centuries past, female politicians and legislators faced a long and difficult battle for acceptance and respect. Even today, many people aren’t aware of the fascinating life stories of the trail-blazing women who led the way to equal representation in state government.

Washington women first got the vote in 1883, and tipped the 1884 elections for law and order. Owners of closed saloons and brothels took suffrage to court, and in 1887 and 1888, on the thinnest of technicalities, the Supreme Court revoked their vote. In a false dawn, Republican Frances Axtell, a Bellingham doctor’s wife, and Tacoma’s Nena Croake, a progressive and osteopath, took seats in the 1913 Legislature after the Legislature had granted women the vote a third time, only to have male voters take it away in a 1914 referendum, under the same influences as 30 years before. The political presence of women was not permanent until Amendment XIX to the U.S. Constitution was passed in 1920.1 Three lawyer-legislators of very different temperaments are exemplars of the evolution of women’s electoral power.

Senator Reba Hurn: Two Firsts

Reba Hurn, the first woman admitted to the State Bar and the only woman lawyer or elected official in the city or county of Spokane, became the first female state senator in 1922. The question of whether a woman should be in politics at all still hovered. None of the five women previously elected to the House had survived to a second term. Hurn reasoned that in four years the novelty might wear off.2 Governor Louis Hart’s Administrative Code of 1921 had sorted and recombined the state’s proliferating agencies, but the economy east of the Cascades was in free fall, and the public mood was “hold the line.” All but three of the 42 senators were Republicans, so fights were more geographic than philosophic.

Hurn wanted to be thought of as a senator, not as a woman. She put up with cigar smoking with politesse, entertained wives, and at least once, hosted the entire Senate for breakfast. Women were saddled with the Public Morals, Libraries, or Education committees until the 1930s. Senator Hurn was the first not made to carry a “female” portfolio, unless it was Prohibition, a residue of the wreckage she had seen in the small town in the Midwest in her childhood. Washington had passed Prohibition in 1916. The need was to sustain a law honored in the breach by most colleagues. In 1923, her Public Morals panel favored a “Temperance Day” in the public schools that was not signed by the governor.3 Assignment to Education and Parks, and heading the Library Committee and Educational Institutions in her second term, were predictable. Two years later she broke precedent in being on the Judiciary and the Appropriations committees, which had not been considered “women’s work.” She also flourished her conservative colors. Hurn was one of four members (of 13) voting against the UW’s budget, a teachers’ retirement fund, and even against reopening the Women’s Industrial Home, a correctional facility at Medical Lake. Economy took priority over a cause local women had worked on for two years, but buying seeds for drought-stricken farmers and turning idleness into education at the penitentiary was worth it.4

Senator Hurn’s first speech in 1925 was in support of regulating the workplaces of those under 18. Indicative of the times, it was badly defeated, as was a substitute referendum in 1926. She was tactfully neutral in the legislators’ struggle with the incorrigible Governor Roland Hartley, although one of his 59 vetoes in 1927 excised the help for farmers.5 Hurn was not at odds with the strongest lobbies of the time — business, tax hawks, the farmers, and the “drys” at home — but cast a flinty eye on their mainly “fluid” tactics. Her bill regulating and registering them is the earliest attempt at public disclosure. Senator Hurn’s fall can ironically be ascribed to an effort for efficiency, a 1929 bill to end her county’s superfluous townships, whose paid officials rose up against her in 1930. Reba endured in a man’s world for eight years because she fit her times, was talented, demure, feminine, diplomatic, and charactered, a “woman in full.” And “after all, there are no women’s issues” to rile her male peers. She was accepted, but could not avoid what she most feared — being unique, a minority of one.6

Senator Lady Willie Forbus: Steel Magnolia

As World War II unfolded, women lost critical mass in the Senate for three decades. Lady Willie7 Forbus, the fiercest feminine force of her generation, was a burr under the saddles of what became an old boys’ club. Told by the Harvard Law School they did not take women, Forbus went to Michigan, and was the only female in a class of 50, in 1918. She got off a day coach in Seattle with $10 in her pocket, and went to the YWCA. The handicaps of being a female lawyer, brilliant, and extraordinarily ambitious and fired by a desire for a public career, soon made Forbus the most controversial woman in Seattle’s public eye since Anna Louise Strong.8

Two decades later, she advised a woman inquirer: “Some lawyers, like myself, have to go out into the community and create a demand….” She still wanted to believe “[t]he opportunities for women are just exactly the same as men, but business is harder to get…there is still some sex discrimination, and men lawyers…are given to the false notion that they are the chosen people….”9 “I was a curiosity,” she finally admitted in 1983, “but when I began dealing with them, they discovered I was tough and hard … so that I had to build my way.” “I was brought up to believe you raised yourself by your bootstraps…with my mother’s insistence and ambition to move out of the class we were in …” but was not conscious of it.10 In 1922, she convinced a grand jury that a Seattle policeman was murdered with pistols of two different calibers, contrary to the county prosecutor’s perfunctory ruling of suicide. Challenging him brought visibility, a chance for a public career, and a way to prove her credo: “In brains there is no sex, in achievement no private hunting grounds.” Reality drew out vitriol: “The ‘gang’ was with him … the bank wreckers, ferry grabbers, the bootleggers, the ‘respectable thieves.’”11 She lost to Malcolm Douglas “because of last minute lies,” while running 12,000 votes ahead of the county Democratic ticket. In three years, Forbus had become “one of the best known and most capable attorneys in Seattle,”12 but her combination of courage and corrosiveness recurred in her campaigns for the Superior Court in 1932 and 1934, blunting her political aspirations for a decade.

She kept a pell-mell speaking schedule, testifying for a child-labor amendment at the Legislature (1925), an illegitimacy law, a home for the feeble-minded, teachers’ retirement, and a cabinet-level department of education. If one of 13 marriages ended in divorce in King County, she reasoned, one of 13 judges should be in a special “Family Relations Court.” Forbus applied to Governor Hartley for an opening on the bench. When “The plum…[fell] to a Lithuanian lumberjack-lawyer” (Kazis Kay), she announced: “I believe…the time has come when we should have a women’s viewpoint in our judicial system.” On running third in a Bar poll, she excoriated it as “reactionary and prejudiced.…Nobody knows better than I how little ability counts in this matter of a lawyer’s choice of a judge.”13 She lost in the primary.

In 1934, Forbus was down to 14 of the 825 votes in the Bar’s poll, and railing at “the leeches who fasten themselves on dead men’s estates, upon bankrupts, upon receiverships…” and vowing to “expose the lawyer’s recommendation racket.”14 “Many” women’s organizations had approached her, and though “women may reasonably insist upon greater representation,” she said she “preferred to base my claim … solely on my ability as a lawyer.” On surviving the primary, her tune changed. “A woman for judge … [i]t will be pioneering … for the Bar is opposed … and … will do everything in its power to prevent her election.” Women did not turn out in equal numbers, and she lost to an “old line” Democrat.”15

Known statewide after stumping 40 towns in three weeks as part of the Roosevelt Caravan in 1936, and as chair of the Democratic National Committee’s State Speakers’ Bureau, Forbus was still dogged by controversy.16 Her main chance lay in a smaller venue, the 44th District State Senate seat (Magnolia Hill and north, in Seattle), where her community work and intense campaigning had maximum impact. Elected in 1942, she got the chair of First Class Cities, on Judiciary and Revenue, all a novice could hope for. One of the “faithful group of 18,” the minority of the “Majority” flailing against a conservative Democrat-Republican operating coalition, Forbus failed to get the 40-mill limit restricted to homes valued under $5,000, or to amend the bills by the Business and Professional Women’s Club and Labor to broaden equal wages to all women.16

Forbus was intensely partisan. She fought Governor Langlie’s attempt to merge the natural-resource agencies, including forestry, the prized possession of the Democratic commissioner of public lands, whose office would be abolished and his peers threatened. The Governor counted on nine Democrats who Senator Forbus felt “deserted their party,” but was halted by GOP dissenters. Having lost a “split” decision to investigate Langlie’s release of prisoners for 1943 harvests, she begged off an ad-hoc committee to confer with him on the 1944 “soldier vote” bill, then damned his veto of extending polling hours to 10 p.m., and favored a one-time exception to the blanket primary in favor of partisan ballots.17 Senator Forbus’s greatest impact came when the Governor and the Liquor Board obtained scarce whiskey from Kentucky’s Waterfill and Frasier Distillery. She sensed the “tee-totaler” was vulnerable in rural counties, and stormed through them, asserting Langlie had personally profited. “Effective word-of-mouth lies,” mourned Fred Baker, Langlie’s consultant, after the Governor unexpectedly lost by 26,000 votes. Charlie Hodde, a former Democratic House member from Stevens County then lobbying for the Grange, was blunter: “[Mon] Wallgren beat Langlie on liquor.” 18

Forbus, at her apex in 1945 as chair of the Judiciary Committee, sided with Governor Wallgren’s liberal-labor administration to dispense all of the $172 million reserve built by the war. The Seattle Municipal League conceded she had a “good legislative Record,” and was a “hard worker.” As president of the Magnolia Community Club, she fought valiantly for 4,000 neighbors irate at the prospect the Seattle School and Park Boards would imperil 60 homes if a new field house was separated from the junior high school, but was unable to overcome the Republican upswing in 1946.19

Forbus is a study in chiaroscuro: the driving intellect, the ambition to “rise above one’s class,” the unwillingness to admit to professional limitations, the ongoing frustrations, and the contrasts between traditional marital views and modernist social stances.20 Fifteen years later, she drafted the planks for the King County Democratic platform demanding total nuclear disarmament and universal health insurance. Women’s suffrage, Forbus thought, obliged them to enter the “new Frontier” of public life. It was “highly unsportsmanlike and unbecoming for a woman to attack her own kind ....” If this did not apply to the men she contested, no one could accuse Senator Forbus of not being “a willing soldier in the field.” 21

Senator Jeannette Hayner: Washington’s “Iron Lady”

Almost a half century after the coming of the New Deal, Republicans in the State Senate overcame their minority status — and mentality.22 Jeannette Hayner (House 1973-77; Senate 1977-93), the most skillful leader of her era, returned the Senate to two-party politics. One of two women graduates of the University of Oregon School of Law in 1942, she was denied a job by Portland’s biggest law firms, and took one with the Bonneville Power Administration with characteristic aplomb: “That’s just the way things were then.” Hayner’s entries into politics were the Walla Walla School Board (1956-63), and community services from Meals on Wheels to the Mental Health Board, and being a Republican state committeewoman.

A traditional Republican upset at Governor Dan Evans’s liberalism, she emerged as an unflappable Senate minority leader in 1979, one as adaptable as Speaker Bill Polk was fixated on an impossible agenda. Her situation was dramatically more difficult. Hayner was installed in a 10-9 caucus coup over a well-liked Wenatchee apple-grower and “old boy.” His allies dropped out and played golf with business lobbyists as the 1980 campaign got underway. The “team effort” the winners had long called for was just six senators, three of them women. The Caucus’s new “executive chairman,” Spokane’s Bob Lewis, was preoccupied with a losing effort to keep his seat, leaving the GOP with a gain of five, one short of a majority, in November. The 1981 session was a month old when petulant Democratic Senator Peter von Reichbauer, provoked by now Congressman Jim McDermott, switched sides. The “Saint Valentine’s Day massacre” embittered Democrats, none of whom had ever been in the minority in the Senate, and jolted the GOP senators, none of whom had served in the majority. Overnight, the Senate changed, from what had been a men’s club in 1973 to a strident partisan battlefield with a woman in charge. Hayner had to mediate between equivocal Governor John Spellman who had bashed his erstwhile opponent, McDermott, as a taxing “Seattle liberal psychiatrist,” and now swung to new levies as the solution, and Polk, whose “troglodytes” promised no taxes and meant it. Hayner lacked a working majority. Three senators, as confused as conservative, tried to wag the Caucus’s dog. In 1981-83, an economic downturn led to a $1.2 billion deficit, the worst meltdown since 1933. For five sessions over the next 20 months, Hayner patiently led her caucus through grinding four-hour sittings, finding votes for nine taxes totaling $750 million, matched by cuts, with Spellman fighting one, and the Speaker the other. In January 1983, the GOP “majorities” were gone, and the governor mortally wounded.23

Hayner was alternately minority or majority leader until 1993.24 She sustained one-vote majorities with a special genius for keeping people together. The GOP caucus obeyed her infamous “Rule of 13.” Whatever a majority of her one-vote majorities decided was what was done, an unthinkable discipline in the “old” Senate. She admitted no personal agenda. If a Senate bill could not be “taken hostage” by the House, it was impossible to play the trading game. The Growth Management Act was just one of the laws enacted in the 1990s after meeting Hayner’s conditions, and with her help. She had the competence and confidence of a natural leader: “I was confident I could do [the challenges]; it never occurred to me that I couldn’t.… I treated everyone as individuals, not as male or female.”25 The “glass ceiling” was in shards.

By then, Washington had the highest ratio of female legislators in the nation (43 percent). In 2005, all four leaders of the Democratic majority were female, and five women and four men sat on the Supreme Court. But no former legislators were on the High Bench for the first time in decades, speaking to the decline in professionals, especially lawyers, in state elective office. Until the 1970s, a third of the Legislature was attorneys. In 1975, the Senate Judiciary Committee drafted a housewife, a farmer, a historian, and the author of this article to fill its seven chairs. The chairman rewrote the entire Civil Code for the first time since 1914 — in one session. Lacking precedents, we had only a foggy notion of what we were deciding. The Legislature gives a generalist’s education available nowhere else, but these are tasks for specialists. In 2003, the House Judiciary Committee had 10 members, but just one lawyer, the chair. In 2007, the Bar has 30,000 members, but only eight are among the 147 legislators. Think of it as a civic default. 

George W. Scott, Ph.D., served in both houses of the Washington State Legislature from 1969 to 1983, as a caucus chair, and chair of the budget-writing Ways and Means Committee during his 12 years in the Senate. He was WSBA director of public affairs (1985-88), then state archivist. Scott is author of A Majority of One: Legislative Life (Seattle: Civitas Press, 2002, 2003), Governors of Washington (2007), and Turning Points in Washington’s Public Life, (2007).

NOTES
 
1.  The initial act of 1883 is on page 40 of the Session Laws of that year, and a stronger act on page 113 of the Session Laws of 1886. Harland v. Terr., 131 struck the first, Bloomer v. Todd, 3 Wash. Terr., 599, 1888, the second. The first decision was decided for lack of a feminine pronoun (“women”) in the U.S. Constitution, which said: “All American citizen, male and female” should vote. The second, on the ground that women’s suffrage was a violation of the Organic Act.  See T.A. Larson, “The Woman Suffrage Movement in Washington.” Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 76 (4/76)(2), 49-62. The best survey of women who have labored in the state’s public vineyard is Jean W. Schuddakopf, ed., Women of Washington: Women’s Involvement in Community Concern. Gig Harbor: AAUW, Washington State, ca. 1975; “Here in Washington, women hold up more than half of state government,” Governor Gary Locke noted in 1997. Female officials and administrators had grown from 222 to 1,935 since 1989, from 21 to 40 percent. “Remarks of Governor Gary Locke to ECESW,” 6/4/97. Washington State Archives, Locke mss, bx 1, speeches 6/97. For the national scene, see Barbara Norander and Clyde Wilcox, “The Geography of Gender Power; Women in the Legislatures,” in Sue Thompson and Wilcox eds., Women in Elective Office: Past, Present and Future. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 103-115.
 2.  Hurn graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern in 1905, and the UW School of Law in 1913. Washington Alumnus, 16, (12/1924), 7-12. I am deeply indebted to Laura Arksey, whose articles “The Diaries of Reba Hurn, 1907-1908,” and “A Lady in the Senate: The Political Career of Reba Hurn,” appeared in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly, 95, (Fall, 2004), 182-93, and in Columbia, XX, (Winter, 2006).
 3.  In 1923, her Public Morals panel favored a “Temperance Day” in the public schools that was not signed by Governor Hartley. He tried to defeat her in the 1926 primary. She was denied re-election as president pro tempore (alternate presiding officer to the Lieutenant Governor), in 1929, over other issues.
 5.  Arksey, Laura, supra n. 2 at 16.
 6.  Arksey, Laura, supra n. 2 at 8; Spokane Spokesman-Review, 1/22/29. Hurn retired in 1946, lived in the Middle East for five years translating the Koran into English, and was in “People to People” delegations in the Eisenhower years. She died at age 86 in 1967. 
 7.  Into the 20th century, Mississippi girls named after their fathers had surnames preceded by “Lady.”
 8.  The outspoken labor and civil rights champion of the 1920s, and later an acolyte of Mao Tse Tung.
 9.   Lady Willie Forbus to Marjorie Mareso, 12/23/42. LWF Mss, UW, 259-2, 1-2.
 10.  Lady Willie Forbus, interview with Karen Blair, 7/3/83. LWF, 259-4.
 11.  Lady Willie Forbus to J.G. Doyle, 9/12/31. LWF 259-2, 2-1932.
 12.  Hanford, Cornelius, Seattle and Environs,. Seattle: Pioneer Historical Publishing Co., 1924, 171.
 13.  Forbus was endorsed by the new Women’s Legislative Council. Sophie L.W. Clark to LWF, 9/20/32, LWF 259-2, 3-WLC, ‘31-’37; LWF, “Radio speech” n.d., (1932), LWF 259-2. “Brains,” she admitted, “played a great part in my likes and dislikes for all people.” Blair interview, ibid.
 14.  Lady Willie Forbus, speech script n.d., [1934]. LWF,
259-2, 2-1, speeches; P.I., 10/14/34.
 15. James T. Lawler, a member of the Taxpayers Council, won, 55,317 to 29,443; Lady Willie Forbus to “Dear Friend,” 9/1/34. LWF 259-2, 3-1, “end notes”; It was not for lack of effort. She circulated 100,00 pamphlets asking, “What’s Your Idea of a Good Judge?” and spent $1,471.
 16.  An offer to  C.C. Dill, who was running for governor  in 1940, was put off. LWF to C.C. Dill 5/1/40, LWF 259-2.
 17.  SBs 18, and 173, 1943.
 18.  LWF to Lt. Gov. Victor A. Meyers, 1/26/44. LWF 259-2 1-1; Journal of the Senate, 20th Legislature, passim.
 19.  Langlie’s close identification with losing presidential candidate Governor Tom Dewey hurt. Baker, interview with the author, 11/12/70; See George W. Scott, “Arthur B. Langlie: Republican Governor in a Democratic Age.” Ph.D., UW, 1971.
 20.  Seattle Times, 1/19/49; Lady Willie Forbus 422, Kimball; S.T., 11/9/50.
 21. She was also chair of the  League of Women Voters’ Welfare Committee (1939), the Florence Crittenden Home (1942-46), president of the League of Democratic Women (1944), the Roosevelt Women’s Democratic Club, vice president of the King County Democratic Club, president of the Ballard Business and Professional Women’s Club and toast mistresses, of the Magnolia Community Club, and on the ACLU Board (1958-69). She  spoke on everything from “Educational Development in Colonial America” to “Garden Planning,” to an “International bill of Rights.” King County
 [Democratic] Central Committee Foreign Policy Draft , April, 1960, LWF 259-4.
 22.  Except for 1947-49, and 1953-55.
 23. Hayner was minority leader (1979-81, 1983-87), and majority leader (in 1981-83, and 1989-93).
 24. Bremerton Sun, 3/18/82, Daily Olympian, 3/27/82, S.T.,1/9/83.
 25.  Hayner both reflected and deflected her conservative constituents, opposing Governor Booth Gardner’s tax-reform plan, and gay marriage (Daily Olympian, 1/10/88), but also sponsored a new approach to funding public education, defended abortion, and collaborated with Democratic Speaker King (Walla Walla Union Bulletin, 2/23/87; Aberdeen Daily World, 1/14/1990).