History
WCL was founded in 1896 by Ellen Spencer Mussey and Emma Gillett in response to a lack of legal educational opportunities for women in the region.
Mussey herself learned the law by apprenticeship at her husband's law offices. She was rejected by several schools in the area, including the National University School of Law, which later merged into the George Washington University Law School, because "women did not have the mentality for the law."
Gillette however, found admission at Howard University School of Law, and graduated in 1882 with an LL.B and in 1883 with an LL.M. She passed the bar in the District of Columbia the same year. Additionally, President Garfield appointed her to be the first female notary public in the United States.
Mussey and Gillett began teaching in Mussey's law offices after they were approached by three women who wished to study with them. With its first graduating class, the Washington College of Law became the first law school to be founded by women, and also the first law school to graduate an all-female class. The "single-sex" education did not last long however: Mussey's male law clerk enrolled in 1897. WCL officially became part of American University in 1949.
Read more about this topic: Washington College Of Law
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)