Lavinia’s father was born in Coventry, New York. He was a descendant of Robert Goodell, an immigrant from Ipswich, England, who arrived in Massachusetts in 1634. As a young man William served as super-cargo on a ship bound for the East Indies, China, and the European markets. Upon his return he engaged in business in a number of locations, including Wilmington, North Carolina, and Alexandria, Virginia, where he saw the slave trade in action. He “grew restive over his day book and ledger…. What to him were the daily balancing of profit and loss over paltry bales of cotton, when slavery was creeping steadily onward, threatening to enchain the nation.” (1) He became an ardent abolitionist and wrote frequently for various periodicals on the religious, moral, and political issues of the day.

William married Clarissa Cady in 1823. Their first daughter died in infancy. Their second daughter, Clarissa Maria Goodell, was born in 1827, and their third daughter, Rhoda Lavinia Goodell, was born in 1839.

Lavinia’s mother was born in Connecticut. She was a cousin of Elizabeth Cady Stanton through their fourth great-grandfather. Clarissa was much more conservative than her husband, but at the time of Lavinia’s birth she was a member of the Female Moral Reform Society, which stressed work as a “safeguard to woman” so they would not feel their “utter dependence on man.”(6) After the end of the Civil War and the shuttering of The Principia, William and Clarissa lived with her sister’s family, the Thomases, in Connecticut. The Goodells’ move to Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1870 was made possible in part by a sizable inheritance Clarissa had received from her brother Isaac Cady, a successful book publisher. Clarissa never fully embraced Lavinia’s decision to pursue legal studies. A week before Lavinia was admitted to the bar in Rock County, Wisconsin, Clarissa lamented in a letter to Maria, “I was very sorry Lavinia goes to the lawyer’s office every day.”(4) Clarissa’s mental health deteriorated throughout the 1870s, and in 1877 she was placed in the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane (now Mendota Health Institute). She died there in 1878, two months after her husband’s death.

Lavinia’s sister was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Twelve years Lavinia’s senior, Maria attended Oberlin College, where she met Lewis P. Frost. She married Lewis when Lavinia was twelve years old. For the rest of Lavinia’s life the siblings maintained a weekly correspondence. Lavinia entrusted her sister with personal thoughts and aspirations that she feared might upset their mother. It was to Maria that Lavinia confided in 1858, “I think the study of law would be pleasant, but the practice attended with many embarrassments. Indeed I fear it would be utterly impracticable.”(8) When Lavinia did embark on her legal studies in the mid 1870s, Maria was generally supportive but expressed some concern that entering the legal profession would require Lavinia to have close dealings with men. Lavinia set her straight. “You speak as if it would be dreadful to ‘encounter men alone.’ I don’t think it is when you are not tied to them for life, but are free and independent and can get away from them again if they are disagreeable.”(2) When Lavinia started teaching classes at the Rock County jail, Maria was alarmed that her sister was fraternizing with criminals. Lavinia’s answer was blunt: “Am no more afraid of those boys than I am of you.”

Lavinia’s brother-in-law was a native of New York and graduated from Oberlin College in 1848. Following his marriage to Maria Goodell, he was for many years the pastor of small village churches in New York, Wisconsin, and Michigan. His family owned a farm south of Janesville, Wisconsin, near the Blind Institute. The Goodells’ relationship with Lewis was somewhat strained at times, and he felt the family did not appreciate him. There was no doubt a grain of truth in his suspicion. Before Lavinia’s short story “A Psychological Experiment,” featuring a self-centered and distant husband, was published in Harper’s magazine, Clarissa Goodell expressed concern that readers might notice the character’s similarity to Lewis. She wrote Lavinia, “I suppose you had to give your real name to the publishers. I hope you have not said anything very bad in representing a certain character because the people in this family will all know about it.”(5) Lewis and Maria divorced in 1882. Lewis remarried and entered the milk business.

Lavinia clearly doted on Maria and Lewis’s eldest son and affectionately referred to him as “Willie.” He was an 1876 Oberlin graduate and was a professor of Greek at Oberlin from his graduation until 1892 when he became the president of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. He served in that role until 1920. It was he who donated the Goodell family papers to Berea’s library. William Goodell Frost was an ordained Congregationalist minister. He was strongly pro-temperance but not so keen on the question of woman’s suffrage. In 1887 he angrily wrote to his mother, “You pulled the trumpet out of your ear so as to prevent me from finishing what I tried to say…. You know that I am in favor of repealing every law which can be shown to discriminate against women, and that I shall desire them to vote whenever it will be for their good or the good of anybody else.”(10)

The daughter of Mary Cady (Clarissa Goodell’s sister) and Peleg Thomas, Lavinia’s cousin was born in Connecticut and spent most of her life there. Lavinia and Sarah were each other’s closest confidantes. When Lavinia gave up her job at Harper’s Bazar to move to Janesville in 1871 in order to care for her aging parents, she persuaded the Harper brothers to hire Sarah as her replacement. In 1876, when Clarissa Goodell’s mental state was rapidly deteriorating, Sarah came to Janesville to help Lavinia care for her. Sarah also helped care for Lavinia following her ovarian cancer surgery in 1878 and was present when Lavinia died in Milwaukee in March of 1880.