I felt “set up” by my success

Lavinia Goodell, December 1874

In December 1874, six months after her admission to practice law, Lavinia Goodell kept busy not only running her law office but also speaking to temperance groups. Several days before Christmas, Lavinia wrote to her sister saying that the previous week she had accepted an invitation to lecture at Whitewater, Wisconsin. She said, “I was considerably alarmed at the prospect but concluded to accept. I shall have to learn to speak if I am going to make much of a lawyer.” She wrote her lecture out because she did not trust herself to make impromptu remarks. The title of her talk was “The Relation of Government to the Liquor Traffic.” She took the train from Janesville to Whitewater and several Whitewater temperance ladies met her at the depot. She said, “I had a crowded audience, and an attentive one, which applauded me generously. Didn’t feel as much scared as I expected to, and got along very well.”

The following day, Lavinia and two of the Whitewater ladies were taken in a carriage to Milton, ten miles away, where she spoke again that evening at the Congregational Church. Lavinia reported:

The church was packed with a very attentive and enthusiastic audience. After our regular addresses we proposed that the ladies there organize and in the discussions of that question I made two or three brief impromptu speeches which got along very well. The minister complimented me the next day and asked me to cultivate my speaking. Said he thought I would make a good speaker. I felt “set up” by my success.

A few days later, Lavinia spoke again, this time to the Sons of Temperance in Janesville. Her topic was, “Can women with the ballot work more effectively for temperance?” This time she spoke for 15 minutes without notes and “got along very well, so that I feel encouraged as I may sometime be able to do what I didn’t suppose I ever could.”

Lavinia Goodell had accomplished a great deal in her first six months as a practicing attorney, and she was also becoming an increasingly confident and sought-after public speaker. Little did she know that 1875 would bring new challenges and would see the beginning of her long campaign to be admitted to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Sources consulted: Lavinia Goodell’s letter to Maria Frost, December 21, 1874; Lavinia Goodell’s December 1874 diary.