Texas had all-female high court in 1925, has seen few women serve on bench since
AUSTIN — Goldframed portraits of past male justices line the wood-paneled walls of the Texas Supreme Court in Austin. Tucked in the back corner of the windowless courtroom is a painting of three women, who together for a brief period in 1925 composed the state’s highest court.
Texas made history then for having the first all-woman high court in the country, just a few years after women won the right to vote.
But the progressive moment was short-lived: The women were appointed to hear just one case. Texas then waited almost 60 years before the next female justice was appointed to the state Supreme Court, in 1982. And since then, only seven more women have served on the state’s highest bench.
“It was the first allwomen panel to ever serve in the country. It does have historical significance from that perspective,” said Texas Supreme Court Justice Debra Lehrmann, one of two women currently on the bench. “Does it have historical significance of being reflective that women were being acknowledged and treated equally? No.”
While women make up half of all law students nationwide, less than
one-third of all state judges are women — a figure that roughly reflects the makeup of Texas courts, according to the Gavel Gap, a report from the American Constitution Society. By the end of the recent filing period, only one female candidate had signed up to run in the March primaries for a spot on the state Supreme Court, now made up of nine justices.
“The glass ceiling that people talk about is still there to a certain extent; we need to examine why that is. And what we need to do is to try to get beyond it,” Lehrmann said.
Debate surrounds the story of the 1925 all-woman court.
What is certain is that a year earlier, in 1924, Gov. Pat Neff faced a dilemma. All three male Supreme Court justices had recused themselves from an upcoming case that involved Woodmen of the World, a popular fraternal organization in which they were members, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
Scholars disagree
As one oft-repeated story goes, Neff searched for fill-in justices but was stymied when every male attorney or judge he approached was also a member of the Woodmen. With just a week until the case was scheduled to begin, Neff decided to appoint three women as special justices, since they couldn’t have a conflict with the all-male organization, according to a reported account from H.L. Clamp, who was the court’s deputy clerk at that time.
Several scholars, however, disagree that Neff turned to women as a last resort, and instead say he intended to appoint an all-female panel to boost women’s political activism.
Known for elevating women to state boards, Neff was also the first governor to appoint a woman as his personal secretary. And it wasn’t the first time he had to name a special judicial panel to hear a case related to Woodmen of the World. In those earlier instances, he had successfully found male attorneys to fill in, according to a history of the allwoman court published by Alice McAfee in the St. Mary’s Law Journal. As an outgoing governor, appointing the all-woman panel was one of his last acts in office.
“I am in hopes that this recognition of the womanhood of the State as attorneys will be helpful in many ways to those women, wherever they may be, who are fighting single-handed the battles of life,” Neff wrote in a letter about the all-woman court.
Even then, appointing a panel of women proved a challenge because there were fewer than 30 female attorneys in Texas at the time. An even smaller percentage — roughly 10 — met the requirements to serve on the state’s highest court, according to McAfee. Two of Neff ’s initial appointees had to step down because they hadn’t already practiced law in Texas for the requisite seven years.
‘I feel proud of them’
Eventually, Neff named Hortense Sparks Ward, one of the first practicing lawyers in Texas who passed the state bar exam in 1910, as special chief justice. For the associate justice positions, he chose Dallas lawyer Hattie Leah Henenberg and Ruth Virginia Brazzil, who graduated from the University of Texas as a “special student” in law, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
When the women first met in January 1925, the event drew national publicity. One reporter noted the women’s court was “no freak affair, but a tribunal thoroughly competent to sit in judgment and reach a conclusion just as sound as a decision might have been made with all the Mr.’s since Adam stacked behind it.”
Still, the justices weren’t immune to commentary on their appearances, with a reporter noting the women “were a good deal better looking than the Supreme Court which regularly deliberates on the third floor of the capitol,” according to McAfee.
The case involved claims for two pieces of land in El Paso. Once the women reached a decision — siding with a lower appeals court in favor of Woodmen of the World — they stepped down.
Henenberg went on to become assistant attorney general of Texas and later special assistant U.S. Attorney General. Ward continued practicing law, but never inside a courtroom for fear her gender would prejudice her clients, according to McAfee. Little is known of Brazzil, the third justice.
In the portrait, which closely mirrors a photo taken at the time, the three women look at ease sitting on the bench. Ward wears a string of pearls.
“I can’t know what the significance of it was in 1925, but I do know that in 2017 I look at that picture and it’s exciting,” said Lynne Liberato, a partner at Haynes and Boone and the first female president of the Houston Bar Association. “When I look at that picture of those women sitting on the bench, it is a visceral reaction to me. I feel proud of them, I feel good about being a woman lawyer.”