It's Friday, March 4, 2022, the day of the week when I pass along a quotation meant to be inspiring. Thanks to my friend Dana Rubin, whom I wrote about Tuesday, there is no shortage of good candidates. Dana is the founder, curator, and proprietress of the Speaking While Female Speech Bank. She is also working on an anthology of women's speeches, a project RealClearPublishing is helping bring out later this year in book form.
As loyal readers of my morning newsletter know, I don't use this space for fundraising, but for this endeavor I'll make an exception. Here is the link to the Kickstarter campaign. (It shows that Dana has met her goal, but that goal was too modest, so please contribute if you're able -- or at least sign up to buy the book.)
How does a website like this fill a need? And why is an anthology of women's speeches so important? I can answer those questions with one of my own (and don't Google it): Who is Clara Shortridge Foltz?
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The district attorney must have known he had a weak case. As he gave his closing argument to a San Francisco jury, the prosecutor included an emotional appeal designed to undermine the credibility of the defense counsel. "She is a woman!" he said. "She cannot be expected to reason; God Almighty decreed her limitations…this young woman will lead you by her sympathetic presentation of this case to violate your oaths and let a guilty man go free."
Clara Shortridge Foltz was a woman all right, one with five children. She was also the first female attorney admitted to the California bar. "Rising to address the court," recalled the authors of a 1976 law review article, "she demolished both the legal and ad hominem arguments of the prosecutor and won her case."
When that piece appeared in the Hastings Law Journal, no biography of Clara Foltz had been published. Her speeches appeared in no anthology. In 2011, a biography did finally appear, written by esteemed Stanford Law professor Barbara Allen Babcock. In it, Babcock writes of Clara Foltz's vast ambition: To become "an inspiring movement leader, a successful lawyer and legal reformer, a glamorous and socially prominent woman, an influential public thinker, and a good mother."
In a life that was understandably "frantic and scattered," Clara Foltz achieved all of that and more. Born in 1849, and raised on a farm in the Midwest, she and her family gravitated after the Civil War to the West. At 15, she eloped with a Union Army veteran with whom she had five children. She and her husband lived briefly in Oregon, while her father and brothers settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her father and brother Samuel Shortridge became lawyers. (Samuel also became a U.S. senator). Another brother worked his way up from being a copy boy at the San Jose Mercury (the newspaper where Dana Rubin and I worked together many moons ago) to become editor and publisher.
As for Jeremiah Foltz, well, he may have been a fine soldier in Mr. Lincoln's army, but as a husband he had some deficiencies. Although she usually identified herself as a widow, Clara divorced her husband after learning that in Portland, Jeremiah had been courting the woman who would become his second wife.
Clara didn't shrink from single motherhood, however, or any other challenge in life. "I am descended from the heroic stock of Daniel Boone and never shrank from contest nor knew a fear," she liked to say. "I inherit no drop of craven blood."
A political reformer, she was the force behind a paid civic fire department, a novelty then in California. She also was a professional lecturer, Republican Party activist, and prominent suffragist who worked on behalf of the 19th Amendment. In 1905, she set up a department for women customers at San Francisco's United Bank & Trust. She also founded and published a newspaper (The San Diego Bee) and a monthly magazine (Oil Fields and Furnaces) and headed an enterprise called Foltz Oil Producers Syndicate in the early 1920s.
But it is the law where she really made her mark. Foltz fought a legal battle that went all the way to the California Supreme Court just to get into law school, started California's public defenders program -- the first of its kind in the country -- and later, in 1910, became a Los Angeles deputy district attorney, the first female prosecutor in the country.
"I was bent on correcting things generally where women were concerned," she once noted. Actually, she wanted to correct deep flaws in the criminal justice system that impacted men and women alike.
At a time when we are reexamining policing and the criminal justice system, Clara Foltz seems a a century ahead of her time. President Biden just nominated a woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court who was a federal defender. Prosecutors all over the country are reexamining whether the system has been biased against defendants. And though it's obvious that many of these big-city district attorneys have leaned way too far in the other direction, this is a national conversation that should have taken place decades ago -- and would have, if we had listened more closely to the wisdom of Clara Foltz.
This morning, however, perhaps because Dana Rubin and I both came up as newspaper reporters, I'm thinking of Clara Foltz this morning as a newspaperwoman as much as a lawyer. It will not surprise you to learn that she also wrote for the publications she founded. "Women compel men to think," she opined in the May 16, 1887 edition of the San Diego Bee. "Their mission is to ennoble the [human] race and no better field for the exercise of her influence can be found than is offered in the publication of a daily paper."
And that's our quote of the week. As for the challenge I issued above, if you didn't previously know of Clara Foltz until this morning (even if you're a lawyer or grew up, as I did, in California), don't punch yourself in the face. Just sign up to support Dana Rubin's project, and buy her book.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
