FAWL seeks information on first 100 women lawyers.

As part of the 50th anniversary celebration of The Florida Bar, President Edith Osman asked the Florida Association for Women Lawyers to research the first 100 women lawyers admitted to practice law in the state of Florida.

FAWL willingly accepted this assignment and the "First 100 Project" was born. The goal of this project is to have a dinner celebration in early 2000 to honor these trail-blazing pioneers in Florida's legal profession and to produce a booklet with their biographies.

The project's first assignment was to compile the list of women. Where to start was easy: FAWL had honored Florida's first woman lawyer, Louise Rebecca Pinnell, who was admitted to practice in 1898, on the 100th anniversary of her admission in June 1998.

Where to find the remaining women was more of a challenge. After obtaining information from The Florida Bar, which inherited the records from its voluntary bar predecessor, the Florida State Bar Association, and alumni lists from Stetson University College of Law, the University of Florida College of Law, and the University of Miami College of Law, which opened in 1900, 1909 and 1928, respectively, a list was compiled. It soon became apparent, however, that the list was woefully incomplete, because it omitted women who were admitted after apprenticing or "reading the law" with a practicing attorney. To obtain that information, a search of the Florida Supreme Court's minutes and its book of attorneys admitted from 1894 to 1949 was the ultimate resource. As the list now stands, it begins in 1898 and extends to 1928.

Since January 1999, a group of approximately 25 volunteers have been uncovering information about these women. The volunteers have pulled dusty books from library shelves, including Martindale Hubbell, Who's Who Among Women Lawyers, law journals and city directories; they have read biographies and histories of women lawyers; consulted with local historians and librarians; interviewed some of the senior members of The Florida Bar; viewed newspapers on microfilm; researched on the Internet; written letters to people with similar names; tracked down probate files; and searched Westlaw. For a group of lawyers, untrained as historians and detectives, a great deal of information has been disclosed.

That is not to say that the research task has been an easy one. The truth is just the opposite, because many early women lawyers were unable to secure jobs in the legal profession after they were admitted or they simply assisted husbands and other family members in their legal practices. Moreover, as is true of today's lawyers, not every one of these women was a lawyer about whom people would write books and articles. For those who were prominent, information is quite, easily uncovered, but for others less well known, information is scarce, even...