Alice G. McGee (1869–1895) was a lawyer included in A Woman of the CenturyA Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied By Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life (Frances E. Willard & Mary A. Livermore, eds., 1893), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Woman_of_the_Century/Alice_G._McGee. and the second woman admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar,Josh Cotton, Trailblazer, Times Observer (Feb. 20, 2021), https://www.timesobserver.com/news/community/2021/02/trailblazer/. She was born in Warren, Pennsylvania and graduated from Warren High School in 1886. McGee studied for three years as a student in the law office of Wetmore, Noyes & Hinckley and was admitted to the Bar after she turned twenty-one on May 13, 1890.Lelia J. Robinson, Women Lawyers in the United States, 2 Green Bag 68, 87 (Autumn 1998).Elizabeth K. Maurer, The Sphere of Carrie Burnham Kilgore, 65 Temp. L. Rev. 827, 849 n. 202.
Early life McGee was the only daughter of Joseph A. McGee and Catherine McGee and spent most of her life on a farm. She was educated in music and painting, which McGee had planned to pursue as a career. After graduating from Warren High School in 1886, she worked as a librarian and teacher.
Gaining admission In 1887, she decided to pursue a career in law, and by February 16, 1887, had registered as a student lawyer at Wetmore, Noyes & Hinckley,She Will Win Sure: Western Pennsylvania's Young Lady Lawyer Is a Beauty, Pittsburgh Dispatch, May 25, 1890, at 6, https://www.newspapers.com/clip/41521879/pittsburgh-dispatch/. a prominent firm that had argued two cases in front of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court only a few years earlier.Richard v. Allen, 117 Pa. 199 (1887).Sager v. Galloway, 113 Pa. 500 (1886).
On May 13, 1890, after McGee turned twenty-one, she was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar by Judge Brown. McGee was only the second woman to be admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar after Caroline Burnham Kilgore, who persevered sixteen years before she became a recognized member of the Bar.Willard, Winslow & White 1897, p. 373. McGee, on the other hand, only worked as a student lawyer for three years and did not attend law school before gaining admission.
McGee's assent from student lawyer to member of the Bar in three years was not only faster than other women at the time, but is also comparable to her male counterparts.Kellogg, Frank Billings, Bibliographic Directory of the United States Congress, https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/K000065. Although law school was an option in 1890, law school was not required, and many were reluctant to admit women.Lewis Ethan Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg and American foreign relations, 1925-1929 (1961).Women in Law: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook (1996), https://archive.org/details/womeninlawbiobib0000unse.James Willard Hurst, Lawyers in American Society 1750–1966, 50 Marquette L. Rev. 594, 602–603 (1967), https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=2502&context=mulr.Evolution of the Board, Pennsylvania Board of Examiners, https://www.pabarexam.org/board_information/history/evo.htm
As a lawyer and actor Although McGee was a successful counselor and pleader, she found the practice of law slow and unprofitable, so she started an acting career, appearing in "The Queen of Sheba" in 1893–1894. She died at the age of twenty-six in 1895.
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