Caroline Burnham Kilgore, Legal Crusader

Posted by on Aug 29, 2025 in | Comments Off on Caroline Burnham Kilgore, Legal Crusader Caroline “Carrie” Burnham Kilgore (1838–1909) was a trailblazer in the fight for women’s rights in the legal profession, but she was not alone. Many women in Pennsylvania faced the same barriers she did, struggling for decades against systemic exclusion from law schools and the bar. Kilgore’s success in 1885, when she became the first woman admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania, was part of a...
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Free-Thinking, 19th-Century Style

Posted by on Dec 2, 2013 in | Comments Off on Free-Thinking, 19th-Century Style Francis Ellingwood Abbot (1836–1903) was nothing if not determined. In 1872, as editor of The Index, the nation’s leading free-thought magazine, he began to muster the full force of his small army of subscribers against what was being called “the God-in-the-Constitution amendment.” A philosopher and theologian, he sought to reconstruct theology in accordance with scientific methodology. From the...
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Isabel Darlington, Esq., Belle of the Bar

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Isabel Darlington, Esq., Belle of the Bar On a crisp day in late December 1897, the members of the Chester County Bar Association gathered on the front steps of the courthouse in West Chester for their annual group portrait. Three dozen lawyers posed solemnly before the camera, each mustachioed face a mirror image of the next. For the first time in its one hundred and fifty year history, there was something notice­ably different about...
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