Celebrating Minnie Hale Daniel

Contributed by Lee Wallace

In honor of Women's History Month, I want to honor one of my personal heroes, Minnie Hale Daniel, the first woman to graduate from law school in Georgia. She went all the way through law school knowing women were FORBIDDEN from being lawyers in Georgia. And when she finished, she set out to change that law.

When she set out to lobby the Georgia General Assembly, a legislator told her she better "wear her best bib and tucker and most becoming hat," so she went out and spent $20.00 -- $410.50 in today’s dollars -- on a white ostrich feather to trim her best hat. Appropriately enough, in this picture, she is wearing a big white hat. I can't say for sure that this is the hat that bore the ostrich feather, but it's awesome just the same.

Opposition to Minnie Hale Daniel's idea was fierce. One legislator said allowing women to practice law would "upset the relations between men and women, relations which began in the Garden of Eden." One woman wrote to the legislature, "A woman lawyer! Help us to keep our girls at the fireside and let our young mothers raise, by the help of God, boys to speak and vote and live the life they would live if He had made them men!"

But none of them had reckoned on Minnie Hale Daniel.  It took her five years, but in 1916, the "Women's Lawyer Bill" passed the Georgia General Assembly.

Hats off to Minnie Hale Daniel!