Unsung hero: Mabel Raef Putnam led charge for Wisconsin's equal rights law for women

Portrait of Mabel Raef Putnam taken by Pach Bros., N.Y., included in her book, "The Winning of the First Bill of Rights for American Women." Photograph by Amy Rabideau Silvers.

​​By Amy Rabideau Silvers
  
In the world of unsung legal heroes, there is a woman whose role in Wisconsin remains shrouded in unknowns and contradictions.
 
Mabel Raef Putnam makes the short lists—including one by the State Bar of Wisconsin—of women who influenced Wisconsin legal history.

​She became the leading activist in the push to pass Wisconsin’s Equal Rights law in 1921, working with the National Woman’s Party and its nationally known leader, Alice Paul. The law was the first such measure in the nation, rating national headlines and celebratory declarations about the state’s fine example.
 
With passage, Wisconsin became “the only spot in the United States where women have, or ever have had since the beginning of our country, full equality with men,” Alice Paul declared in a telegram.
 
But did it change much of anything or bring Wisconsin women closer to equality?
 
The short answers are probably no and no. The more nuanced analysis shows the final legislation was, perhaps, a casualty of its time and conflicting cultural perspectives—something that appears unsettlingly similar in more recent history.
 
The stated purpose of the statute, signed into law on July 10, 1921, was “to remove discrimination against women and to give them equal rights before the law.”
 
The final wording, however, was more ambiguous than decisive:
 
“Women shall have the same rights and privileges under the law as men in the exercise of suffrage, freedom of contract, choice of residence for voting purposes, jury service, holding office, holding and conveying property, care and custody of children and in all other respects. The various courts, executive administrative officers shall construe the statutes where the masculine gender is used to include the feminine gender unless such construction will deny to females the special protection and privileges which they now enjoy for the general welfare. …
 
Any woman drawn to serve as a juror upon her request to the presiding judge or magistrate, before the commencement of the trial or hearing, shall be excused from the panel or venire.”
 
A victory of sorts, it did include some rights Wisconsin women already had. It also it came with an inherent tension between “the same rights and privileges under the law as men” and the exception for “special protection and privileges which they now enjoy for the general welfare.”
 
In the years immediately following passage—and even with that “special protection” provision—Putnam noted that there was “some talk, among elements hostile to social change, of an attempt to have the law repealed, or amended adversely.”
 
There was, she maintained, no chance that would happen, in that or any later legislature session.

In 1922, a year after passage, the woman also known as Mrs. Frank Putnam spoke to the National Woman’s Party meeting in New York, according to an article in The New York Times.

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Putnam wrote this book to tell the story behind the historic bill. This copy, one of a thousand copies printed, is included in special collections at the Milwaukee Public Library's central location. Photograph by Amy Rabideau Silvers.

“Wisconsin women are little, if any, more actively interested in politics than they were before the equal rights bill was passed,” Putnam then said. “But as voters they would be instantly aroused by any attempt to legislate them back into the condition of legal inferiority from which they have emerged.”

Putnam herself wrote about the legislative effort in a slim how-we-did-it book called The Winning of the First Bill of Rights for American Women. It was published by her husband, Frank Putnam, whose professional work included news and publishing.
 
“This edition is of 1,000 copies,” according to a publisher’s preface in the book. “It is a gift to the cause of human liberty. Its aim is to aid in the liberation of American women from a status subordinate to American men under manmade constitutions, laws and customs.”
 
A new direction after legal suffrage
 
The effort began following the 19th amendment, ratified in 1920, which gave women the right to vote. The National Woman’s Party held its national convention in Washington early in 1921, disbanding as a suffrage organization and setting a new goal. A sample bill was drafted to abolish discriminations against women on account of sex.
 
In Wisconsin, newspapers reported on that, with Putnam's comments.
 
“The national congress and the legislature of each of the forty-eight states,” said Mrs. Putnam, “will be asked to pass a bill in substantially this form, to give women legal equality with men, as the suffrage amendment gave us political equality. … We want Wisconsin, first to ratify the suffrage amendment, to be first in removing the legal disabilities of women.”
 
Putnam became the point person in Wisconsin, but it was a new and uncharted role for her.
 
“I was at a loss how to begin,” she wrote in her book. “I had no previous experience with a state legislature, nor did I know any member of the Wisconsin legislature, nor any person connected with the State government at Madison.”
 
She began meeting with other interested women, as well as the editor of The Capital Times, and then Gov. John J. Blaine.
 
“I had gone to Governor Blaine to get his opinion on our bill, and to ask his advice on the best way to proceed,” Putnam wrote. “I told him we had talked with lawyers, but had not been able to learn all of the remaining legal discriminations against women in the statutes of Wisconsin, and I asked him to send me to the person who would be most likely to know all of those disabilities and who would help us draft a bill removing them.”
 
The governor advised her to speak with Charles Crownhart, revisor of statutes. Crownhart became “our best friend throughout our hard campaign,” she wrote. (Crownhart was subsequently appointed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, serving from 1922 to 1930.)
 
Others argued that a comprehensive bill would never pass.
 
“One of our former Woman’s Party members was connected with the legislative reference library. I went to see her. She was horrified at our idea of presenting a blanket bill; she was sure the legislature would never pass such a bill.”
 
Instead, that woman argued, a bill-by-bill approach over four years could be successful.
 
Putnam was adamant that was not an acceptable option. 

“My answer was: “The National Woman’s Party does not work that way; we do things NOW,” she wrote.
 
The first committee meeting
 
Putnam soon appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman, John A. Conant.
 
“I was the only woman in the room,” she wrote, telling the story in her book.
 
When it was her turn to speak, “I made known my desire, and read the bill, telling the committee it was to be introduced into Congress and each State legislature.
 
“Mr. Conant laughed and said: ‘Have you heard about my jury bill and what happened to it in the Assembly? Such a bill as yours, including jury service, would never pass the Assembly.’”
 
Putnam said that women would work to pass the Equal Rights bill.
 
“Well, you take your bill to an Assembly committee, and get them to introduce it over there. If it passes the Assembly, it will pass the Senate,” he replied.
 
“My heart went down, but I was determined not to yield. I said: 'No, I’m here now. If I went to an Assembly committee, they would tell me to take it to a Senate committee; and besides, we want this committee to introduce it.’’’
 
At that, a smile went round the committee table, and after some demurring and discussion among the committee members, Mr. Conant agreed to introduce it, “if Mr. Crownhart will draw it up.”
 
Crownhart agreed, and Conant issued an admonition that she would “have to do a lot of missionary work in the Assembly.”
 
That statement “seemed very funny to all the committee,” Putnam wrote. “I realized afterwards that an attempt to get any such bill through the Assembly seemed like a huge joke to them all.”
 
More discussion and changes
 
Putnam reached out to other women, including those involved in the League of Women Voters and women’s clubs and groups. And she continued reviewing legal language.
 
“When reading the statutes in regard to jury service … the word ‘male’ was always used,” according to her book. “The idea kept recurring to my mind that probably there were other statutes when the word ‘male’ was used, instead of the word ‘citizens,’ especially in respect to holding office, and that we ought to have a blanket bill changing all the statutes necessary to avert the possibility of any future legal discriminations against women.”
 
Putnam contacted Crownhart with her concerns and he agreed, with Crownhart proposing corrective language that “where the masculine gender is used to include the feminine gender unless such construction will deny to females the special protection and privileges which they now enjoy for the general welfare.”
 
That language delighted Putnam and others involved in the effort, but it proved to be only the first change and the beginning of other challenges.
 
Soon another bill—audacious according to Putnam—was introduced in the Assembly. It required jury service of “all citizens of the United States except women.”
 
“How dare men introduce such a bill!” wrote Putnam. “Not satisfied with the discriminations against women which already existed, they wished to discriminate further against us.”
 
The battle of the bills had begun.
 
Next came the culture war argument that allowing a wife to determine her place of residence—should she want to live apart from her husband for any reason—would lead to the downfall of the family.
 
Again, Putnam did not mince words.
 
“Historically, a man who is not free to choose his own residence is a slave; the same applies to women,” she wrote.
 
Some legislators were concerned about trying to pass the bill too quickly. Sen. Claire Bird of Wausau offered an amendment to strike the “freedom of contract” clause.
 
“Senator Severson countered … with an eloquent floor speech during which he claimed that the denial of freedom to contract kept women ‘in a class with children and idiots and all other irresponsibles.’”
 
Then Sen. Conant, thought to be an ally, offered an amendment striking the words “and in all other respects.”
 
The bill was passed unanimously by the Senate.
 
“We were horrified,” Putnam wrote. “We couldn’t believe it had happened.”
 
And yet more politics
 
Supporters of a true equal rights bill were incensed, launching a public relations campaign and intense behind-the-scenes lobbying. The discussion further shifted to the rights of married women, with Putnam declaring that they should have the same freedom of contract “that their brothers have always enjoyed.”
 
In one press statement, Putnam had this to say:
 
“Fifty per cent of the voters of Wisconsin are women. Men who imagine women do not want equality with men are mistaken. Men who think women voters will not use their ballots to win equality under the law are mistaken. A large majority of women are far more deeply interested in gaining equal legal rights with men than they were in gaining equal suffrage. Their long fight for equal suffrage was only a means to this end—that they might use their ballots to enforce equality with men under the laws of State and Nation.”
 
The problem was in the state Senate, where many senators were Republican, “elected as Republicans, in large part by women voters, on a platform pledging them to grant equal legal rights to women,” she said.
 
“We shall demand a roll call, so that Wisconsin women, in every senatorial district, may know whether their senator represents all of the voters, or only 50 per cent of them.”
 
When the Senate reconvened on June 21, the “freedom of contract” and “in all other respects” clauses were restored, and the bill was passed.
 
Other early amendments—“choice of residence” for voting purposes and the right to request being released from jury service—remained.
 
The bill was signed into law by Gov. Blaine, who used a pen supplied by the National Woman’s Party. Supporters also arranged for a moving picture company to record the event. When the governor did not want photos taken, apparently due to long days and the July heat, the women successfully lobbied his wife.
 
The moment was captured for posterity.

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Mabel Raef Putnam shaking hands with Gov. John J. Blaine following his signing of the equal rights law. Photograph courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society. WHS Image 118142.

​Contemporary perspectives
 
“The 1921 law, in my opinion, was a pioneering law,” said Joseph A. Ranney, of Marquette Law School and its Adrian Schoone Fellow for the Study of Wisconsin Legal Institutions. He is the author of Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law.
 
“They tried to use this as a national model,” Ranney said, speaking in a telephone interview. The reality was “it was more of a situation where Wisconsin woman slowly increased their rights.”
 
The Equal Rights law did figure in some Wisconsin Supreme Court cases, with differing arguments and results. In one case, First Wisconsin National Bank sued Amalie Jahn after her husband failed to repay a bank note for $8,000. Amalie, who had signed as an “accommodation endorser,” or co-signee, was ruled liable for the debt.
 
Although she would not have previously been found responsible under so-called special protections, she was ruled liable under equal rights. Interestingly, the court did address the matter of gender differences, saying that the law “does not and should not strike down sex as a basis of classification in the enactment of laws relating to our health, morals, and general well-being of our people.”
 
In a 1926 case, Wait v. Pierce, Mathilda Wait sued her husband for negligence in an automobile accident, something not earlier possible under common law rules in which husband and wife constituted one legal identity. The final irony was that her right to sue freed his partners as co-owners of the vehicle from legal responsibility. It also brought much commentary on the possible collapse of common law family values.
 
Those cases and more were “shaped by conflicting perspectives and ideas which had little to do with equality for women,” according to a master’s thesis by Samantha Langbaum, while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992. She titled it, The Paradox of Aspiration and the Making of a Law: the Wisconsin Equal Rights Act of 1921.
 
“As a result of the forces which battled during the enactment process and later, as judges interpreted the statute, the ERA was critically unstable and easily manipulable in its meaning,” Langbaum wrote. “I argue here that the written law was not ‘made’ on the date of its enactment; it was constructed as it went through many convolutions and interpretations …
 
“As time went on, litigants continued to bring cases before the Court which enabled the justices to narrow the statute’s application from ‘all women,’ as they had in Jahn to an interpretation which further modified the rights of husband and wife as they existed at common law. Those modified rights were applied in twists and turns: though Amalie was reconstituted by the law as a freely contracting individual, her new legal status would not disrupt the tradition-bound order of the family.”
 
Decades later, a federal Equal Rights Amendment was again proposed, with Wisconsin among the ratifying states, though it never became the official law of the land.
 
In his book, Ranney wrote that “the new ERA elicited a new, reactive, special-rights movement. Phyllis Schlafly, the movement’s leader, raised the specter that women would lose their traditional exemption from military service and their legal rights to husbandly protection.
 
“In Wisconsin, (Kathryn) Clarenbach and her colleagues secured legislative approval of a state ERA but did not take steps to accommodate special-rights concerns as Putnam had done,” he wrote. “In 1973, to their surprise, Wisconsin voters rejected the amendment.”
 
As for Mabel Raef Putnam, little biographical information is readily available today. She moved from Wisconsin to Chicago about 1930, working as a business journalist and financial advisor, and publishing another book, What Every Woman Should Know About Finance, in 1954.
 
“If I had to guess, she was an upper-middle class wife and involved with women’s clubs,” Ranney said. “And she probably thought, ‘I can do more than that.’
 
“From one perspective, the law didn’t make a great deal of difference,” he said. “But the law is still on the books today.”

Like these fellow activists, Mabel Raef Putnam was proud of Wisconsin's effort to give women equal rights. This photo, taken in 1923 in Seneca Falls, N.Y., was included in Putnam's book. Photograph courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society. WHS Image 143040.

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