Alice Parker Lesser

Alice Parker Lesser (April 21, 1863 – October 30, 1939) was an American lawyer, suffragist, and clubwoman based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Alice Parker Lesser
Alice Parker Lesser, from an 1897 publication.
Born
Alice Parker

(1863-04-21)April 21, 1863
Lowell, Massachusetts
DiedOctober 30, 1939(1939-10-30) (aged 76)
NationalityAmerican
OccupationAttorney, Suffragist
Spouse(s)
Josephus Mona Lesser
​
​
(m. 1895⁠–⁠1902)​
his death
Roger Hutchins
​
(m. 1914)​

Early life and education

Alice Parker was born in 1863 (some sources give 1862 or 1864), in Lowell, Massachusetts, the only child of Dr. Hiram Parker and Annie G. Trafton Parker. She graduated from Lowell High School; she went to California in 1885 for her health.[1] She passed the bar examination in San Francisco in 1888, after studying independently and with the lawyer who would become her husband; in 1890, she became the third woman admitted to the bar in Massachusetts.[2]

Career

Alice Parker began her law practice in Boston in 1890.[3] She also gave lectures for women on legal matters, and worked on state legislation involving women's rights.[4] She was president of Portia, an organization of women lawyers and law students in Boston, and also president of Pentagon, a social organization for professional women.[5] She was a member of the Women Lawyers' Association[6] and the Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs, where she chaired the Committee on Legislation.[2]

Alice Parker Lesser spoke frankly about gender in the legal profession. "I and other women lawyers have lied when we said that we were on an equal basis with men in our profession," she declared to a Boston newspaper in 1912. "Women lawyers can earn money, but not fame... Suffrage is the one cure."[7] She also wrote about the political deprivation of women: "She has been deprived of all civic imagination, all civic knowledge, and all civic responsibility, so far as many could deprive her.... Will there be women who will make good Presidents? That is another question, and one to which I give the ready answer, yes."[8]

Alice Parker Lesser was part of the American delegation to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance congress in 1911, at Stockholm, representing Massachusetts.[9] Later in life, as Alice Parker Hutchins, she was editor of the Women Lawyers' Journal and was based in New York City.[10] After suffrage was achieved, she was active with the League of Women Voters.[11]

Personal life

Alice Parker married fellow lawyer Josephus Mona Lesser in 1895, in New York. She was widowed when he died in 1902, after a head injury sustained in a fall on the Boston courthouse steps.[12] She remarried in 1914, to Roger Hutchins.[13] She died in 1939, aged 76 years.

References
  1. Frances Elizabeth Willard, Helen Maria Winslow, and Sallie Elizabeth Joy White, Occupations for Women (Success Company 1897): 372.
  2. Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., Who's Who in New England, Volume 1 (A. N. Marquis 1909): 587.
  3. "Club Women of Massachusetts" Boston Post (April 22, 1904): 7. via Newspapers.com
  4. "Alice Parker" in Frances Elizabeth Willard and Mary Ashton Rice Livermore, eds., American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies (Mast Crowell and Kirkpatrick 1897): 557.
  5. Jane Cunningham Croly, The History of the Woman's Club Movement in America (H. G. Allen 1898): 658-659.
  6. Jean H. Norris, "The Women Lawyers' Association" Women Lawyers' Journal (January 1915): 28.
  7. Virginia G. Drachman, Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History (Harvard University Press 2001): 215.
  8. Alice Parker Lesser, "A Woman President a Possibility" Cameron County Press (21 December 1905): 14. via Newspapers.com
  9. "For Women's Suffrage; International Meeting Held at Stockholm" Boston Evening Transcript (June 13, 1911): 11.
  10. Masthead, Women Lawyers' Journal (January 1921): 13.
  11. Jill Norgren, Rebels at the Bar: The Fascinating, Forgotten Stories of America's First Women Lawyers (NYU Press 2016): 181. ISBN 9781479835522
  12. "A Well-Known Boston Lawyer; J. Mona Lesser Dies Suddenly from the Result of a Fall" Boston Evening Transcript (February 14, 1902): 2.
  13. "Alice Parker Hutchins" in Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., Who's Who in New England (A. N. Marquis 1915): 587.
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