Clara Shortridge Foltz

Clara Shortridge Foltz (born July 16, 1849, probably New Lisbon, Ind., U.S.—died Sept. 2, 1934, Los Angeles, Calif.) was a lawyer and reformer who, after helping open the California bar to women, became a pioneering force for women in the profession and a major influence in reforming the state’s criminal justice and prison systems.

Clara Shortridge taught school in her youth and in 1864 married Jeremiah R. Foltz, with whom she moved to California. Widowed in 1877, she undertook the reading of law in the office of a local attorney. On discovering that the California constitution limited admission to the bar to white males, she drew up an amendment striking out those limiting qualifications and, aided by Laura D. Gordon and others, pushed it through the legislature in 1878. That year she became the first woman admitted to legal practice in California. In 1879, denied admission to the state-supported Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, she brought suit and, again with Gordon’s help, argued her case successfully up to the state Supreme Court. That year she and Gordon became the second and third women admitted to practice before the state Supreme Court.

Foltz served as clerk of the state assembly’s judiciary committee in 1879–80. Her private legal practice in San Francisco grew rapidly, and in 1893 she organized the Portia Law Club with other women lawyers of the city. During 1887–90 she lived in San Diego, where she founded and edited the daily San Diego Bee. Later she resided and practiced briefly in New York City. A growing practice in corporate law led her into such sidelines as organizing a women’s department for the United Bank and Trust Company of San Francisco in 1905 and publishing a trade magazine, Oil Fields and Furnaces (later merged into the National Oil Reporter). From 1906 she lived and worked in Los Angeles. She played a leading role in the campaign that secured the vote for women in state elections in 1911, and shortly thereafter she served for a year or two as the first woman deputy district attorney in Los Angeles.

From 1910 to 1912 Foltz was the first woman member of the State Board of Charities and Corrections, a post awarded her on the strength of her long efforts for reforms in criminal procedure and prison administration, including the appointment of public defenders for indigent defendants and the segregation of juvenile offenders from adult prisoners. She was also responsible for legislation that allowed women to serve as executors and administrators of estates and to hold commissions as notaries public. In 1916–18 she published the New American Woman magazine. She was long active in state politics. In 1930, at age 81, she entered the Republican gubernatorial primary; although she lost, she received a respectable vote.