Women in Bankruptcy

SALUTE TO FEMALE TRAILBLAZERS

March is Women’s History Month and as we approach the 100th Anniversary of the NCBJ, we are taking the opportunity to feature several of the “first” women who served as bankruptcy referees and judges.  Under the Bankruptcy Act of 1898, district court judges handled bankruptcy matters with the assistance of referees who were appointed for two-year terms and could be removed only for incompetency, misconduct, or neglect of duty.  The referees were paid a percentage of funds brought into the estate.   

While most referees were white men in the early years of the twentieth century, there were a handful of women referees, characterized in the 1929 Journal of the National Association of Referees in Bankruptcy, as the “fairer sex”. As a group they were active in their communities working for women’s suffrage, better working conditions for laborers and for universal kindergarten for children.  After the early twentieth century, the number of women appointed to the bankruptcy bench was nearly nonexistent until the 1970s.  Arline Rossi was appointed to the bench in the Southern District of California in 1959, but no women were appointed in the 1960s, only three during the 1970s, 37 during the 1980s, 33 in the 1990s.  

In delving into our history, we discovered three west coast trailblazers.   Florence Olson was appointed in 1898, Gertrude K. Durham in 1926 and Felice Cohn in 1926.  Mary L. Trescott of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania was appointed in 1921.  

Florence Olson 

As a teenager, Florence Olson, worked for many legislative reforms through the “Oregon System” – citizens working directly on legislative initiatives including popular election of U.S. senators, the right for women to vote and establishment of prohibition and banishment of the death penalty in Oregon.  In 1987, Florence was admitted to the Oregon bar and from 1898 until at least 1903, she served as a referee in bankruptcy in Oregon City and Milwaukie.  She later practiced law and was known as an insurance law expert.  We were unable to find much about the cases that she handled but perhaps as our investigation continues, we will find more.  Florence married Herman Ledding, a lawyer she had “gone with” for 20 years.  The two were active in the Milwaukie community, leaving their extensive library and house to the City of Milwaukie for a public library.  

Mary L. Trescott

Mary Trescott was born in 1861 and according to the Luzerne County Historical Society aspired from a very young age to become a lawyer.  She moved to Poughkeepsie, New York after determining that women could not practice in Northeastern Pennsylvania.  She graduated from Eastman Business College and began studying the law under lawyer Henry Wilbur Palmer, who later served in Congress.  She practiced in New York under the name “M.L. Trescott”, but later moved back to Pennsylvania where she was the first woman to appear before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1901.  The Luzerne County Historical Society describes the case as follows:

On October 28, 1894, a house known as the “Hungarian Shanty” was destroyed in a dynamite explosion, killing 3 and injuring 8 others. Arrests were made of five African American suspects in June 1895, including Hester Brace and Sarah Miller, wives of two of the male suspects. Trescott, however, was able to obtain their release under a writ of habeas corpus in 1897, after more than 3 years of incarceration.

Later she was active on the local school board and became president consistently working not only for better wages for teachers, but to make kindergarten available.  She was appointed bankruptcy referee for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 1921. After serving as bankruptcy referee, she ran for office several times and continued to be a trailblazer on many civic issues.  She died in 1935.

Felice Cohn

An excellent student, born in 1878 in Carson City, Nevada, Felice enrolled at the University of Nevada in Reno and then went on to Stanford University.  Although she did not graduate, she studied law for several years and was admitted to the bar in 1902.  Her practice focused on land issues, patenting mining claims and later was hired by the Federal government as assistant superintendent of public land sales.  She continued to work for the government and was admitted to the District Court in San Francisco in 1908.  During this time, she was very active in the suffrage movement and was a founding member of the State Equal Franchise Society, and chaired the legislative committee, lobbying to see the successful passage of the resolution she drafted denying the “elective franchise at any election on account of sex.”  The resolution passed in 1911, but there were still many years until it became law.  She was adamant that suffrage work should be non-militant and peaceful and opposed those that thought the movement should be more strident.  

She continued to work on land issues in Washington D.C., working for the Department of the Interior and stayed in D.C. long enough to be the fourth woman admitted to the Supreme Court.  She returned to Reno, opened her own law office, and was appointed U.S. Referee in Bankruptcy for the District of Nevada in 1926 and served three terms.  According to the Nevada Women’s History Project, she was involved in the “notorious ‘Owl Drug Case’ when the Owl Drug Story Company voluntarily declared bankruptcy. She was not reappointed when her term expired in 1934 (she refused to testify in the Owl Bankruptcy).”  Just as she left the referee appointment, she was appointed National Chairman of the Committee on Ethics of the National Association of Referees in Bankruptcy.  She continued to be active in many public interest efforts to improve the quality of life for women and children in Nevada.  She died in 1961.  

Other “Firsts” by Circuit

Finally, we want to acknowledge the other “first” women selected to serve as bankruptcy referees/judges by circuit.  While the following list of “firsts” recognizes those first appointed by circuit, we recognize there are many others to whom we are indebted to and who paved the way for many of us.  There was an enormous gap between the early pioneers described above and it is not surprising that progress was slow even as more women entered and graduated from law school in the 1970s and 1980s.  Few entered the insolvency field, which was dominated by white men, but slowly a few made their way to the bankruptcy bench.  Many of our women colleagues recall being the only women in court or in a conference room during their practice days. Several of those “first” women are still serving today and one of the “firsts” was not appointed until 2020.

Incorporated within the mission of the NCBJ is the goal of encouraging and supporting young women, people of color and other underrepresented individuals to enter the field and to prosper within it. We are grateful to those women who came before us.  During the next several years, the NCBJ hopes to collect the stories of these “firsts” and others who paved the way—not only to honor them but with the knowledge that we can learn from them and thank them for their work which opened the doors for us, as we now work to do so for others.

We encourage you to share your stories about each of the following “first” women (or correct our initial research) by submitting stories to team@ncbj.org.  Many stories are already stored at the Biddle Law Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and we hope to add to the collection.   

The following women were the first by circuit: 

Name	Circuit	District	Years Served
Arline M. Rossi	9th	SD California	11/17/59 – 9/30/69
Patricia Clark	10th	Colorado	1/25/75-5/15/80
Helen Balick	3rd	Delaware	5/21/74-1/31/98
Prudence Beatty	2nd	SD New York	9/1/82-1/4/96
Alice Batchelder	6th	MD Tennessee	3/31/83-4/25/85
Margaret Mahoney	8th	Minnesota	1984-1987
Letitia Clark	5th	SD Texas	3/21/85-2/7/2017
Catharine Carruthers Aron	4th	MD North Carolina	7/24/85-9/2/2022
Carol Kenner	1st	Massachusetts	8/18/86-7/31/2004
Susan Sonderby	7th	ND Illinois	10/1/86-5/15/2012
Joyce Bihary	11th	ND Georgia	9/17/87-2012
Elizabeth Gunn	DC	DC	9/4/2020-Present