THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL 20 | SEPTEMBER 2024 Women in Law Grace Elmore Gibson BORN AUG. 8, 1886, IN KANSAS, Grace Elmore Gibson’s life was dedicated to being involved in civic and community affairs and setting precedents for women in the legal profession. Once she graduated from the University of Kansas and married Judge Nathan A. Gibson, she took up the study of law so she “could be a good listener when her husband talked.”1 Ms. Gibson was motivated to action following a conversation with her husband about a case he was handling. When she asked about the case, Judge Gibson commented, “I forgot for a moment that you don’t understand law.” It was shortly after that conversation that she enrolled in classes and began studying the law.2 She soon realized she was interested in pursuing a legal career, not just to be a good listener but to practice law as well. After completing her legal studies and being admitted to the bar in 1929, Ms. Gibson began practicing law in Tulsa’s Court Arcade Building. Once she discovered she had a particular interest in cases dealing with the “human equation,”3 Ms. Gibson developed quite a clientele in the area of domestic difficulties. When discussing the problems women encountered in those times, Ms. Gibson noted that being a wife was a difficult job and involved “expecting things of a man, believing he can do them, keeping an even keel in that most delicate of human relationships, and spending wisely.”4 She said she found herself being a woman first and then a lawyer – not because he wanted it that way, but because her “colleagues were so acutely conscious that a woman was in the courtroom lawyering.”5 As all women from that era understood, the legal profession had been a man’s profession and he was at home in it, but “he was not at home with women in it.”6 As the world watched women beginning to claim their rights in the legal profession, “the men watching ... [were] good sports about it.”7 Despite men’s preconceived ideas of women in the workplace, Ms. Gibson always found her colleagues very courteous and gallant, perhaps more than she would have liked them to be. Ms. Gibson would say, “I am here as a lawyer, not as a woman, and I ask no odds because I am a woman. In the courtroom, men get up to give me their chairs, but I’d rather they wouldn’t.”8 She saw a woman lawyer as a “concrete vocation of interesting actualities.”9 When trying a case before a jury, she had only men to address since women had not yet been granted the right to serve on juries. In her dealings with male jurors, Ms. Gibson felt that how they viewed her depended on how they viewed their wives at home. If a man’s wife was domineering at home, then he, as a juror, tended to see a woman lawyer pleading a case “as a bossy sort of a hussy and looked upon her with a resentful eye. She wasn’t going to tell him what to do.”10 If a juror thought his wife was intelligent and respected her, he tended to treat the female attorney the same way. Ms. Gibson was concerned that women be granted the right to serve on juries because she, unlike many of her time, felt that women would add a new dimension to decision-making in jury trials. She was not concerned that, when they were granted that right, their emotions would make the decisions for them. She saw the topic of women jurors as “an abstract subject of interesting possibilities.”11 In 1930, Ms. Gibson became the first woman to be elected to a county or district judgeship in Oklahoma when the Tulsa County Bar Association tapped her to replace vacationing Judge John Boyd for several weeks. In 1936, she was named by Gov. E. W. Marland to sit for Judge James S. Davenport on the Oklahoma Criminal Court Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff.
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