THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL 22 | SEPTEMBER 2024 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. Women in Law Ethel Kehrer Childers ETHEL KEHRER CHILDERS WAS BORN OCT. 19, 1887, in Coal Hollow near Chanute, Kansas, to Mr. and Ms. Charles H. Kehrer. She and her six siblings were reared on an 80-acre farm 10 miles southeast of Chanute. She attended a country school near home, and at age 12, she took the examination for admittance into high school and passed with flying colors. After graduating from high school at 15, she obtained a teaching position at Coal Hollow. One day, after several encounters with students – many of whom were larger than she was – she took a rubber hose to 24 students who had disregarded her instructions. Three of them were children of members of the Board of Education. She feared for her job, but the board members respected her “straightforwardness of decision and resoluteness of character” and told her she had the job as long as she wanted it.1 Not wanting to return to Coal Hollow, she enrolled in Chanute Business College. After a year, she took a position in Coffeyville, Kansas, for $8 a week. In 1904, the law office of Veasy & Rowland in Bartlesville, Indian Territory, contacted Chanute Business College looking for a legal stenographer. After interviewing for the position, James A. Veasy and L.A. Rowland, just out of law school, asked her if she would stay until they found someone fitted for the job since she had no legal experience. This was another challenge she met by studying the law and learning what she needed to know to keep the job. After she married John E. Childers on Aug. 22, 1910, in Bartlesville at the age of 23, she decided to retire from the business world. The Childerses adopted two children, Dorothy and Robert. The Veasy & Rowland firm had difficulty accepting Ms. Childers’ retirement, and their daily telephone calls finally convinced her she might as well be drawing a salary because she was still working.2 In 1912, Ms. Childers became the law partner of H. H. Montgomery in Bartlesville, and after taking the bar examination and passing with highest honors, she was admitted to the bar between 1912 and 1913. The fact that the Montgomery firm was general counsel for Kanotex would play an important role in Ms. Childers’ future. Ms. Childers and Kittie Sturdevant, another pioneer female attorney, were the only female attendees at the voluntary bar association meeting held in Tulsa in 1914. In 1918, Ms. Childers was an attorney of record in a reported decision dealing with the rights of a Cherokee to make a voluntary alienation of allotted lands.3 In 1918, after working for two years under her former boss, Mr. Veasey, who was general counsel for the Carter Oil Co., Ms. Childers joined the Kanotex Oil Co. in Arkansas City, Kansas, as secretary, assistant treasurer and general counsel. She had proven herself in the business world as a “trouble shooter of manifold possibilities in the other business positions she had held”4 and had a “competent knowledge of nearly every phase of the production, transportation, refining and distribution of petroleum prod- ucts. She had supervised the construction of pipelines”5 and “was capable of running the oil through all the operations which make it into gasoline.”6 In 1919, Ms. Childers went to Devol for Kanotex when the Burkburnett field was coming into its most complete activity. Within one month, in the heart of the oil fields, she counted 25 holdups on the block in front of her office. Although she was never held up, she was threatened many times when she “threatened to put men in jail or send them to the penitentiary for thefts or other crimes.”7
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