Have you ever felt so angry with an obstructive male boss or colleague that you could feel the red mist descending? Then you might like Kate Kane (1854–1928), the trailblazing American lawyer who, on the afternoon of Friday 20 April, 1883, got so enraged at Judge James Mallory that she dashed him in the face with a glass of water in a Milwaukee courtroom.
That morning, Mallory had reassigned one of her clients to another lawyer – Peter J Somers, who had worked on Mallory’s recent re-election campaign – even though the client had specifically asked for Kane. It wasn’t the first time Mallory had done this, and Kane realised she was never going to get a fair run in his courtroom.
On 12 May, the Police Gazette reported her actions as follows:
She grasped the inkstand resting on the bar, but finding it too heavy for dextrous handling, let go of it and seized a glass full of water.
This she poised in her hand until the judge looked at her, when, with a vicious jerk, she threw the water squarely in his face, with a ‘Take that, you dirty dog.’
Judge Mallory, fairly beside himself with rage, ordered Kate to be arrested, and she was promptly seized by two deputy sheriffs, marched to the prisoners dock, and fined $50 and costs for contempt. She then broke out into a perfect torrent of abuse, telling the judge she would rather go to jail than pay her fine; that the county jail was a far more respectable place than the municipal courtroom with his honor; that his recent re-election was accomplished through bribery and fraud, and much else.
Judge Mallory simply said, ‘Take this creature out of this court.’
‘You have insulted me, you dirty dog,’ screamed Kate. Her order to the deputy sheriff who seized her wrist to hasten her exit was, ‘Unhand me, sir.’ She struggled all the way to the clerk’s office. When asked if she wished to pay the fine, she replied: ‘No, I will rot in jail first.’
Kane spent days in jail. Afterwards, she explained: “Judge Mallory has been trying to drive me out of this court; he has continuously insulted and misused me, but I bore it. Today, I wanted to insult Judge Mallory just where he had insulted me—in open court.”
Kane was the second woman admitted to the Wisconsin bar and the first to practise in Milwaukee. Here’s how this was reported in the Milwaukee Sentinel in March 1879:
Miss Kane is about 25 years of age and pretty, with sharp, black eyes, and as modest as she is intelligent. [When a judge approved her petition to practise law in Milwaukee] the deputy sheriffs smiled … seeing no doubt that the day is not long distant when they will not have to chase for jurors, but drive ’em off with clubs.
Modern women, realising Kane endured five years of this workplace before her red-mist episode, can identify with a rage that would still be transgressive now. We can add Kane to feminism’s historical pantheon of ‘amazing babes’ and ‘mighty girls’ who challenged structural barriers.
While The New York Times disparaged Kane as being “mad as a wet hen” and “decidedly feminine”, the Sacramento Daily Union refused the sexist view that she represented proof that women made unsuitable lawyers:
…it proves man’s unfitness too, for he has over and again committed breaches of propriety, and outraged the rules of Courts, more wantonly than this Milwaukee spitfire has.
Having incinerated her Wisconsin legal career, Kane moved to Chicago – then home to a small but thriving population of women lawyers – and became the 13th woman admitted to the Illinois bar. She was a successful criminal defender, suffragist and activist, specialising in representing sex workers and labourers.
According to Chicago’s Inter Ocean newspaper, she “had the police sitting up nights to think of schemes to avoid her anger. She appeared often in the police courts defending Italians, and in the heat of argument she frequently depopulated the temples of justice.”
She married Vincenso Rossi, and as Kate Kane Rossi she unsuccessfully contested multiple elections for judge, state’s attorney (on the “Abolition of Women’s Slavery” ticket) and even demanded to be appointed chief of police. In 1908 she was arrested for disorderly conduct after forcing her way into the mayor’s office, ranting that the Chicago police and state prosecutor were covering up “murders and atrocities”. However, she was acquitted. She retired in 1920.
What makes Kate Kane Rossi a recognisably modern heroine is that she wasn’t merely ‘feisty’ – picturesquely angry. Bubbling below the surface of her gung-ho career is a sense that she came across to others as foolish and unlikeable. Rage came to define and undermine her career, much as women’s anger today gets dismissed as ‘knee-jerk outrage’, or being ‘upset’, ‘irrational’, ‘unstable’ and ‘emotional’.
Writing in the Boston Woman’s Journal, pioneering American lawyer Edith Prouty recalled that a law journal, under the heading, “Chicago’s Leading Lady Lawyer”, had described Rossi as a “lawyeress militant”… but Prouty carefully noted that Rossi’s militancy was not “typical of the sex in that profession as I have never met that type myself.”
Prouty wrote, not quite approvingly, that in court Rossi had once hit her opposing counsel over the head with her umbrella:
Sometime after her marriage an altercation with an elevator boy who refused to take her baby carriage up in the elevator, brought her faithful umbrella again into play and the perambulator went up.
In one especially revealing episode, Rossi was again fined for contempt of court in August 1900. Having discovered that her husband had pawned items of his clothing, she sued the pawnbrokers for receiving stolen property, arguing she had bought Vincenso his clothes and had not authorised him to pawn them.
“Shut your mouth,” she told the magistrate when this situation was revealed in court. “I don’t want my business affairs aired by you. I have never received a square deal in this court.”
The Inter Ocean newspaper account of this incident suggests the private humiliations behind Rossi’s blunt-force working methods:
Several years ago she married Rossi. According to her own story, their domestic path has not been strewn with roses.
Rather than a cartoon image of a historical trailblazer, Kate Kane Rossi emerges as a distinctly modern woman, struggling to reconcile personal and professional tensions. As the Milwaukee Journal reported on 3 August 1891,
She is a woman of splendid abilities, and with a fair chance would make her mark either in the law or in the world of letters.
Many professional women still don’t get that fair chance.
