Laura de Force Gordon

Laura de Force Gordon (née Laura de Force; August 17, 1838 – April 5, 1907) was a California lawyer, newspaper publisher, and a prominent suffragette. She was the first woman to run a daily newspaper in the United States (the Stockton Daily Leader, 1874), and the second female lawyer admitted to practice in California.

As an activist, Gordon was a key proponent of the Woman Lawyer's Bill, which allowed women to practice law in California. She also pushed for the inclusion of a section in the California Constitution that prohibited the state from barring women from practicing any profession.

Early life Laura de Force Gordon (née Laura de Force) was born in North East, Pennsylvania, on August 17, 1838, to Abram de Force and Catherine Doolittle Allen. The family had nine children. Her father struggled with rheumatism, but the children (including at least two daughters) received education in the public schools.

After the death of one of the children, the family turned to Spiritualism in 1855. During one such event, she met a Scottish physician named Charles H. Gordon, and married him in 1862. then to Nevada, and finally settling in California in 1870.

Journalism Portrait from the official publication of her speech at the Columbian Exposition in 1892.In 1873, Gordon became an editor and reporter for the Stockton Narrow Gauge. In 1874, she bought the Stockton Weekly Leader and converted into a daily newspaper, becoming the first female publisher of a paper in the United States. Between 1876 and 1878, she published the Oakland Daily Democrat. It attracted a healthy crowd, some of whom went on to become leaders in California's suffrage movement. Gordon also worked for suffrage in Nevada, speaking throughout the state in the late 1860s and in front of the state legislature in 1871. One paper writing about her speaking at this time described her speaking as "like a stream of liquid fire".

Gordon also traveled outside of the Southwest, representing California at the 1872 National Woman Suffrage Association in New York City. At the 1872 Liberal Republican convention, alongside Susan B. Anthony, she asked the party to seat her as a representative from California (to "laughter") and submitted a pro-suffrage resolution.

After beginning her legal career in 1879, she continued her suffrage activism. She was elected president of the California State Suffrage Association from 1884–1894, and a paid speaker on behalf of the movement in the 1888 presidential election. In 1892, she spoke at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Gordon was considered part of the "radical" branch of women's suffrage activists, Her correspondents included Henry George and Susan B. Anthony.

Later in 1878, Gordon was nominated as a delegate to the California Constitutional Convention, but was defeated.

On February 3, 1883, Gordon became the second woman to be admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court, after Belva Lockwood.

Later life and death Gordon retired from the legal profession in 1901, and spent her last years on her farm in Lodi, California. Armistead Maupin, who was present when the time capsule was opened, speculated that the quotation's use of "lover of her own sex" could have been a "coming out" for Gordon, but also acknowledged the phrase could have been an "idiosyncrasy of 19th century speech".

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