Eliza Orme

First woman to earn a law degree

1848 – 1937

Eliza Orme was the first woman in England to earn a law degree: in 1888 at University College London (UCL). She was then 39 years old and since her early twenties had been a prominent advocate for women’s suffrage and for the Women’s Liberal Federation (WLF). She was fully established in the career that would flourish for another two decades.

Rebuffed after an initial attempt to enter one of the Inns of Court, Orme opted instead to trade on the knowledge and mindset inculcated by an academic legal education to offer a new kind of professional service. She opened chambers in Chancery Lane and found clients among London’s busy barristers and solicitors, who paid her half the large fees they received from their own clients to prepare necessary documents.

This was the springboard for providing other unregulated legal services and for a successful, if unorthodox and precarious, public life.

Orme was the daughter of a prosperous distiller and a political activist; both parents were acquainted with literary and political figures and her mother a leader in the nascent women’s suffrage movement. Eliza Orme was one of nine women who, in 1869, sat the first General Examination for Women at UCL.

At the age of 23 she declared her intention to study law – because women clients needed legal advocacy, and because this was a lucrative profession that ought to be open to women.

An attempt to become the pupil of a sympathetic barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, with an eye to being called to the Bar as a conveyancer, was unsuccessful. Instead, in 1875, she established her own chambers in Chancery Lane in partnership with fellow UCL student Mary Richardson. Later another law student, Reina Emily Lawrence, joined her. This arrangement was successful, since there were plenty of clients for their service of preparing the paperwork for property transactions, wills, and mortgages. Patent agency and probate settlements were unregulated and therefore available to non-solicitors. In a 1903 interview with the Law Journal, Orme recalled: ‘I “devilled” for about a dozen conveyancing counsel who kept me busily employed on drafts they wanted done in a hurry, and for twenty-five years I found it both an interesting and profitable employment’. This interview, occasioned by Gwynneth Bebb’s (unsuccessful) challenge to the Benchers of Gray’s Inn, came at a time when Orme was already nearing retirement.

Although Eliza Orme was a feminist, her feminism came second to her Liberal party politics. In the mid-1880s she became a leader and spokesperson in the WLF. But that organisation split in 1892 over the question of whether it should endorse women’s suffrage in defiance of official party policy. Orme was one of those who formed the Women’s National Liberal Association, remaining in accord with the party establishment and Gladstone’s leadership.

Her feminism, like her Liberalism, was rooted in the belief that financial independence was the most important goal for women, whether they were married or single, working-class or prosperous.