New England School of Law

In December 1908, 12 years before the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, Arthur Winfield MacLean, an entrepreneurial Boston attorney, resolved to train women to be lawyers. What began with just two students grew each year until 1918, when he incorporated his enterprise as Portia School of Law, the only law school in the country founded exclusively for women. By 1927, the law school had 436 students and regularly provided the majority of female admittees to the Massachusetts bar. Guided