The legal profession in Tennessee has a storied history of strong women who broke down the barriers that stood between them and the practice of law. Early examples of those trailblazers include Lutie Lytle and Marion Griffin.

Lytle secured many “firsts” in her legal career: first Black woman to earn a law degree in the South; first woman, of any color, to be admitted to Tennessee’s bar; first African American female member of a national bar organization. Though Lytle was the first woman admitted to the state bar, she taught at Central Tennessee College’s law department instead of actively practicing. She later moved to Topeka, where she became the first Black woman admitted to the Kansas bar and became a dedicated pro bono lawyer whose practice was focused on fighting the oppression of women and African Americans. Russell Fowler’s 2018 article for the Tennessee Bar Journal, “A Woman of Many Firsts,” tells of how Lytle passed an oral bar exam and earned her admission to the state bar in a time when the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that women were not qualified to be lawyers.   

Several years after Lytle was admitted to practice, Marion Griffin began her seven-year battle for admission to the state’s bar. Her petition to be licensed, In Re Griffin, 71 S.W. 746 (Tenn. 1901), was dismissed 3-2 by the Tennessee Supreme Court on common law grounds. In 1907, Griffin persuaded the General Assembly and governor to pass a statute allowing women access to the bar. She would later become the first woman elected to the Tennessee House and she practiced law in Memphis for more than 40 years. Featured in the Tennessee Bar Journal’s January 2011 issue, Sam Elliott’s article, “The Progress of Women Lawyers,” has more on Griffin.

The good work of Lytle and Griffin opened the door for women to practice law in Tennessee and set the stage for more trailblazers to follow. Tennessee Bar Journal Editor Suzanne Craig Robertson details the lives and work of early women lawyers in the state in “It’s Not Just for White Men Anymore” from the TBJ April 2005 issue and in “50 Years of Pioneers: Early Women in Tennessee Law” from the July 2001 issue.