Two Women, More Than One Milestone

A professional milestone can involve several different doors: education, examination, admission to practice, and welcome into an association. Newspaper accounts of Julia Radle and Helen Shaffer illustrate why those steps should not be collapsed into one claim about the first woman lawyer.

Julia Radle Before the Bar

Julia Radle’s route into law began in education. Dickinson Law’s institutional history places her childhood in Georgetown, now Dalmatia, in Northumberland County. It reports study at Soldiers’ Orphan Schools, followed by teacher training and a Shippensburg Normal School graduation in 1894. A contemporary 1901 profile also connected her with the orphan schools and Shippensburg. These accounts show a background that included teaching before her entry into the legal profession.

She entered Dickinson’s law school in 1897 and graduated with the Class of 1899. The school identifies her as its first woman student and graduate. While there, she was elected class secretary and vice president of the Dickinson Law Society; the library’s history also records her work on The Forum in 1898–99. These are particular school milestones and responsibilities. They do not, by themselves, establish who was the first woman admitted to every court or professional association in the county.

Education, Examination, and Practice

Public speaking was another part of her training. The 2017 Dickinson library account describes study at Shoemaker’s National School of Elocution and Oratory and connects her interest in law with speaking and the encouragement of her brother Philip. It also gives the title of her graduating thesis: Privileged Communications Between Attorneys and Clients. That specific subject offers a glimpse of the legal work she studied, beyond a newspaper headline celebrating an unusual graduate.

The Northumberland County Democrat reported on June 22, 1899 that Radle, a Dickinson graduate from Georgetown, had taken a preliminary examination for admission. Its favorable assessment was not an admission order. Dickinson’s later histories place her admission to practice in 1900 and say she worked with Philip in Northumberland County; the 2017 account specifies Shamokin. The Evening Report’s September 1901 profile likewise presented her as a recently admitted woman lawyer associated with the city. The sources describe successive stages, not interchangeable dates.

A period school catalogue adds an independent professional description. In its 1910–1911 alumni list, Cumberland Valley State Normal School printed Julia Radle at Dalmatia and identified her occupation as lawyer. It did not give a court-admission date, cases, or office address. Its value is more direct: the school publicly described its alumna as a lawyer long before the 1934 newspaper announcement concerning Helen Shaffer.

More Than One Professional Milestone

Dickinson’s accounts also describe Radle returning to teaching after her work in law. The duration of her practice and the exact timing of that return are less certain than the dates of her study. Her teaching background, law-school responsibilities, and later identification as a lawyer reveal a career with more than one professional role.

Radle’s school first can be stated precisely; the county’s competing firsts require more care. School attendance, graduation, preliminary examination, admission to a court, active practice, and membership in a bar association are different events. The later welcome for Helen Shaffer deserves its own place in that history without erasing Radle’s earlier education and professional recognition.

On October 15, 1934, Helen Shaffer was welcomed alongside three men. Reporting connected her with Sunbury High School, Dickinson, and the office of her father, Fred. The accounts do not describe every professional milestone consistently enough to award a broad first without qualification. Read together, they offer a better story: more than one woman working through institutions whose milestones were recorded in different ways.