|
Practice Areas
|
Carrie Morrison The first woman actually to be admitted as a solicitor was Carrie Morrison who was admitted in December 1922 and subsequently married Ambrose Applebe. A graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, she had served during the 1914-18 War in the War Office and the Army of the Black Sea at Constantinople. She practiced until she died aged 62 on 20 February 1950 at 7 New Square.
Her primary concern was with family law and she was an active participant at the Law Society Provincial Meetings where she read a paper on the costs of domestic relations in 1931. Again in 1933 she spoke on the topic of the reform of the law of married women having particular regard to husbands and creditors where she felt that “the law as it stood was galling in the extreme to any woman of independent spirit”. She thought that women ought to take the rough with the smooth and bear their due share of the joint burdens. She advocated that housekeeping money given to a wife by her husband should be the wife’s own property, and argued against the law regarding tax and the wife’s income which required a husband to be liable for his wife’s tax even though she made a separate return. Perhaps ahead of their time she and Ambrose Applebe in 1939 argued for a solicitors’ fund to be set up to indemnify individuals against loss connected with solicitors’ defalcations
© Ambrose
Appelbe 2004-2006 |
She was obviously a woman of stout views. Stephen Kaleny who was
articled to her noted in a letter to the Gazette in 1950 that “the problem
of the description in affidavits of women solicitors is not a new one.
Miss Carrie Morrison, the first woman solicitor who recently died, had at
the first opportunity refused to describe herself otherwise than
“solicitor”. Her affidavit was not accepted by the Probate Registry but
she carried her point up to the President and was allowed to omit any
reference to her married status.”