Ethel Benjamin
Ethel Benjamin
NZ’s first female lawyer
Ethel Rebecca Benjamin (19 January 1875 – 14 October 1943) was New Zealand's first female lawyer and indeed the first woman in the British Empire to appear as counsel in court.
Benjamin was born into an orthodox Jewish family. Her parents, Lizzie Mark and Henry Benjamin had emigrated from England in the late 1860s. Ethel was the oldest of seven children and an accomplished student. She won an Education Board Junior Scholarship at Otago Girls’ High School and a university scholarship in 1892.
When she enrolled for a Law degree in 1893, women were not yet able to practise law, but she expressed great hope in the liberality of the country:
It is true that the Legal Profession was not then open to women, and that the franchise had not yet been granted, but I had faith that a colony so liberal as our own would not long tolerate such purely artificial barriers. I therefore entered on my studies with a light heart, feeling sure that I should not long be debarred from the use of any degree I might obtain.
Ethel Benjamin (centre front) first female lawyer in New Zealand, at the opening of the Dunedin Law Courts in 1902.
Image public domain
Benjamin was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 1897, a year after The Female Law Practitioners Act was passed.
When it came to practicing law in the late Nineteenth Century, Benjamin had to overcome much discrimination in an all-male conservative legal profession. The Otago District Law Society placed many obstacles in her way; she was not allowed in their library, was excluded from the Society’s annual dinners and more importantly was not part of the traditional mentoring of young lawyers by established lawyers.
In spite of this, her practice was successful, if mostly limited to the Jewish community and some independent businesswomen. As honorary lawyer for the fledgling Plunket Society, she also handled divorce and adoption and defended women against spousal abuse. Her work there was particularly valuable as it coincided with the liberalisation of divorce laws and formalisation of adoption laws.
Benjamin was a founding member of the Dunedin branch of the New Zealand Society for the Protection of Women and Children (founded in 1899) and was its honorary solicitor.
At the age of 32, Ethel married Alfred De Costa, a 36 year old Jewish real estate agent in Wellington. To the annoyance of the Wellington District Law Society, she opened a practice there and ventured into property. Biographer, Janet November showed that early in her career, Benjamin developed an “assertive and tenacious business persona”.
In 1908 the De Costas moved to England where Ethel managed a bank and then worked in a law firm. The couple lived in Italy and France between the wars. Alfred Costa died just prior to the Second World War. Ethel died tragically in 1943, as a result of a motor vehicle accident.
Although Benjamin cleared the way for women in law, she was way ahead of her time. It was 14 years before another New Zealand woman received a law degree and not until after World War II did women, even in small numbers, begin to practice law in New Zealand.
Benjamin’s legacy lives on via The Ethel Benjamin Scholarship which was established in 1997 by the New Zealand Law Foundation, marking the centenary of the admission of Ethel Benjamin as New Zealand's first woman barrister and solicitor.
Since 1997 the Law Foundation has awarded this scholarship, valued up to $30,000 annually, to over 30 outstanding New Zealand women law graduates for post-graduate study, enabling them to study at some of the most prestigious universities in the world – Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, New York, Columbia and Duke.
(The original article first appeared on our parent site, Jewish On-line Museum, written by Jill Leichter. Edited.)