In law, Grata Flos Matilda Greig went first

The American industrialist Henry Ford once said, ‘whether you can or you can’t, you’re right’. This article is not about Henry Ford, but a woman whose character is perhaps epitomised best by this line. A woman who did not allow the limiting beliefs of the time prevent her from achieving her professional aspirations. A woman who studied law when women were not allowed to practise it. And a woman who used her expertise to remove that barrier. When people told her she couldn’t, Grata Flos Matilda Greig believed she could. And she eventually became the first woman to practise law in this country.

Grata Flos Matilda Greig, known to most as Flos, was born in Scotland in 1880. She was nine when her family sailed to Australia and settled in Melbourne, where her father founded a textile manufacturing company. Greig had three brothers and four sisters. Her parents didn’t just believe all three of their sons should receive a university education, but all four of their daughters too. This belief was instilled in their children, who all went on to study numerous degrees.

Greig was sixteen when she began walking the halls of The University of Melbourne, after enrolling to study arts and law. No woman in Australia had graduated with a law degree at the time, partly because women were not allowed to practise law. As Greig noted, “the impediments in the way were so great, that they concluded, after consideration, it was not worthwhile”. Yet she persisted.

In 1902, after Ada Evans graduated law from The University of Sydney – becoming the first woman in the country to graduate with this degree – she was still not allowed to practise. Greig would be graduating one year later, so she began navigating her way around “the many obstacles in the path of my full success”. As she said, “I resolved to remove them”.

The Supreme Court of Victoria c.1905 where Greig was admitted to practice. Image credit: State Library of Victoria.

Leaning on male allies and mentors, Greig enlisted the men in her life to help her enter the boys club that was the legal profession. The year she graduated from The University of Melbourne, the men in her class voted in support of women being allowed to practise law. She also leant on her lecturer, John Mackey, who was a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly. Together, and with the support of many peers and colleagues, the two crafted and proposed a legislative change in the state. While proposing the change, Mackey argued it would ease the concerns of women who had little faith their interests were served by a political body made up solely of men.

The Women’s Disabilities Removal Bill – also known as the ‘Flos Greig Enabling Bill’ – was passed in the Victorian Legislative Assembly in April, 1903 and women in the state were finally allowed to practise law. That same year, Greig graduated, becoming the first woman to graduate law from The University of Melbourne and ranking second in her class. Before being sworn into the bar, there was one more hurdle. She needed to complete a period of “articling”, so she was hired by a commercial law solicitor, Frank Cornwall, to complete her “articles of clerkship”.

On August 1, 1905, Grata Flos Matilda Greig was sworn into the bar and became the first woman able to practise law in Australia. At the swearing-in ceremony, Chief Justice John Madden described Greig and the monumental moment as “the graceful incoming of a revolution”. However, his commentary didn’t come without a few gendered slights that accurately depict the limiting beliefs of the time: “Women are more sympathetic than judicial, more emotional than logical.”

“Women are men’s equals in every way and they are quite competent to hold their own in all spheres of life.”

News outlets also displayed more interest in her outfit than her intellect or character. When a reporter asked her what she wore for the monumental day, Greig shut down the question before finally responding: “Well, if you insist! I wore grey, with a greenish tinted hat, trimmed with violets!”

The professional accolades of the trailblazer would go on to surpass her sartorial choices. Greig established her own practice in Melbourne which focussed on providing legal support to women and children. She founded The Catalysts’ Society in 1910, which later became the Lyceum Club in Melbourne, a haven for professional women to connect and support one another. She was also elected as the first president of the Women’s Law Society of Victoria. And she played an integral part in the women’s suffrage movement – which saw Victorian women win the right to vote in 1908. As she declared in 1903, “Women are men’s equals in every way and they are quite competent to hold their own in all spheres of life.”

Women, it is fair to say, were at the heart of her professional and civic life. In the face of countless cannots, Grata Flos Matilda Greig told women they can – through the words she spoke, the laws she changed and the path she paved that ultimately made each step a little easier for the women behind her.

Main image credit: University of Melbourne Archives

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