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Splitt breaks the attorney mold

By: JESSICA STEPHEN//March 18, 2015//

Splitt breaks the attorney mold

By: JESSICA STEPHEN//March 18, 2015//

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splitt
Lifetime Achievement
Esther “Cody” Splitt
attorney, Private practice – Legal degree obtained from: University of
Wisconsin Law School, 1949

Cody Splitt was ready to meet her first client.

He, on the other hand, was not so ready for her.

“He turned and looked at me and said, ‘I thought you were a man.’ Then, he just turned away,” said Splitt, 95, an Appleton attorney, who retired in 1994 after 25 years of legal practice. “That was the first time I encountered discrimination.”

Perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. But it was nonetheless astonishing to Splitt, a child of the Great Depression, born one year after American women earned the right to vote. She joined the U.S. Navy at the height of World War II and was the only woman among more than 700 men at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“They were perfectly decent all the way,” Splitt recalled of her male contemporaries.

Thanks to her mother, Anne Monahan Wendt, Splitt expected nothing less.

“I told my mother I was going to be a lawyer when I grew up, and my mother never pointed out that there was a little gender problem there.”

Splitt has worked all her life to repay that debt, first with her naval service and later as an attorney, judicial candidate and Outagamie County supervisor.

But it all started with wanting to become a lawyer, a dream that took hold when Splitt was a child seeking refuge from the summer heat.

“My mother was a single woman raising me, and money was awfully tight,” Splitt explained.

Splitt spent her days at the courthouse, admiring the men in their lightweight summer suits. She also daydreamed about becoming like the one lady lawyer she knew – one of her mother’s friends from Chicago.

“She had blonde hair in a chignon, and she wore shiny bracelets on both arms. She was so glamorous. So, there was my lawyer. I was going to be like her, look like her, although at the time I had no money.”

Money came from Schuster’s department store. She worked there until August 1942. That was the year when she, inspired by the deaths of two high school classmates, decided to join the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service program, also known as WAVES.

Her military service qualified Splitt for the G.I. Bill, which she used to attend law school.

Splitt opened her own practice after graduating in 1949, but closed it shortly afterward because she couldn’t make enough money to afford her office rent.

Nearly 20 years later, she tried again.

By then a mother, Splitt recalled, “I called my daughter’s school to see if they thought it would be bad for my daughter if I opened my own office. They said, ‘You go for it, and we’ll be behind you all the way!’”

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