Continued from last week

Her parents realized she was going no matter what they said. Deflated and worried, they hugged her and sternly urged her to take great care.

Ruth found a women’s rooming house in Big Rapids. The older women who lived there treated her well. But she found it strange they would not speak to her when she met them on the street with a man.

She eventually discovered she was living in a house for “ladies of the night!”

She moved out immediately and focused on her studies. Ruth was raised in Onaway, but she found love at Ferris. February 18, 1921, while both were students, she married her beau, Frederick James Brass, a future dentist. She was 18 and he was 26.

Within a couple years, Ruth divorced Brass and went back home to Onaway to live with her parents.

In the late 1920s, Ruth headed to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming an attorney. She knew California was becoming more progressive and accepting of the rights of women to choose to work in male-dominated professions.

She found a job teaching at a private school when she met Robert Raymond Ashton, a naturalized Russian who was studying to become an attorney.

The 1930 census shows them married and living together in the same household in L.A., although their license was issued Feb. 13, 1932, in Yuma, Arizona when they were 27 and 26.

Robert passed the California State Bar in 1931 and Ruth passed in 1935.

She took her law license and sought an open lawyer position.

The managing partners at the firm—all men—laughed at her. There was simply no chance they would hire a woman as an attorney, they all said, even if she had a law license. They offered to hire her as a law clerk.

Out of sheer necessity, she took the job.

Then came World War II. All the male lawyers in the firm were called to service in the armed forces.

With her natural confidence and drive, Ruth stepped into the void and kept the firm open and stable.

Off at war, the male attorneys weren’t aware of the leadership role she had taken to help save the business.

During that time, her husband Robert was serving in North Africa with the United States Army Transport (USAT) service in North Africa.

In 1944, Robert was seriously wounded and sent back to the States on a medical ship, the S.S. Edmund B. Alexander.

When the war in Europe ended, all the male lawyers returned home.

As they were getting reacquainted with their offices and the work the firm had on its plate, one of them picked up a legal document crafted while they were off at war. He read it and was stunned. “This is beautiful!” he exclaimed.

“Who did this?” he asked the staff.

A clerk proudly pointed to Ruth, saying “She did it!”

“Well, then, she can be an attorney in our firm,” the male lawyer said.

With her resilience, Ruth joined a group of pioneering women who had been fighting since the 1860s to fully open courtroom doors for female lawyers. In 1878, the first woman lawyer allowed to practice law in California, Clara Shortridge Foltz, joined the State Bar and began to practice law at age 29.

Progress was still painfully slow. By 1930, there were an estimated 4,000 women licensed to practice law in the United States, which was about two percent of the national Bar.

By 1955, the number of female lawyers was still only 5,000, and Ruth was one of them.

By 1965, only four percent of law students were female. Eight years later, in 1973, after many protests for freedom and rights across the country and in the streets, the percentage grew to 16. In 1979 it was 32%.

But progress toward equal consideration of males and females in law firms was still slow. ln 2019, the American Bar Association reported that females were 50% of the enrollment in law schools, but only 23% of law firm partners were women.

Robert and Ruth (McKune) Ashton retired from the practice of law in the late 1950s and moved to Lane County, Oregon.

Robert Ashton died Sept. 12, 1961.

Ruth lived another three decades. She died June 6, 1991, at the age of 88.

And so it was, that a woman who grew up in Onaway tirelessly pursued and ACHIEVED her dream of succeeding in the practice of law in one of the biggest cities in the world, Los Angeles.

Merritt Chandler and Thomas Shaw may have built the first roads to Onaway, but Ruth McKune paved her own path to success from Onaway to L.A.