Ada Lewis Sawyer

Ada Lewis Sawyer (1892–1985) was an American lawyer. She is remembered as the first woman to take and pass the bar exam in the state of Rhode Island.

Ada Lewis Sawyer was born March 3, 1892 in Providence, Rhode Island. She was one of four siblings and the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Winsor Sawyer. Her father was a salesman for an oil company. Her family resided at 50 Pitman Street in Providence during the early years of her life.

Sawyer attended Providence public schools. At age 12, Sawyer graduated from the Federal Street grammar school. In 1909, she was one of four students to receive honors from the English high school, where she and forty others graduated.

The day after graduating, Sawyer was hired by the law office of Charles E. Salisbury and Percy W. Gardner, the office at 75 Westminster Street at this time, as a stenographer. Around a year later, when Gardner separated from his partner and moved into suite 402 in the Turk's Head Building, he brought Ada along as his secretary.

When Ada started showing an interest in the law, Percy not only encouraged her to study it, but signed her up for the bar examination in 1917 as A. Sawyer. At this point, no woman in Rhode Island had ever sat for the bar. In order to qualify for the bar, the candidate was required to have graduated from an accredited college or graduate school or have read the law for three years. As Sawyer had not attended law school, she was signed up as a clerk for Gardner.

In 1920, Sawyer was ready to sit for the bar exam. It was only when one of the bar's examiners realized that A. Sawyer was really a female that an argument was made that the noun "person" used in the bar rules was meant to apply to men but not to women. After the Rhode Island Supreme Court debated this case, Justice Sweetland made the famous finding that the term "person" includes a woman, an important finding as women then still did not have full legal rights, such as the right to vote:

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