Life Story: Mabel Walker Willebrandt (1889–1963)

Mabel Walker was born in Woodsdale, Kansas on May 23, 1889. She was an only child. Mabel’s family moved often, as her parents took various teaching and printing jobs in small towns throughout the West. Mabel was educated at home until she was 13, when her parents enrolled her in school.

After high school, Mabel became a teacher. While teaching, she met school principal Arthur Willebrandt. Mabel and Arthur married in 1910. Less than a year later, they moved to Arizona and then California. Arthur had tuberculosis and dry desert air helped his condition.

Once in California, Mabel obtained a job as a school principal. Both she and Arthur also decided to pursue careers in the law. Arthur did not have a job and attended law school full-time during the day. Meanwhile, Mabel took classes at night after work. Her salary paid for both of their tuitions.

Arthur graduated in 1915. Mabel graduated with an undergraduate degree in 1916, and finished a master of law degree the following year. The toll of working full-time, attending school at night, and bringing in the household’s sole income was too much for Mabel. She had also suffered a miscarriage during this time. Mabel left Arthur in 1916 and moved in with a friend. Their divorce was finalized in 1924.

Mabel immediately put her hard-earned degrees to work. She worked as Los Angeles’s first female public defender. This meant Mabel represented women who could not afford a lawyer when appearing in court. Many of Mabel’s clients were sex workers and other women who suffered abuse and abandonment at home. Eventually Mabel opened her own private practice with two law school colleagues. She founded the Women Lawyer’s Club of Los Angeles and continued to advocate for women’s rights. She argued that the law should protect women, particularly married women whose marriages did not live up the ideal.

Mabel was a master at networking and quickly developed a professional reputation. In 1921, she was appointed assistant attorney general by President Warren G. Harding. At only 32 years old, she was the highest-ranking woman in the federal government and the second woman in American history to hold such a title. Her boss put her in charge of one of the largest departments, which oversaw tax laws, the prison system, and the Volstead Act.

Mabel was a relentless enforcer of the law. Before her appointment, Mabel did not have strong opinions about Prohibition, which began one year earlier, and she occasionally had a drink of alcohol. But she took her new job seriously and immediately went “dry.” Many opponents called her “Prohibition Portia” because of the way she went after bootleggers.

Most law enforcement efforts were on a small scale, but Mabel knew that arresting small bootleggers would not stop the endless cycle of illegal alcohol production. She tried to break the system from the top. To stop smuggling along the coast of Florida, she used the Coast Guard. To stop major bootlegging operations, she charged the business managers with tax evasion. To ensure everyone was held accountable, she investigated corrupt politicians. She argued over twenty cases before the Supreme Court in defense of this work. No one was immune to Mabel’s intense scrutiny.

Mabel was incredibly smart and successful. Each year the Prohibition division processed over 50,000 prosecutions. But Mabel’s work often hurt the people she had once defended—working class women. Bootlegging was a source of income for many women, and Mabel’s work was so effective that many of those women were arrested. The number of women arrested on federal charges doubled after the passage of the Volstead Act.

The high volume of arrests spilled into Mabel’s other responsibilities as assistant attorney general. She was also in charge of overseeing the federal prison system. Many historians argue that her work around prison reform was more influential than her anti-alcohol efforts. In response to the high volume of convicted women, Mabel petitioned Congress for the funds to build a new women’s prison facility. The first federal women’s prison opened in Alderson, West Virginia, in 1929. In addition, she worked to improve youth reformatories, enacted policies that allowed inmates to secure paid work, and fought corrupt leadership in some of the country’s largest prisons.

But Mabel faced an uphill battle. By 1921, public indifference toward Prohibition was already taking shape. Mabel made speeches and wrote articles to make her cases more public. Mabel believed in her work, even though she often made enemies. She knew she was the villain in many people’s lives, but someone needed to stand up to crime and corruption.

In 1928, Mabel was recruited by the Republican Party to campaign for its presidential candidate, Herbert Hoover. Mabel was a dynamic speaker who criticized the Democratic candidate, Al Smith, for opposing Prohibition. Her most famous speech was to 2,500 ministers in Ohio. She encouraged the religious leaders to endorse Hoover and protect the morals of the country.

Mabel’s campaigning may have been too good. Hoover won the election, but with public opinion shifting against Prohibition, many were afraid to associate themselves with a wildly passionate dry advocate like Mabel. Mabel wanted a promotion, but she was a political liability and a woman in a male-dominated field. Hoover did not name her attorney general, and she was turned down for a federal judgeship. Mabel resigned her post in May 1929.

Mabel returned to California and opened a new private law practice focused on radio and aviation. She headed the American Bar Association’s committee on aeronautical law from 1938–1942. She was the first woman to chair a Bar Association committee.

Mabel also built a network in Hollywood. She represented movie stars like Jean Harlow and Clark Gable and the movie studio MGM. During the Red Scare of the 1940s and ‘50s, Mabel represented the Screen Directors Guild and drafted their controversial loyalty oath against Communism.

Mabel continued to work until she died of lung cancer on April 6, 1983. Years after her death, one of her former colleagues reflected on her career and reportedly said, “If Mabel had worn trousers, she could have been president.”

• aeronautical: Relating to the science or practice of flying.
• American Bar Association: The largest professional association for lawyers in the United States.
• bootlegger: Someone who makes illegal goods, especially alcohol.
• dry: The term used to refer to people who did not consume alcohol.
• Eighteenth Amendment: The amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the production, transport, and sale of alcohol. It went into effect in 1920 and was repealed in 1933.
• political liability: A person who is at risk of causing trouble or embarrassment in the political realm. Someone a politician avoids.
• private practice: A group of lawyers who are paid by clients to do work.
• Prohibition: The term used to describe the period from 1920 to 1933 when the Eighteenth Amendment was in effect.
• Red Scare: A term used to describe the widespread fear of communism in twentieth-century America.
• Volstead Act: The law that enforced the Eighteenth Amendment. It was passed in 1919 and went into effect in 1920.