Lavinia Goodell is more than a name on a dusty list of Important Women in Wisconsin History. She was a woman who desired to serve, but perhaps more importantly, more humanly, she was also just a woman who wanted to be able to use her gifts to the fullest degree possible, and if that meant taking on the patriarchy, well, then that's what it meant.

Rhoda Lavinia Goodell was the daughter of radical abolitionist parents, her father being a leading abolitionist, writer, editor, and clergyman. In the mid 1860's, "Vinnie", as family called her, worked, and wrote for Harpers Magazine in New York and then joined her parents and sister’s family in Janesville, Wisconsin.

She studied law on her own and was admitted to the Rock County, Wisconsin bar in 1874. She became the first woman admitted to practice law in Wisconsin and, after a long court and legislative battle, the first woman admitted to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1879. A few weeks before she died, Lavinia learned she had won the first and only case she had argued before the State Supreme Court.

Lavinia is one of several women depicted in a mural on the outside of the Rock County Courthouse building. She was originally buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Janesville, WI. Her remains were removed to the Berea Cemetery in Berea, Kentucky, by her nephew William Goodell Frost to rest with her parents and sister.