Consuelo Northrup Bailey was Vermont’s first woman to hold the office of Speaker of the House. When she was 15 years old, Bailey was a spectator at an inheritance trial of a prominent St. Albans woman. The basic argument against the woman who deserved the money was that she was too small a woman to inherit a large amount of money.
The case appalled Bailey, and must have been in the back of her mind when she graduated from law school and became Burlington’s Grand Juror. It also must have been in the back of her mind as she became Speaker of the Vermont House and Lieutenant Governor of Vermont. Bailey was the second woman in the nation to be elected Speaker and the first woman in the nation to be elected Lieutenant Governor.
She was born in 1899 in Sheldon, Vermont, and received strong support from her father to pursue a legal career. She graduated from the University of Vermont and afterwards taught Latin, reading and history in Shelburne. In 1925, she graduated from the Boston University School of Law and was appointed Grand Juror of Burlington. She passed the Vermont Bar Exam in 1925, the seventh woman in Vermont to be an attorney.