Willebrandt, Mabel Walker (1889–1963)

Biographical Details

Born in a Kansas sod hut in 1889, the only child of Myrtle (Eaton) and David William Walker, Willebrandt became a teacher in the Michigan schools at the age of 17, a school principal in California at 22, and a lawyer at 27, having funded her legal education and that of her husband (Arthur Willebrandt) at the University of Southern California. An early member of the women's legal organization Phi Delta Delta, Willebrandt was a master networker. She worked with Miriam Van Waters to promote progressive causes before the California State Legislature. While establishing a law practice, she also served as assistant police court defender in Los Angeles, representing more than 2,000 defendants. Her record won her the nomination of California's Progressive Senator Hiram Johnson and appointment by President Harding in 1921 as assistant attorney general, the second woman to hold that post. She was 32.

Her Career

Willebrandt and the superintendent of prisons, Heber Votaw, set three priorities: establishing a federal prison for women, developing a federal reformatory for young males, and providing employment for prison inmates. The burgeoning convictions under the Harrison Drug Act (1914) and the Volstead Act (1918) presented a crisis for the federal prison system in the 1920s. The combination of low federal funding and federal guidelines made state institutions reluctant to continue to house federal prisoners. [Page 1033]The numbers of women convicted under federal statutes doubled after World War I, and there was no federal facility for women. Working with Votaw, the brother-in-law of President Harding, Willebrandt galvanized women's and prison reform organizations to deal with this crisis.

At a meeting in September 1923 at the Washington headquarters of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), representatives of 21 national organizations unanimously approved a proposal to establish a federal institution for women prisoners on the cottage plan and pledged their lobbying support. The legislation passed in June. The Alderson site was selected, and Congress approved appropriations in 1925. Mary Belle Harris, appointed by Willebrandt as the first warden, praised her at the dedication of the model cottage facility as caring and fighting for Alderson as a “mother for her child” (quoted in the New York Times, November 28, 1928). Harris named Alderson's academic building Willebrandt Hall.

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