With the November presidential election ahead and a female vice presidential candidate on the ballot, it is important to remember that there were many women who helped pave the way for the opportunities women have today.

In Milledgeville’s history, there have been many women who have led the way for today's trailblazing women. Eva L. Sloan was one of these women.

As Milledgeville’s first female lawyer and one of the first female lawyers in Georgia, she led the way for many other female attorneys who would eventually follow in her footsteps.

Eva Sloan was born in New Bern, N.C. in 1910. She was a graduate from a business college, Eureka College, in Ayden, N.C.

In 1936, she moved to Milledgeville with her husband and took on a job as a legal secretary with Marion Ennis. Working as a secretary for Ennis for many years, she obtained a working knowledge of the law.

“She just had such a wonderful memory that Marion Ennis told her to take the Bar Exam and she passed it,” said Sloan’s daughter, Tony Brown.

Brown, who is named after Marion Ennis’s wife, remembers the day she found out her mother was going to be a lawyer.

“I was so proud of her,” she said. “I was just thrilled to death.”

Sloan had a reputation for being a good lawyer, mainly because she was relentless in the courtroom.

“That tenacious style is what set her apart,” said Reg Bellury, a Baldwin County attorney who worked with her in the beginning of his career. “She just would not give up. She’d pretty much wear you down.”

“On one case that I tried with her she kept calling the A.T 15 — a horrendous looking semiautomatic weapon — a machine gun. Each time, the judge would sustain the objection and she’d say it again,” said Bellury. “She eventually got the D.A. so riled up that he went and got the weapon to show the jury, which is exactly what I didn’t want. I lost the case.”

And she is still remembered for her professionalism.

A plaque in the Baldwin County Courthouses’ lawyers lounge states that Sloan was “regarded as an able and zealous advocate who represented her clients fearlessly and fervently.”

At the beginning of her career, she won a case against an attorney who insisted that the reason she won was because of her nice legs, according to Brown.

The next time she had to try a case against the same attorney, she asked Judge George Carpenter for special permission to wear a pants suit, uncustomary attire for women during the 1950s.