Belva A. Lockwood

American lawyer and social reformer

• Born: October 24, 1830
• Birthplace: Royalton, New York
• Died: May 19, 1917
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Lockwood obtained passage of federal legislation giving women equal pay for equal work in government service in the United States. She also was the first woman granted the right to plead cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and was a committed activist for women’s rights.

Early Life

Belva Ann Bennett was the second of the five children of Lewis Bennett and Hannah Green Bennett. She attended country schools and completed her education by the age of fifteen. Her father’s opposition to her educational ambitions, as well as a lack of funds, led her to begin a career in teaching. She taught school for four years before marrying Uriah McNall, a local farmer. The young couple moved to the country near Gasport, where Belva gave birth to a daughter, Lura. When her husband died in a sawmill accident in 1853, Belva returned to school to further her education in order to support herself and her child.

Belva McNall sold the farm and entered Gasport Academy. She also continued to teach school. As a teacher, she experienced at first hand inequities toward women when she was offered half the salary paid to male teachers. Angry and upset, she left her daughter with her parents and entered Genessee College, where she studied law, political economy, and the U.S. Constitution. On June 27, 1857, she received a bachelor of science degree from the college that was to become Syracuse University.

In 1857, Belva McNall became headmistress of Lockport Union School, where her daughter studied. For the next four years, she supervised the staff, taught courses, and, despite conservative disapproval, encouraged gymnastics, public speaking, nature walks, and skating for young women. She also taught at the Gainesville Female Seminary and later became proprietor of the Female Seminary in Oswego, New York. In 1866, while in her middle thirties, Belva McNall, with her daughter Lura, left for Washington, D.C. Her profession was still teaching, but she had political ambitions that would eventually take her far beyond the classroom.

In 1867, Belva McNall opened a school of her own. On March 11, 1868, she married Ezekiel Lockwood, a dentist and former Baptist minister. Their only child, Jessie, died in infancy. Ezekiel Lockwood assumed the administrative duties of his wife’s school so that she could pursue a law degree. Denied admission to Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard because she was not only a woman but also a married one, Lockwood was finally accepted at the National University Law School. She completed her studies in 1873 but was awarded her diploma only after she petitioned President Ulysses S. Grant, the school’s ex officio president, to intervene on her behalf. Her husband, who had continued to supervise her school in Washington, was finally forced to close it because of his ill health. He died in 1877.

Life’s Work

After judicial rules were changed and women were allowed to practice law in the District of Columbia, Belva Lockwood was admitted to the bar on September 24, 1873. She then embarked on a distinguished career in law. When one of her cases came before the Federal Court of Claims that winter, Lockwood was refused, because she was a woman, the right to plead a case. Her petition for admission to the Supreme Court of the United States (1876) was denied on the basis of custom, but Lockwood would not admit defeat. She petitioned Congress to pass a Declaratory Act or Joint Resolution “that no woman otherwise qualified, shall be debarred from practice before any United States Court on account of sex.”

Reasoning that if women had the right to practice law they were entitled to pursue legal matters through the highest courts in the country, Lockwood pushed enabling legislation through Congress. By means of energetic lobbying, and with the support of such pro-suffrage senators as Aaron A. Sargent of California and George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, Lockwood secured the passage of the Lockwood Bill, which permitted women to practice before the Supreme Court. On March 3, 1879, she became the first woman to be admitted to the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court. Three days later, she was admitted to the U.S. Court of Claims.

A year later, on February 2, 1880, in a striking demonstration of her commitment to racial equality, Lockwood appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States and made a motion that Samuel R. Lowery, an African American, be allowed to practice before the Supreme Court. Lowery, who was the principal of the Huntsville Industrial University in Alabama, became the first black southerner to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Lockwood became a familiar sight in Washington as she pedaled throughout the city on “Challenge No. 2,” an English tricycle that she introduced to the nation’s capital. She rode the vehicle to the Capitol, the courts—wherever her work led her. By 1890, Lockwood was well established in her law career, specializing in pension and claims cases against the U.S. government. It was this specialty that led her to one of the greatest legal triumphs of her career. The Cherokee Indian Nation secured Lockwood to represent it in claims against the U.S. government related to an 1891 treaty involving the sale and purchase of more than eight million acres of land known as the Cherokee Outlet. Lockwood was entrusted with defending nearly fifteen thousand Cherokee clients. After reviewing the numerous treaties and statutes that governed the history of the Cherokees, she filed a petition to uphold the claim of her Indian clients.

On March 20, 1905, the case of the Eastern and Emigrant Cherokees against the United States was decided before the Court of Claims. Following an impassioned argument by Lockwood, the chief justice agreed that the United States had broken and evaded the letter and spirit of its agreement with the Cherokees. Nevertheless, although he decreed that the Cherokees recover certain amounts due in the account rendered by the government, he could not bring himself to allow the full interest on those amounts. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, where, on April 30, 1906, Lockwood again argued for the Indians and their rights. The court agreed and awarded the Cherokees five million dollars.

As a feminist, Lockwood did much to further women’s rights. In 1867, she was one of the founders of Washington’s first suffrage group, the Universal Franchise Association. During the 1870’s and early 1880’s, she was active in the Washington conventions of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In January, 1871, Lockwood presented a memorial to the U.S. Senate on “The Right of Women to Vote.”

Lockwood addressed congressional committees and drew up innumerable resolutions and bills that would help bring equality to women in the United States. She circulated a petition at the meetings of the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations in New York that hastened the passage, in 1872, of legislation giving women government employees equal pay for equal work. In 1873, she represented a woman in a divorce case, charging the defendant with drunkenness, cruel treatment, desertion, and refusal to support. She won the case for her client, obtaining the decree of divorce and alimony with costs. Later, in 1896, as a member of a committee of the District Federation of Women’s Clubs, she helped Ellen Spencer Mussey and others secure passage of a law liberalizing the property rights of married women and equal guardianship of their children in the District of Columbia. In 1903, she proposed the inclusion of woman suffrage clauses in the statehood bills for Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico, which were then under consideration.

In 1872, Lockwood spoke at Cooper Union in New York on behalf of Victoria Woodhull’s candidacy for president of the United States. Lockwood herself was nominated for president in 1884 by women representing the National Equal Rights Party. Her platform reflected her commitment to civil rights, temperance, and feminism. She encompassed equal rights for all, including African Americans, Indians, and immigrants. She advocated curtailment of the liquor traffic, reform in marriage and divorce laws, and universal peace. She flourished a banner inscribed on one side with the words “Women’s Rights” and on the other with the word “Peace.”

Although Lockwood’s campaign alienated many members of the organized suffrage movement, including Susan B. Anthony, it generated much public interest. Astonishingly, she won the electoral vote of Indiana and half that of Oregon, nearly captured New Hampshire, and made a respectable showing in New York. A second campaign four years later was less successful. Her political aptitude was recognized by President Grover Cleveland, who sent her as the U.S. delegate to the Congress of Charities and Correction in Geneva, Switzerland.

Increasingly committed to the cause of world peace, Lockwood put much of her energy into peace organizations after the 1880’s. One of the earliest members of the Universal Peace Union, Lockwood served at various times during the 1880’s and 1890’s on the union’s executive committee and the editorial board of its paper, the Peacemaker, as a corresponding secretary and vice president, and as one of the union’s chief lobbyists. She was the union’s delegate to the International Peace Congress of 1889 and its successors; served as the American secretary of the International Bureau of Peace, founded in Berne in 1891; and served on the nominating committee for the Nobel Peace Prize. In all these organizations, she agitated for the arbitration principle as a means of settling world problems.

Lockwood remained politically active into her later years. She continued lecturing well into her eighties and even campaigned for Woodrow Wilson. In 1909, she was awarded an honorary LL.D. degree by Syracuse University, and in 1913, she was presented with an oil portrait of herself by the women of Washington, D.C. The portrait now hangs in the Art Gallery of the National Museum.

Following the death of her daughter Lura in 1894, Lockwood’s financial fortunes collapsed, and her last years were spent in ill health and relative poverty. She died at George Washington University Hospital in 1917 and was buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington. The funeral service held in the Wesley Chapel of the Methodist Episcopalian Church recalled the triumphs of her life, and the newspapers recorded her history. A scholarship was established in Lockwood’s name, and a bust of Lockwood was unveiled by the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of her admission to the Supreme Court.

Significance

Legally and socially, Belva A. Lockwood scored important victories for women. Marriage, she concluded, should be a civil contract in which property rights were equal. She rebelled against the law in the District of Columbia that could compel a man to support his illegitimate child but could not compel him to support his wife and his legitimate children. She worked for the reform of probate law and recognition of the rights of widows and orphans. Single-handedly, Lockwood moved the U.S. Congress to open the highest court to women lawyers. She fought for civil rights for all Americans. Up to the day she died, she worked for world peace.

Over the years of her practice, Lockwood gave aid, advice, and encouragement to women from all parts of the country who were attempting to become attorneys-at-law. Lockwood’s hard-won battles, confidence, and fortitude are an inspiration to women throughout the world.

Bibliography

Curti, Merle. Peace or War. New York: Garland, 1972. Curti discusses Lockwood’s pacifism and her efforts to advance peace on the national and international scenes.

Fox, Mary Virginia. Lady for the Defense: A Biography of Belva Lockwood. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. A useful, relatively recent treatment of Lockwood’s life and work.

Klebanow, Diana, and Franklin L. Jonas. People’s Lawyers: Crusaders for Justice in American History. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2003. Contains short biographical chapters on ten civil rights attorneys, including Lockwood. Features a biography of her life and career, a chronology of key events in her life, a review of her major cases, and an annotated bibliography.

Norgren, Jill. “Lockwood in ’84.” Wilson Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Autumn, 2002): 12. Examines Lockwood’s 1884 presidential campaign, describing her personal life and career and her opinions of woman suffrage.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, et al., eds. History of Woman Suffrage. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Contains informative accounts of the NWSA’s Washington conventions, 1870 to 1874, in volumes 2 through 4 (1882-1902) and useful chapters on the District of Columbia in volumes 3 and 4.

Stern, Madeleine. We the Women. New York: Schulte, 1963. This work contains the most complete account available of Belva Lockwood’s life. Stern discusses, at length, Lockwood’s most celebrated court cases, including her own quest to practice before the Supreme Court. This is the best source to consult regarding Lockwood’s commitment to women’s rights, civil rights, and pacifism.

Whitman, Alden, ed. American Reformers. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1985. A brief but fairly thorough account of Lockwood’s life, highlighting her women’s rights and peace activism.