Book Review / JENNIFER GABOURY
The Woman Who Would Be President
Belva Lockwood
- Belva Lockwood, The Woman Who Would Be President by Jill Norgren (NYU, 2008, 311 pgs.)
I look to see women in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. If [a woman] demonstrates that she is fitted to be president she will some day occupy the White House. It will be entirely on her own merits, however. No movement can place her there simply because she is a woman. It will come if she proves herself mentally fit for the position. — Belva Lockwood
One hundred and twenty four years before Hillary Rodham Clinton became a candidate for the presidency, Belva Lockwood ran for the nation’s highest office. In Belva Lockwood, The Woman Who Would Be President, legal historian Jill Norgren, Professor Emerita of Government at John Jay and the Graduate Center, reconstructs Lockwood’s life, making a significant contribution to women’s history as well as calling long over-due attention to her extraordinary achievements. When she died in 1917, few libraries collected the papers of women, and Lockwood’s grandson, who took possession of her books and papers, lacked an understanding of his grandmother’s place in history. Cartons of her papers were given away to the Salvation Army and then pulped. In the absence of such materials, Norgren’s book is a considerable achievement, requiring extensive archival research to recover letters and other artifacts to chronicle Lockwood’s life.
Lockwood was the second woman to make a run for the highest executive office. The first was Victoria Claflin Woodhull who ran in 1872. Woodhull found success as the first female stock broker on Wall Street, as well as the publisher of the magazine The Woodhull & Claflin Weekly, which attracted 20,000 subscribers. Woodhull’s radical political positions, including her championing of the free love movement, helped sink her candidacy. She was dubbed “Mrs. Satan” by the influential cartoonist Thomas Nast. Woodhull was forced to withdraw from the race not long after it began due to financial trouble in the face of the free-love scandal. While Woodhull’s campaign was viewed by some as a kind of stunt, Lockwood ran a serious political campaign, speaking across the country, calling attention not only to suffrage, but issues beyond gender inequity. And, as the brief preface from Ruth Bader Ginsburg makes clear, the run for the presidency was one of many of Lockwood’s achievements as she was, among other things, the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court.
The daughter of farmers, Belva Green Bennett was born near Niagara Falls in 1830. Belva longed for more education than her rural schoolhouse afforded her and she began to read on her own from an early age. As a young adult, she began teaching and wanted to further her education, but her father refused. It would be a waste of money, he argued, to educate a woman. So Lockwood did the practical thing and married a young, local farmer, Uriah McNall. They had a daughter, Lura, but only four years into their marriage, Belva McNall became a widow. Had her husband lived, Lockwood’s life might have mirrored that of many other suffragists of her era with small children, her voice emerging, Norgren writes, “from household writing tables.” Instead, she was 22 and had a second chance at higher education. She seized upon it, leaving her three year old daughter with her mother and entering Genesee Wesleyan Seminary. Lockwood then became the third female student at the Seminary’s adjoining and newly coeducational school, Genesee College, where she studied science and politics. And while she took a high school teaching job upon her graduation, she had her eye on her next goal, and in 1866, moved to Washington, D.C.
In the post-war period, the nation’s capital teemed with women who had entered civil service jobs when soldiers were away and many held on to these positions as the federal bureaucracy expanded. At first, Lockwood continued to teach and became an agent to lease halls to political organizations. In her spare time, she was learning about lobbying and would often watch governmental proceedings from the ladies’ section of the Senate chamber. In 1868, she married Ezekiel Lockwood, making a second practical match. He was a dentist, a lay preacher, and was 30 years her senior, but they shared many of the same views about political reform. In 1870, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter Jessie, Lockwood decided to enter law school as a stepping stone to a life in politics. She applied to area schools, but faced rejection until she, along with a few other women, was granted admission to the newly formed National University. She was undaunted by the hostile reception she received from many male classmates and persevered. When she completed her course work, the university decided to withhold her diploma on the basis of her sex. She went ahead and petitioned for entry into the D.C. bar, but she was turned away with the absence her diploma.
In 1873, in Bradwell v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that the Illinois bar could refuse membership to Chicago attorney Myra Bradwell. The court offered the opinion that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life….The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” While many state bar associations, including Illinois, would soon admit women, the Bradwell decision had a chilling effect upon the acceptance of women in public life.
While Bradwell practiced law with her husband and bided her time until she was eventually admitted to the Illinois bar in 1890, Lockwood looked for a way around the barriers erected in her path. Unable to move forward without her diploma, she appealed to President Ulysses S. Grant, the school’s president ex officio, who sent a letter on her behalf requesting that her diploma be issued. Lockwood then went to work on legislation that would put an end to discrimination against women entering federal court on account of their sex or marital status. She lobbied to move the bill out of committee, often on her own, only to watch its defeat in the Senate in 1875. But Lockwood persisted and four years later, the bill passed. Lockwood reapplied for admission to the bar of the Supreme Court, and less than two years later, she became the first woman to argue in front of the body, sworn in before many of the judges who had ruled against women in the Bradwell decision.
Lockwood became active in feminist politics when the movement for suffrage was undergoing a transition. The alliance between anti-slavery and women’s rights groups that had been forged before the Civil War were being split over the terms of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which recognized the voting rights of African American men, but not women. Suffragists were divided over whether or not to endorse these amendments as a positive incremental step. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony deemed it an unacceptable compromise, demanding the creation of a constitutional amendment to recognize the rights of women.
Lockwood represented the next generation of suffragists, many of whom were working women and whose lives presented new problems in terms of equal access to job and pay. Informed by her work as a teacher where many times she had earned half that of her male colleagues, Lockwood organized a campaign asking Congress for a bill that would outlaw pay discrimination on the basis of sex in federal jobs. While the legislation was significantly weakened by the time it passed, it was a significant achievement resulting in pay raises for many women in civil service. Lockwood’s ongoing attention to issues of women’s labor distinguished her from many of her peers. Perhaps this came from years as a widow, supporting her children, while many suffragists were able to embark on political activity because of the affluence of their husbands. Women’s colleges such as Vassar were opening and more were looking to do what Lockwood had done and enter the professions — law, medicine, and academia.
The 1884 presidential election was a time of widespread dissatisfaction among the populous and many were looking beyond the two parties to the Greenbackers, Prohibitionists, and Populists. Stanton and Anthony decided to continue supporting the Republican Party with the hope that they would champion women’s suffrage. Lockwood was not alone in her criticism of this strategy. Publisher of the Women’s Herald of Industry, Marietta Stow went looking for a candidate for the Equal Rights Party and, after offering it to Lockwood, would eventually join her on the ticket as a vice-presidential candidate. Frustrated by Stanton and Anthony’s trust in the Republicans, Lockwood wrote to Stow: “It is quite time that we had our own party, our own platform; and our own nominees. We shall never have equal rights until we take them, nor respect until we command it.”
Armed with years of practical political experience, Lockwood set up a campaign headquarters in her home, staffed by her daughter Lura. Following the announcement of her candidacy, she received invitations from around the country to speak for a fee. Lockwood was an attraction, drawing large crowds, and her campaign was financed by these funds. At the end of the race, she emerged “$125 ahead.”
At the heart of Lockwood’s campaign were issues related to gender inequality. At the rally at which she announced her candidacy, Lockwood declared: “I cannot vote, but I can be voted for.” Lockwood pointed to her achievements in lobbying Congress and called for greater action on pay equity, arguing that all public offices must be open to women, ending the monopoly men had in positions such as district attorneys, judges, and marshals.
But Lockwood accepted the nomination with the understanding that the Equal Rights Party would not have a single issue platform. Further, she knew that the party’s ideas should be digestible and “brief [enough] that the newspapers would publish it and the people read it.” She embraced issues that were common to the reform parties of the era, calling for tariffs on foreign manufactured goods, currency reform, and temperance. She sought middle ground between issues of protection and free trade. She advocated land being available to “honest yeomanry” instead of railroads. She championed citizenship for American Indians and called attention to issues of land allotment. Lockwood broke with many of her colleagues in the West, taking a stand against the Chinese Exclusion Act. Based on her experience representing Civil War veterans in her law practice, she wanted to see tariff revenues pay for veterans’ benefits, including pensions. In addition to aligning herself with advocates of temperance, she called for reform of family law, with particular attention given to the rules around marriage and divorce, to give wives equal authority over joint property and family owned businesses. Foreshadowing the next cause that Lockwood would take up, she pointed to the need in foreign policy for greater arbitration between nations, calling for the creation of a special court to do so.
Strategies employed by suffragists would vary and sometimes conflict in the decades before women’s suffrage was finally won. Lockwood’s entering the presidential race was greeted by many suffragists with a lack of enthusiasm. Anthony, in particular, was unhappy with Lockwood. Not only did she join the Equal Rights Party ticket without seeking the approval of suffragist leaders, she was seen as straying from focused attention on the causes of women. Anthony complained that Lockwood’s campaigning, with her attention to issues such as trade and currency reform, were “too much like a re-hash of the men’s speeches!!”
While newspapers often disregarded her campaign as a publicity stunt, much as they had with Woodhull, Norgren makes the case that in many instances she often received similar treatment alongside Republican James Blaine and Democrat Grover Cleveland. As one might expect, Lockwood was heckled and ridiculed for being a woman. Some men formed Belva Lockwood Clubs, which involved donning Mother Hubbard dresses — a kind of housecoat that was considered improper to wear outside of the home. But Norgren argues that such taunting should be understood within the context of a campaign where all candidates may be subjected to mockery and criticism. When it was revealed that Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock, he was taunted with the cry: “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” In turn, Lockwood conducted her campaign as men did, eschewing the role many women would cast for themselves in politics, attempting to place themselves above the fray of partisan struggle, taking on the role of earnest do-gooder in the service of a cause. Lockwood was committed not only to the ideas of reform, but understood and embraced rough-and-tumble politics.
In the end, Lockwood won over four thousand votes in the eight states where she was on the ballot and was pleased with the results. Cleveland beat Blaine by a narrow margin of 30,000 votes. Lockwood would run for president again in 1888 with a more limited campaign, and this time around she was criticized more by some for engaging in a frivolous exercise, rather than doing something that would alter the political landscape.
In 1906, at the age of 75, Lockwood returned to the Supreme Court, representing the Eastern Cherokee, and won a five million dollar judgment on their behalf following the improper sale of tribal land decades before.
Lockwood was active with the Universal Peace Union, advocating for arbitration and international courts as a way to prevent armed conflict. Conducting this work, she fought to be included in the delegation that President McKinley sent to the first Hague treaty convention in 1899. And when she was overlooked, she did what she had done many times before, insisting upon her inclusion and making the trip on her own.
The end of Lockwood’s life was marked by difficulties. She outlived her children and, for financial reasons, lost her home on F Street in Washington. The fees she was awarded in the Cherokee case were the subject of dispute with the clients. Still, at the end of her life, she remained a stubborn, unflappable optimist. At each stage of Lockwood’s life, she might understandably have settled for less. Norgren is right to link Lockwood’s success with the dogged persistence that marked her every activity. She died in 1917, just one year before Congress would take up the issue of women’s suffrage which would culminate in passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
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